Posts Tagged ‘keeping horses at home’
Unless you want to come out and find this…
Yes, Save a Forgotten Equine has rescued yet another victim of Horse-Eating Fence, aka Barbed Wire. In the four years that I have been doing this blog, I have heard a LOT of excuses for still having horses out on barbed wire:
1. My horses are “smart” and don’t go near the fence.
2. My horses have never been hurt on it.
3. We have too much acreage to change the fence.
4. It’s only temporary until I find another place to board.
5. It’s the only place I can afford to keep my horses.
6. I rent and they won’t let me change the fence.
7. The horses are out with the cows so we have to have barbed wire.
8. But everyone in my area has their horses out on barbed wire!
I have heard it all. You are not going to come up with a new excuse, trust me. Not a single one of these excuses is valid. If you own a thousand acres, fence off what you can afford to fence off with horse-safe fence for your horses, and run the cattle on the remainder. If you rent, put in temporary fencing inside the perimeter of the fence that you are not allowed to change. And as to the last excuse, as my mother used to say, if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?
Yes, a horse can get hurt on any fence (heck, a horse can get hurt on anything, and we’ve all seen freak accidents) but barbed wire is truly horse-eating fence. Folks, there is a reason they put this stuff on top of PRISON fence! It will grab YOU and rip your leg just as sure as it will do that to your horse.
Facts are facts — if you have barbed wire, you are playing a very dangerous game called “How long can I get away with this before something horrible happens?” The stories are endless and include horses found after having gotten caught in the fence and bled to death. This particular mare whose injury I pictured is safe now, and here is the “after” pic now that she has seen a vet.
If you’d like to help SAFE with her rehab, you can donate here – but even SAFE would tell you, don’t send them money if that money should be going toward replacing barbed wire on your own property. Just get up and do it – it’s a weekend and there is no time like the present!
Oh, and I just heard Dean Solomon is in jail AGAIN and facing new cruelty charges. Man, you can NOT teach that old dog a new trick. Details to come …
I showed you Lucero at Shiloh in a video taken last year, last week. I wanted to post a still pic taken recently so that you can see how wonderfully this filly has filled out with proper care. She is coming two and looking for a home – contact Shiloh Horse Rescue for details!
Best of FHOTD: Horsesitters, who can you trust?
Summer vacation season is fast-approaching, so I thought it was a perfect time for a repost of this blog about how to find a quality horsesitter and be able to vacation without worries!
I read a story once – it might even have been a reader of this blog’s comment – where a young lady found the man of her dreams and headed off on a European honeymoon with him. She entrusted her much-loved cat to her best friend, who promised to come by and care for him. Confident that kitty would be loved and provided for, she got married and headed off for a wonderful two weeks.
She came home to…a dying cat.
Yes, Best Friend had completely failed to do as she had agreed and stop by to care for the cat. Without even water, he was too far gone and could not be saved. The newly-married girl, who should have been enjoying one of the happiest times of her life, was plunged into deep depression and guilt over the entire incident. It brings up a great question – really, who CAN you trust to care for your pets? With so many of us heading out for holiday trips, it’s a timely topic. Here are my thoughts on ensuring a similar train wreck never happens to you.
1. Backup. Even the most responsible person may have a crisis of their own. Ensure that whoever is watching your pets has several numbers to call of people who can come by in a pinch and provide care. Discuss whatever system will work for ensuring those people have the access they need – keys, gate codes, etc. If you are using someone you have not used before, having someone else make some visits to ensure all is well is a great idea.
2. Site-Check Yourself! Look at your property like you are a rescuer inspecting it to see if it is a safe place for an animal to live. Check for places in the fence where an animal could escape or get injured, loose nails, loose wire and other hazards. The last thing you want to have happen is an escape or a horse get hung up in fence when someone is only stopping by twice a day to feed.
3. Plan and Prepare. Have plenty of everything – hay, grain, etc. And label things! One friend came home to find that her non-horsey hubby had fed the horses straw the whole time she was gone. It is always best to have a real horseperson care for the horses for just this sort of reason, but if you are trusting a non-horsey family member, make it easy for them with clear signs, labels, and measuring cups/scoops.
4. Plan and Prepare for ANYTHING. What happens if the power goes out? Do you have a generator? Does the sitter know how to use it – for sure? Any chance the pipes will freeze and getting water will be a problem? What then? We ALL know how often Murphy’s Law applies around animals…odds are if you’re ready for anything, it won’t happen, but if you’re not, you can bet on it taking place.
