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Jul. 6th, 2009 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickAfter work today I dewormed the Ungrateful Babies, who are doing better at eating their Omolene 200. Purina makes it. It's about fifteen dollars for fifty pounds of the stuff, which comes in a pretty red bag what has a picture of horses on it. They're having a promotion where if you feed the stuff for a given period and fill out a chart on how your horse does with it, they will give you a "buy eight, get two free" coupon and also a 10$ off coupon on something. Whatever. Anyway, coupons are involved. The promotion is called something like "A difference you can see".
I learned about this at the horse feed seminar mentioned a couple of weeks back. Fortunately the people at Purina understand how horse people work and their coupon offer thingies have lengthy enrollment periods. Probably my coupon stuff is at the mail -- if I could ever GET to the damn mail, I would have my stuff by now. However, the holiday fucked up my mail retrieval subroutine and there has been no mail since Wednesday last week. :(
The Ungrateful Babies (Peake and Te) had been eating generic feed-mill sweet feed, which is about thirty-seven dollars for two hundred pounds of the stuff or (math is hard) $18/hundredweight at ye olde feed mill. It's called "sweet feed" because it has molasses in it. In the event that you tasted the stuff, however, it would not taste sweet to you. Sweet feed smells sweet but it tastes like you'd expect cracked field corn, whole oats, and pelleted alfalfa to taste. There's some salt and some molasses added but mostly it's not very tasty to humans, the which I know because I've tasted it. Sweet feed comes in big nylon sacks and not in lightweight red bags with a picture of horses on the front. It also does not have the higher protein and mineral content of the Omolene 200 stuff. Thing is, the UBs liked sweet feed. They ate it with enthusiasm.
They did not particularly dive into the twice-as-expensive Omolene 200. Horses are not big on change. They're not experimental that way. The first day, they ate about half of what was set before them. The second day, they ate about three-quarters of the feed. The third day, they ate all the feed but they ate it slowly. By day four, they were hoovering it up just as they had done with the sweet feed. Purina pitches this stuff as "extremely palatable" which means, y'know, that horses should eat it. They say all their horse feeds are "extremely palatable" but in the real world, some of it is more palatable than others.
For example: Purina's Senior Horse is designed to keep weight on old horses that are having trouble keeping weight on with normal feed and forage (hay, grass, that stuff). It works. It's medium-tasty for horses and most horses will eat it fairly well after about five exposures. However, it's not as tasty to horses as Purina's Ultium. Ultium is apparently crazy tasty. (It's also calorie dense and expensive.) Horses that happily chow down on Senior Horse dive into the bucket for Ultium. Probably they should have called it UltiYUM. In addition to observations involving horses, informal research (I tasted them both) suggests that UltiYUM is significantly tastier than Senior Horse for humans, too.
At any rate, the Ungrateful Babies are now eating their Omolene 200 and I've started keeping track of the Difference I Can See or whatever. This seems like a lot of work for what is basically a buy-eight-get-two-free deal but it's probably the best deal we're going to get in this economy. The reason for messing around at all with the ration for the UBs is that the Purina people claim that yearling horses do better on Omolene 200 than they do on regular feed. Not sure I believe it, but what the hell. I need more hobbies and it's only money.
After that, I took Nick out to the field across the road to jump over the little cross-rail from yesterday. She did that, in a nice straight line approach without overjumping or wobbling around. It was like she'd figured it all out overnight. So I put her over the cross-rail a couple of times and then hopped off and made the jump a vertical with a ground line. With a single horizontal bar, the jump is about 19" tall, which isn't a whole lot. It is, however, visually less inviting than the crossrail jump.
I walked Nick around the jump twice so that she could eyeball it, it being all new and stuff, and she didn't do that. So then I trotted her towards it and she stayed arrow-straight and jumped it at a sensible and attractive height. I was impressed. Then we tried some circles and bending and stuff for a break and then I headed her back at the jump. She was kind of jogging along so I put some leg on her and clicked (!) to get her to add some thrust. She perked right up and attacked the jump in a solid, steady, robust line with boldness. She overjumped a bit, but not badly, and she felt super-solid on the approach and going over the jump.
We're still doing trot-overs on very small jumps. This is a foundation -- not a time to skip steps or rush things along. I want her to feel confident and enthusiastic before we progress. (I want to feel confident and enthusiastic before we progress, too.) I'm getting most of my information on how to build jumps and gymnastics for horses out of the Pony Club C manual. Probably I should hunt up another book (or three) but right now I'm doing fine with Pony Club C manual stuff. There are "related reading" suggestions in the Pony Club manual -- I should look at some of those to see if there's anything I might find useful. Trys would probably like reading anything I get ahold of, too.
