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Mar. 25th, 2007 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBusy, horse-filled weekend.
Saturday was the Coggins clinic for La's 4-H kids. As constant readers are aware, the Coggins test (named after some guy named Coggins what developed it) checks horses for antibodies against Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA or swamp fever), an incurable disease of horses that is spread through bodily fluids like blood, milk, and semen. Generally, in horses, the vector is flying, biting insects like horseflies. You have to have a negative Coggins within the last twelve months if you cross state lines, enter your horse in a show, attend an organized trail ride, or take your horse to a sale barn for auction. The Coggins test uses a blood sample drawn from the horse, so you need a vet to be going on with this.
As you might not know, some horses take to having blood drawn better than others. Meatly, for example, my darling little black pony of surpassing cuteness, needs to be held down by four strong people in order to get a blood sample from her. (One on each ear, one on her off leg, one holding the lead rope. If you don't have that many people, you are not going to be able to get a needle within five feet of her. Also, she does not go gentle into that good night. As soon as the first person grabs an ear, she fights until all parts have been grabbed and tightened down upon.) It's kind of rodeo exciting which I guess would be fun except for the possiblity of getting hurt by Meatly panicking. On the other hand, Nick tolerates blood being drawn fairly well and you don't need four people to hold her down. Guess which of mine we get a Coggins done on?
Anyway, we structure the Coggins thing from "good" to "bad" so that all the people with good horses can be processed very assembly-line and everything moves right along. There are three dingbats that we still try to draw blood on: Martini, Elklin, and Ceres, and we save them for the end where they will not disrupt the flow of things so badly. (Nick is not very ding-batty and we don't bother harrassing Meatly about it anymore because I don't do Coggins-requiring things with her. And honestly, if I did, I would probably try filling the horse trailer with like six horses, Meatly one of the ones in the middle, and see if that worked any better for drawing blood on her. There is nowhere to go in a horse trailer filled with six horses. That's what Truaxes did with Maybee (Elklin's mom, as it happens) for years and it worked better than anything else they ever came up with.) At this particular clinic, we got Elklin (after a certain amount of dancing around like an idiot) and Ceres (after twitching her so that she thought her lip would be torn off if she moved). Martini was totally a lost cause and we didn't get her done. I'm not sure if La will try her again some other time or not.
That was at Lynn Ann's house and it went as well as we could have expected, not including the stuck truck-n-horse trailer and unplanned yard excavation. That was not part of the plan.
Here's a picture of the damage:
Here's the people who pushed the truck out and reattached the trailer to it:
Yes, they are all women. A man got the truck-n-trailer stuck.)
Here's a picture of Nick looking very intently at the child in the tire swing (not shown). She was very interested in the tire swing. Very interested.
That, pretty much, was the horse-filled Saturday, not counting the part where that idiot red pinto baby fell into the truck cap that was in the field and bent it all to hell, shearing the aluminum and leaving it with all sharp edges and not putting a single mark on her own self.
There was also hot chocolate.
We hauled most of the horses home from that but left three (Absolut, Eikon, and Casper) of the rideable ones there overnight to ride home on Sunday. La figured she and I and Cass could ride 'em home lickety split or at least more lickety split than it'd be if we had to wait for the yard to firm up so that we could turn the trailer around. (Things were getting awfully wet and slickery by the time we quit hauling horses home and we didn't figure the horse trailer was going to turn around another time without getting stuck.)
So, today La and Cass and I went over and rode Eikon and Casper and Absolut home. That took less than an hour. I rode Absolut, who is entirely not a difficult or complicated ride. She's kind of ADD, but not mean or sudden. She's just like, "Oh, look! A chicken!" As horse mental states go, Absolut's isn't the worst I've seen. I find her very relaxing to ride because she'll only kill me out of inattention, not out of malice.
Cass did well -- no whining, no bitching, helpful, had her stuff together, rode without complaint. She's improving (she's 10) and is getting better about being responsible.
Then La and I went over to Odie's to get the last two horses out of there. Odie's is no more. They're going to try running beef cattle on the place or something. Whatever. They told us to get the horses out, so out we are getting. The last two horses were Jasmine (Galen's chestnut mare of vicious killer-osity. Jasmine is horribly mean to everything in the field. She's like an equine Eris, sows unhappiness and discord everywhere she goes.) and Meatly (my little black, pregnant *again* horse). Meatly likes the stud and escapes her field to go get into his. *sigh* I don't like riding mares with babies alongside. It's annoying. However, given that it is apparently impossible for me to have an unbred Meatly without a foal at her side, I'm going to have to institute a new way. The damn foal can be tied to the saddle and it can come along or I'm going to drag it by its head along the road until it gets up and walks. At least that way it will lead. We're not quite sure when she was bred, but to my eye it looks like she has another month, maybe two, to go.
Her gravidity did not keep me from riding her ass back from Odie's at the trot. (It's about five, six miles.) Despite the fact that I hadn't been on the horse in three years (give or take), she was reasonably pleasant and fairly rideable, which was a nice surprise. I'd like to get some more mileage on her, baby or not, so that's kind of on the agenda this year. We'll see.