5. Hire like a H.R. Director! Actually check references, and ideally use someone that someone you know has used before. Look them up in your local court’s web site, if they have a search feature. This is not an invasion of privacy. I don’t care if someone does that to me because I know there’s no animal cruelty case with my name on it.
6. Consider commercial boarding for your dogs and cats. Commercial boarding is not always bad. I would particularly recommend Petsmart, which offers 24/7 supervision at their Petshotels. Commercial boarding is a great choice for (a) animals that pose a high risk of escape – door dashers, etc. (b) animals that LOVE to socialize, like the dog who loves to play with other dogs and is lonely alone. (c) animals that are destructive – the chewers, the stress-pee’ers, the diggers. Stick with in-home, if possible, for kitties unless they’re social and outgoing, and small dogs that are always cold and are very upset by change. Check out the facility that you use and find out how often the animals get out of their cages, what the standards are for cleanliness, and what the standards are for disease control. Don’t use a place that lets anyone in the door without all vaccinations, or a place that does not have a quarantine area that is totally separate for an animal that comes down with kennel cough or an upper respiratory.
7. Inform! You know that Levi and Buffy will kick the living shit out of each other if turned out in the same field, that FluffyPony doesn’t straight tie, that Shadow can’t go anywhere near the goats or he’ll have heart failure and snort all day, and that Champ has been known to kick if you try to clean the stall with him in it. Your pet sitter has no way of knowing information like this unless you tell her. Barn stuff too – the hot water won’t come on unless you switch the valve 5 feet higher up the wall on, etc. Sit down when it’s quiet and write down everything you can think of.
8. Be accessible. Most likely you are not going to some remote corner of the world where there is no way to contact you. Make sure everybody has your cell phone and your cell phone is always on, loud enough to hear at parties. Give some backup contacts like good horsey friends who have the authority to make decisions about whether or not to call the vet in your absence. And make sure everybody knows which vet you prefer. This information should always be posted in the barn. Vets enjoy the holidays, too, so list at least 3 choices in case some of your vets are out of town.
9. Don’t leave your petsitter a problem. If an animal needs to go to the vet, get them in there early this week before you take off. Don’t think that maybe it will be okay ’til you get back – that almost always goes bad!
10. If you have pets that are elderly or in some way in a chronic precarious health condition (including pregnancy!), pay the money and get someone who actually stays at your house and is there almost all of the time. Someone dropping by twice a day to feed and water is just too risky – what if something goes wrong and the animal suffers for 8 hours, or worse yet, your pet sitter arrives to find a dying pet? Just among my circle of friends this holiday season, I’ve seen a mare – that was ultrasounded without this being discovered – turn out to be carrying twins and abort them and prolapse her uterus. If they had not been home, she would have died. Can you imagine coming home to that scene? Just pay the money – you won’t regret it.
What experiences can you share about petsitters that worked out or didn’t? Who was great? Who was a nightmare? How do you make sure your animals are safe and cared for without totally giving up any ability on your part to travel and have a life?
Best of FHOTD: The Topic No One Wants To Talk About
This is a re-run but given today’s news story coupled with the fact that most of you are at home today and do have time to spend an hour checking your barn for hazards, I think it’s a good time for a repost! Spend that hour before you start partying. You surely will not regret it.
We just had a local barn fire where 15 boarded horses died (caused by a space heater in the tack room) so I want to talk about this.
Losing a horse in a barn fire is probably my worst nightmare. I fear it more than finding out a horse of mine went to slaughter. I think many horsepeople would agree with me that there’s nothing more horrifying than the thought of your horse burning to death locked in a stall. But do you really know how to minimize your chances of this happening? Do you know if your barn, or the one you board at, is a fire risk?
I realized I didn’t know much about this. I mean, I knew the obvious – no smoking in the barn, watch out for faulty wiring or outlets that spark. But I didn’t know enough, so I decided to do some research and talk about this today.
Check out this great site on preventing barn fires. Read her charts and stats about how often it happens. It’ll scare you right out to your barn to start de-cobwebbing.
Some of the basic tips:
1. Never block doors or aisleways. Don’t leave the manure spreader parked in the aisle – I know a lot of barns that will do that, because they don’t have an equipment storage shed. I know, I know, but just tarp it if you don’t. You don’t want to be scrambling over a spreader to try to evacuate horses.
2. Barns should have wide enough doors that two handlers with horses can exit simultaneously. Can you open your barn door with one hand if your other is being used to control a panicking horse? I’ve been in a lot of barns where I had to throw my body against the main door to make it budge.
