Saw nervous wreck exhausted friend and family off, on their way to Switzerland. One of the dogs has gone walkabout - fortunately before they left. I could hear him barking and having fun chasing wallaby off down the hill. I hope the silly beggar is home by morning, as there are at least 10 000 acres of bush for me to search. Not happening... well, I'd probably try but it's not a really plausible idea.
I tell myself looking after horses will be good for writing fantasy novels. It actually went quite well tonight, with two of us. Tomorrow morning however will be hell as I am not yet confident enough to do it alone, and Barbs has work at 9 and doesn't do mornings well at the best of times (I don't do mid-day well, but am usually at work by 5.30AM at the latest. In summer, 4 AM.) Yeah I know. It's unfair. Some people are morning people and some aren't.
One thing about horses (in the unlikely event your friends didn't lecture you about it.) Never over feed. Never. The wretched things have horribly delicate tummies. Especially if they're getting all the fancy high vitamins and minerals and protein and fats and such . . . always err on the conservative side. If you have some horrible emergency and miss a feeding. Do. Not. Double. Feed. Just give them their regular single serving size and they'll be fine.
ReplyDeleteYeah, got lecture already :-). When you consider the Mongol pony... you have to wonder about what we've done to them.
DeleteThere are few sayings as wrong as "healthy as a horse". :-)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand I've dealt with more than a few who were far from delicate. There was the horse who loved hot dogs and taco sauce... Never once, despite some truely odd foods he ingested did he have the slightest problem. Others would colic at the mere glimpse of anything other than their regular diet.
Odd or off foods are dangerous as horses cannot throw up. If they eat something that doesn't agree with them they cannot easily get rid of it.
I had a Percheron and the worse thing you could do to the boy was feed him modern food. The stable I had him at hired a new hand to feed the horses. She thought she was doing Baby a favor by feeding him Carb pellets instead of baled grass. One week later he was visibly heavier and the gas....oh my.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the easy to keep, if you keep them away from modern foods, are those the Thoroughbred community looks down their nose at.
My comment about mongol ponies... and Black South Africans - especially those in the mountains have very robust horses that would regard baled grass as newfangled luxury. But I am not going to experiment on her very thoroughbred horses.
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