I learned about this at the horse feed seminar mentioned a couple of weeks back. Fortunately the people at Purina understand how horse people work and their coupon offer thingies have lengthy enrollment periods. Probably my coupon stuff is at the mail -- if I could ever GET to the damn mail, I would have my stuff by now. However, the holiday fucked up my mail retrieval subroutine and there has been no mail since Wednesday last week. :(
The Ungrateful Babies (Peake and Te) had been eating generic feed-mill sweet feed, which is about thirty-seven dollars for two hundred pounds of the stuff or (math is hard) $18/hundredweight at ye olde feed mill. It's called "sweet feed" because it has molasses in it. In the event that you tasted the stuff, however, it would not taste sweet to you. Sweet feed smells sweet but it tastes like you'd expect cracked field corn, whole oats, and pelleted alfalfa to taste. There's some salt and some molasses added but mostly it's not very tasty to humans, the which I know because I've tasted it. Sweet feed comes in big nylon sacks and not in lightweight red bags with a picture of horses on the front. It also does not have the higher protein and mineral content of the Omolene 200 stuff. Thing is, the UBs liked sweet feed. They ate it with enthusiasm.
They did not particularly dive into the twice-as-expensive Omolene 200. Horses are not big on change. They're not experimental that way. The first day, they ate about half of what was set before them. The second day, they ate about three-quarters of the feed. The third day, they ate all the feed but they ate it slowly. By day four, they were hoovering it up just as they had done with the sweet feed. Purina pitches this stuff as "extremely palatable" which means, y'know, that horses should eat it. They say all their horse feeds are "extremely palatable" but in the real world, some of it is more palatable than others.
For example: Purina's Senior Horse is designed to keep weight on old horses that are having trouble keeping weight on with normal feed and forage (hay, grass, that stuff). It works. It's medium-tasty for horses and most horses will eat it fairly well after about five exposures. However, it's not as tasty to horses as Purina's Ultium. Ultium is apparently crazy tasty. (It's also calorie dense and expensive.) Horses that happily chow down on Senior Horse dive into the bucket for Ultium. Probably they should have called it UltiYUM. In addition to observations involving horses, informal research (I tasted them both) suggests that UltiYUM is significantly tastier than Senior Horse for humans, too.
At any rate, the Ungrateful Babies are now eating their Omolene 200 and I've started keeping track of the Difference I Can See or whatever. This seems like a lot of work for what is basically a buy-eight-get-two-free deal but it's probably the best deal we're going to get in this economy. The reason for messing around at all with the ration for the UBs is that the Purina people claim that yearling horses do better on Omolene 200 than they do on regular feed. Not sure I believe it, but what the hell. I need more hobbies and it's only money.
After that, I took Nick out to the field across the road to jump over the little cross-rail from yesterday. She did that, in a nice straight line approach without overjumping or wobbling around. It was like she'd figured it all out overnight. So I put her over the cross-rail a couple of times and then hopped off and made the jump a vertical with a ground line. With a single horizontal bar, the jump is about 19" tall, which isn't a whole lot. It is, however, visually less inviting than the crossrail jump.
I walked Nick around the jump twice so that she could eyeball it, it being all new and stuff, and she didn't do that. So then I trotted her towards it and she stayed arrow-straight and jumped it at a sensible and attractive height. I was impressed. Then we tried some circles and bending and stuff for a break and then I headed her back at the jump. She was kind of jogging along so I put some leg on her and clicked (!) to get her to add some thrust. She perked right up and attacked the jump in a solid, steady, robust line with boldness. She overjumped a bit, but not badly, and she felt super-solid on the approach and going over the jump.
We're still doing trot-overs on very small jumps. This is a foundation -- not a time to skip steps or rush things along. I want her to feel confident and enthusiastic before we progress. (I want to feel confident and enthusiastic before we progress, too.) I'm getting most of my information on how to build jumps and gymnastics for horses out of the Pony Club C manual. Probably I should hunt up another book (or three) but right now I'm doing fine with Pony Club C manual stuff. There are "related reading" suggestions in the Pony Club manual -- I should look at some of those to see if there's anything I might find useful. Trys would probably like reading anything I get ahold of, too.
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Date: 2009-07-07 08:46 pm (UTC)Look. This isn't science. It's advertising.