Saturday was the Coggins clinic for La's 4-H kids. As constant readers are aware, the Coggins test (named after some guy named Coggins what developed it) checks horses for antibodies against Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA or swamp fever), an incurable disease of horses that is spread through bodily fluids like blood, milk, and semen. Generally, in horses, the vector is flying, biting insects like horseflies. You have to have a negative Coggins within the last twelve months if you cross state lines, enter your horse in a show, attend an organized trail ride, or take your horse to a sale barn for auction. The Coggins test uses a blood sample drawn from the horse, so you need a vet to be going on with this.
As you might not know, some horses take to having blood drawn better than others. Meatly, for example, my darling little black pony of surpassing cuteness, needs to be held down by four strong people in order to get a blood sample from her. (One on each ear, one on her off leg, one holding the lead rope. If you don't have that many people, you are not going to be able to get a needle within five feet of her. Also, she does not go gentle into that good night. As soon as the first person grabs an ear, she fights until all parts have been grabbed and tightened down upon.) It's kind of rodeo exciting which I guess would be fun except for the possiblity of getting hurt by Meatly panicking. On the other hand, Nick tolerates blood being drawn fairly well and you don't need four people to hold her down. Guess which of mine we get a Coggins done on?
Anyway, we structure the Coggins thing from "good" to "bad" so that all the people with good horses can be processed very assembly-line and everything moves right along. There are three dingbats that we still try to draw blood on: Martini, Elklin, and Ceres, and we save them for the end where they will not disrupt the flow of things so badly. (Nick is not very ding-batty and we don't bother harrassing Meatly about it anymore because I don't do Coggins-requiring things with her. And honestly, if I did, I would probably try filling the horse trailer with like six horses, Meatly one of the ones in the middle, and see if that worked any better for drawing blood on her. There is nowhere to go in a horse trailer filled with six horses. That's what Truaxes did with Maybee (Elklin's mom, as it happens) for years and it worked better than anything else they ever came up with.) At this particular clinic, we got Elklin (after a certain amount of dancing around like an idiot) and Ceres (after twitching her so that she thought her lip would be torn off if she moved). Martini was totally a lost cause and we didn't get her done. I'm not sure if La will try her again some other time or not.
That was at Lynn Ann's house and it went as well as we could have expected, not including the stuck truck-n-horse trailer and unplanned yard excavation. That was not part of the plan.
Here's a picture of the damage:
Here's the people who pushed the truck out and reattached the trailer to it:
Yes, they are all women. A man got the truck-n-trailer stuck.)
Here's a picture of Nick looking very intently at the child in the tire swing (not shown). She was very interested in the tire swing. Very interested.
That, pretty much, was the horse-filled Saturday, not counting the part where that idiot red pinto baby fell into the truck cap that was in the field and bent it all to hell, shearing the aluminum and leaving it with all sharp edges and not putting a single mark on her own self.
There was also hot chocolate.
We hauled most of the horses home from that but left three (Absolut, Eikon, and Casper) of the rideable ones there overnight to ride home on Sunday. La figured she and I and Cass could ride 'em home lickety split or at least more lickety split than it'd be if we had to wait for the yard to firm up so that we could turn the trailer around. (Things were getting awfully wet and slickery by the time we quit hauling horses home and we didn't figure the horse trailer was going to turn around another time without getting stuck.)
So, today La and Cass and I went over and rode Eikon and Casper and Absolut home. That took less than an hour. I rode Absolut, who is entirely not a difficult or complicated ride. She's kind of ADD, but not mean or sudden. She's just like, "Oh, look! A chicken!" As horse mental states go, Absolut's isn't the worst I've seen. I find her very relaxing to ride because she'll only kill me out of inattention, not out of malice.
Cass did well -- no whining, no bitching, helpful, had her stuff together, rode without complaint. She's improving (she's 10) and is getting better about being responsible.
Then La and I went over to Odie's to get the last two horses out of there. Odie's is no more. They're going to try running beef cattle on the place or something. Whatever. They told us to get the horses out, so out we are getting. The last two horses were Jasmine (Galen's chestnut mare of vicious killer-osity. Jasmine is horribly mean to everything in the field. She's like an equine Eris, sows unhappiness and discord everywhere she goes.) and Meatly (my little black, pregnant *again* horse). Meatly likes the stud and escapes her field to go get into his. *sigh* I don't like riding mares with babies alongside. It's annoying. However, given that it is apparently impossible for me to have an unbred Meatly without a foal at her side, I'm going to have to institute a new way. The damn foal can be tied to the saddle and it can come along or I'm going to drag it by its head along the road until it gets up and walks. At least that way it will lead. We're not quite sure when she was bred, but to my eye it looks like she has another month, maybe two, to go.
Her gravidity did not keep me from riding her ass back from Odie's at the trot. (It's about five, six miles.) Despite the fact that I hadn't been on the horse in three years (give or take), she was reasonably pleasant and fairly rideable, which was a nice surprise. I'd like to get some more mileage on her, baby or not, so that's kind of on the agenda this year. We'll see.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-26 01:15 pm (UTC)The girls would like to see your horse when we come up. We are trying to be solid and firm and plan for after the house renovation, so we really *do* actually show up this spring/summer.
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Date: 2007-03-26 04:16 pm (UTC)The girls (and you and spouse, of course) are welcome to meet the horse, the other horse, and a whole field full of related horses. We can take carrots or apples or something if you want, but that's really not necessary because the horses will visit even if we don't bring food.
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Date: 2007-03-27 12:32 am (UTC)