Saturday, May 5, 2012

Horses, sheep, goats, dogs, chickens...

We're babysitting a small menagerie while my friend and his rather animal-crazy wife and their kid go to visit her family overseas for the first time in many years. They're good folk, but it's no small job as the horses have a diet that makes your average suburban yuppie 'health' nut on 53 supplements, natural goats-milk yoghurt and only shopping at health-food stores for important staples like organic burghul look like a meat-and-fried potatoes redneck. The one sheep (of 9) - which IIRC is 11... comes to have special muesli in the laundry.

The diet and instruction sheet... well the horses alone runs to two foolscap pages of typescript.

I wasn't too sure about the horses (Barbs has had a lot to do with horses, I had preferred motor bikes), but they seem good natured beasts. The 3 Border Collies... well I like dogs. And I like Border Collies. One is already a soppy big boy and I will have to work the others.

They have a horse-poo vacuum cleaner which tows behind a quad...

7 comments:

  1. Unless these are very elderly horses or ones with multiple health problems it sounds like the owners have gone overboard on feeding. Adding beer or ale to the grain once or twice a week was considered spoiling them equines where I came from. :-)
    I've known race horses whose feeding schedule can be written on a postcard in large print.

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    1. The one horse had Laminitis and she nursed it through with a regime that makes this look tame (but I think that was 4? years back). I'm certain about 80% of this is unnecessary - but I have no idea which the good 20% is - and she has literally left the animals for 3 days in 10 years to have a baby, (and then something went wrong) so we'll just stick as best as possible to it.

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    2. Laminitis can be life-threatening. Good on them for managing to beat it.

      Horses cannot manage on three legs and laminitis can result in the hoof (or hooves) it is in being destroyed.

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  2. Best of luck with this Dave and Barb ……. !

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  3. A horse-poo vacuum cleaner? Wow...I never knew such things existed.

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    1. It comes with its own hitch on the quad-bike tip-able horse-poo trailer!

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