which_chick | Bird fitness efforts

He's been doing really well with a five-or-six day a week schedule. I try to mix things up so that it's not all "sit n lift" every single day. My enthusiasm has been helped by Pretty Darn Good air quality, lower humidity, and not a ton of late afternoon rain. I've been getting a bunch of rides in.

I'm not sure he's all that much fitter, but he is a tiny bit more shapely under the new regime. His topline now has a very, very slight high spot along the spine instead of being dead level and he's also lost a smidge of the "smoothing" fat between his shoulder and his ribcage. He is not, his assertions to the contrary, "starving".

There is lovely second cut hay in front of his face 100% of the time. (His smallish paddock does not grow enough grass to support him and a friend without hay supplementation but if I have hay out all the time, there IS grass in his paddock.) He also gets fed half a can of sr. horse and half a can of 14% protein feed plus 1 cup of beet pulp shreds every morning. (The beet pulp slows down his eating speed and he throws less feed around. I don't know that it does fuck-all for his nutrition but it does make him a tidier, thorough-er eater with reduced waste.) In the late afternoons, which is mostly when I ride, he gets hosed off and held out on grass until he dries most of the way. He grazes politely, I read my Spanish book on my phone. So he gets grass then, too.

Not starving, but ... more work and less chow never made anyone happy.