3. Floor to ceiling dividers every 4 stalls or so in a large barn can prevent fires from spreading. (They are not a bad idea anyway – they give you places to put horses in quarantine, or stallion stalls)
4. Hay storage in a separate building is the ideal but if not possible, hay lofts are preferable to simply storing hay in aisles or stalls. Loveland doesn’t comment on the common practice of storing hay in the back of the riding arena. I’ve always thought that seems fairly safe because fire doesn’t spread through dirt with nothing to feed on, but I could be wrong.
5. Electrical appliances like space heaters and coffee makers should be unplugged when not in use. Space heaters should shut off automatically if tipped over. I am hearing reports that the space heater that caused the recent fire was so old it didn’t have an automatic shut-off. New ones that do shut off are a whopping $10 at Wal-Mart.
6. For those of you in areas that have brush fires, like southern California, clear the brush from around the barn. Loveland even suggests leaving a 15 foot wide strip of dirt between your pasture and the road because people throw cigarettes out of car windows.
Past that, most of the advice is the common sense we already know (or hopefully do) – watch for hazards like exposed wiring or smoking in the barn. Cobwebs are flammable – it’s worth taking the time to remove them. Don’t store flammable things in or near the barn – whether it’s gasoline for the tractor, a pile of old wood fence or a stack of heating wood.
I had to laugh at this: “Sprinkler systems are effective suppression devices and contrary to commonly-held notions, no person or animal has drowned under the spray, nor panicked as a result of the shower.” Ha ha. Typical excuse developed for not doing something that is a good idea but costs money. Now, I’ll admit I’ve never priced out a sprinkler system for a boarding barn so I don’t know if the cost is prohibitive — but it seems to me it might be a pretty good investment if you want to keep your horses as safe as possible.
Read the website – she gives great advice about how to react if you do encounter a fire, to maximize the chances that no lives will be lost. Read the logs – you’ll see valuable information about how fires start. How many of you light your show horses 24/7 with auxiliary lights? Do you know that those lights are safe? Are they far enough away that a horse cannot chew on the wiring? Do you, right now, have a heat lamp on baby animals in your barn? Here’s one they probably didn’t anticipate – “plastic feed sacks set afire after being pulled into generator by foal.” All the horses were rescued, that time.
You know, all the fire safety stuff is the sort of routine maintenance that we all get busy and have trouble finding time to do. And it’s true, 99% of us are going to dodge the bullet and never have a barn fire. But I don’t know anybody who’s been in the 1% that has ever really recovered from it – so please put reading this information and taking the advice on your to-do list this holiday. It’s one of the nicest holiday presents you can give your horses!
For the last time, it’s NOT !$&!$^! horse fencing!
I am seriously running out of patience with people like this one who have money to do eventing and all sorts of fun stuff but apparently cannot spend a couple of hundred dollars in supplies and kick their fiance in the ass a few times to help them FIX THEIR FUCKING FENCE.
No, I don’t have any sympathy for you, Heidi. I only have sympathy for your poor mare, who is now dead because YOU DIDN’T REPLACE THE BARBED WIRE ON YOUR PROPERTY.
She sounds like a great mare. I mean, who knows why the FUCK you made her do a dressage test with a hematoma on her back or evented her with her back and a shoulder out. I guess it just shows that she was a good mare and you were a bad owner. By the way, maybe you should pray harder as apparently God did not protect your horses from your shitty fence just because you brag about what a great Christian you are all over your Facebook page. Guess God expects you to get off your ass and FIX YOUR FENCE, ya think?
I know what Heidi’s reaction to this is going to be. I’m psychic that way. She will e-mail about what a MEEEEAAAANIE I am for calling her out when clearly she’s suffering (though she’s not the one that wound up with her leg half ripped off – I sure would rather be SAD than have my leg ripped halfway off and die, wouldn’t you?). Some of her buddies will tell her she should ignore me and that I’m just a bitch who wishes she had Heidi’s wonderful life and blah blah. That’s OK Heidi. Stay ignorant. Leave that Friesian stallion out there on the crap fence too. I guess that’s one way of keeping his unapproved cross-bred piece of shit babies from going to slaughter – they won’t make it THAT far. They’ll die on the fence!
But I know, it’s not your fault, nothing is your fault, right? You went to horse college! You’re, like, a horse professional, aren’t you, Heidi? And I know you couldn’t possibly be expected to get out there and perform the hideously SIMPLE task of replacing the barbed wire with hot tape. You are way too busy with important tasks like uploading pictures of yourself making duckface to your Facebook.
P.S. Your responsible horse-owning friends are the ones who sent this to me. Apparently you don’t listen to people who try to more subtly hit you with a clue-by-four. So we’ll try this in the hopes of saving your remaining horses!
P.P.S. I removed the last name only because some of the people who read this blog apparently do not have any self-control. Maybe if I make it harder to find people who are featured, then only the smart people – the ones capable of writing a coherent e-mail and expressing their legally protected opinion about the person’s behavior – will manage to track them down and the immature/stupid who think it is appropriate to threaten people (it’s not, and it’s not legal, and I won’t protect you if you do it) won’t have the necessary problem-solving skills to figure out how to make contact, and we can avoid some drama. You are completely within your rights to tell someone that you think they’re an idiot – this is America. But tell them once, and don’t continue to harass them or make threats, or you may find yourself in a heap of trouble. If you aren’t sure where the line is, stay away from it altogether and keep your comments IN the comments. Finally, it is always anyone’s right who is featured here to respond – that’s what the comments are for. I gotta say, there is a WHOLE lot of drama around that whole Jack Knife Hollow thing – you guys should have a reality show, you’re ALL fighting and accusing each other of everything down there. Must not be much else to do!
Now, for those of you who have safe fence and need a cute little Thoroughbred mare to put behind it, check out Broadway at Shiloh Horse Rescue in Nevada!
The perfect weekend project!
2. It’s cheap.
3. It doesn’t involve any heavy lifting or physical strength.
4. It can save you a ton of money not to mention your horses a lot of pain!
What is it? Installing t-post caps!
Despite the fact that these things are about 50 cents each, I still see horse properties without them. These properties may have perfect safe fence stretched between those posts – usually electric tape or wire, sometimes coated wire, sometimes wire mesh (reasonably safe if tight and small weave so a hoof can’t go through), but the sharp t-post tops are just waiting for a horse to plunk some part of their body down on them and, believe me, it happens.
One of my readers just sent me this picture – and this is in the middle of the horse healing up! The horse did recover, but spending 50 cents for a t-post cap on the top of what she landed on would have prevented this in the first place. Horses try to jump and stake themselves on the sharp posts, or they do what one of my mares did in 1998 and put their neck/head down on it (she was probably just trying to scratch, but she tore a hole in her jugular vein and nearly bled to death). I know you think you own the world’s most sensible old horse, but he’s still a horse and you cannot predict what they will do 100%. An injury like this means you’ll be spending time before and after work washing it and wrapping it in all kinds of weather, not to mention paying plenty to the vet for follow up visits, antibiotics and ointment. Trust me, it is MUCH cheaper to use the caps!
Yes, I have had horses who pull the t-posts caps off and play with them — just use some Krazy Glue to put them on there in a more permanent way. Putting those caps on, if you haven’t done so already, is the perfect weekend project that you probably won’t even break a sweat doing.
While we’re on topic, if you have a cool before-and-after picture showing how you fixed up the fence (or facilities in general) of your new horse property, feel free to share those. You may motivate your fellow readers, and hey, you deserve a little acknowledgement for your hard work! 
Remember, direct links only (they start with http) and only the “i” link from photobucket, not the “s” link. The picture will not show up for you. It will show up when I moderate. Links must end with .jpg or .gif.
If you’re looking for a big draft cross trail companion, Shiloh Horse Rescue in Nevada has just started Latte under saddle, and from this first ride video, I’d say odds are good she will be an easy one to continue training. This is a pretty good example, too, of how to do a first ride. #1, the horse has a halter on over the bridle and that is what the ground person is using for control – there’s no rope snapped to the bit, as I see people do. #2, the horse is not forced to stand perfectly still for the first mounting – the steps sideways as she balances herself are allowed and she’s not punished for them. #3, the rider is as quiet as possible, which helps the mare have a good, non-scary experience, and only has the ball of their foot in the stirrup (this is how you don’t wind up hung up and inventing silly devices like the “imprinter”). #4, they’re in the round pen – a safe, small place for the mare to get used to this new idea. #5, all they do is walk. I see so many people screw up the first ride by asking too much and making it scary, and you’re just laying a foundation for trouble if you do that, even if you don’t get that trouble during that first ride. Maybe the only thing I’d change is that the ground person should be next to the horse, not out in front in case she leaps forward, but overall, this is a good example of a safe and smart first ride. Anyway, if you’re interested in Latte, contact Shiloh – they’d love to hear from you!
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