Posts Tagged ‘keeping horses at home’

But Mom, I know a pony would fit in the garage!

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Uncategorized

When I was a kid, I read one of those books – it was probably the Summer Pony one – where the parents built a stall in their garage for their daughter’s pony. I thought that sounded like a great idea.  I mean, we had a pie-shaped suburban lot.  The back was pretty wide, affording plenty of room for a kid and a dog to get up to speed.  Surely there was enough room there to turn out a pony, if we added some fence.  My mother’s explanation of subdivision HOA rules sounded far too ridiculous for a six-year-old to believe could be true.  If it was OUR house, why couldn’t we keep OUR pony at it?

I grew up and learned about HOA’s (though I still think they’re largely ridiculous – particularly that part I grew up with about how we had to all have the same lamp out front) and developed a deep and abiding hatred of suburbia, based upon my earliest recollections of it as a Place You Couldn’t Keep Ponies.  But when I had a question this week about how much space it really takes to keep a horse, I decided to Zillow my childhood home and see just how large that yard had been.  It turns out it was just over a quarter of an acre.  So, a huge and wonderful turnout for a horse if you are in Southern California, and not big enough to keep anything bigger than chickens in the rest of the U.S.!

The space issue is an excellent question.  I just adopted out a Thoroughbred mare to a place that is probably a quarter of an acre – but she’s 24 years old.   The space is clean, the fence is new, there’s a large, tall run-in shed and poop is picked up daily.   She shares it with two alpacas and there hasn’t been the slightest issue.  Shortly thereafter, I was asked to look at a horse just down the street that some impulsive lady had purchased at the Enumclaw auction and was now dumping on Craigslist.  OMG.  Same amount of space, but full of crap including a trampoline and numerous other hazards and junk – and the horse was a six year old OTTB!  A rescuer friend snatched him up quickly before he had a chance to get hurt.

There are four main issues to consider when asking yourself how much space a horse really needs.  The first one is safety.  If you have more than one horse, someone is going to be the boss and it’s smart to give the #2 horse sufficient space to get away from the tough guy.  In a small area, horses are more likely to be cornered and kicked or bitten.  That’s why all those horses on a kill buyer’s lot are so marked up – there’s just no space to get away.  So, if you have two twenty-something sweethearts that have been together for years, they may do just fine in a fairly small area, but lose one and replace him with a four year old, and you’re likely to have problems.  Another issue is how active the horse(s) are.  The senior Thoroughbred I mentioned above rarely even breaks into a trot on her own.  A young one that needs to run needs the space to do so, or you are likely to have a heck of a time with him under saddle.  Southern California is full of young Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods locked in stalls or 10 x 15 pipe corrals.  I watch their owners longe and longe, trying to make up for the lack of turnout and space to run, and many of these horses are still nuts.  Seriously, I’ve never seen as many people offloaded at any barn as I have at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.  It is like the rodeo over there – and I think it’s all about lack of turnout.  (They do have some paddocks, but turnout is not included in board, so many horses sit all day while the owners work).  A final factor about space is what is the space like?  A perfectly flat and mostly clear half acre with no significant mud problem is a vastly superior horse home than ten acres that are thick with trees and turn into a swamp come October.

The second issue is sanitation.  If you are going to have horses on a small area, you absolutely have to get out there and pick up poop.  Yes, in the pasture.  I know, I know.  The first time I saw someone do this, I too thought they were off their rocker – but it’s actually an unavoidable part of decent quality horsekeeping on a small property.  If you’ve got more acreage, you may be able to just drag the pastures or even let nature take its course, depending, but if you’ve got fifteen horses on five acres, get the wheelbarrow – you’ve got a lot of work to do if you don’t want your property to be a breeding ground for parasites.  Don’t think regular deworming will fix the problem.  Horses shouldn’t eat off their own excrement, nor should they stand in it, period.  In nature, they constantly move and travel so that this isn’t an issue.  If you’re going to lock them up, it’s your job to clean up.  You’ll never get a horse worm-free if he’s in a little dry lot you never clean.

(The space issue is so interesting. I know some of you are going, OMG, who would put 15 horses on 5 acres?  And those of you somewhere like L.A. are thinking, man, I wish I could find a place to board that had five acres and only 15 horses on it.)

A third issue is the horse himself, and there are two main considerations about how much space he may need, and what type of space.  The first one is soundness.  It’s not fair to an old coot with stiff legs to ask him to stand in a 12 x 12 box stall and be taken out once a day for a ride. He’s going to be stiff, sore and painful and I’m sorry but NO amount of Legend, Adequan, bute, BL pellets, glucosamine, MSM or anything else is going to compensate for the lack of movement.  Your old guy needs to walk and move continuously, and on a reasonably flat area that doesn’t stress his legs.  He needs to be kept out of mud or deep footing.  A stall with an attached paddock is the ideal, or 24/7 turnout with shelter.   The other kind of horse that absolutely has to have space is the young, energetic horse including young stock.  Ask any vet and they’ll recite for you the problems that are caused by locking growing foals in stalls or small paddocks where they can’t run and play.   A study at Utrecht University in the Netherlands found the following:

“Week-old Dutch warmblood foals were put into two groups: One living in box stalls for five months, and the other turned out 24 hours a day. After five months, some foals were euthanized and their fetlock joints examined. The results showed that confining foals significantly decreased calcium deposition, collagen development, and collagen cross-linking, which is critical to collagen strength. In comparison, pastured foals had normally developing subchondral bone.”  (This is from The Horse)

Yeah, yeah, I know, I would think there’d be a way to do that without euthanizing foals, too, but the point is that babies need to move or you’re looking at soundness problems later.  Locking a foal in a stall or a small paddock is a bad, bad idea and people do it all the time, reasoning that a foal is small, so for him, it’s not such a small area.  He may be small, but his need to exercise is far greater than the adult horse that is three times his size.

The final question is whether or not you expect the horse to live off of pasture, at least in the summertime.  There is no hard and fast rule of thumb about how many acres of pasture a horse needs.  It depends on what your pasture is like. I used to have a five acre property in the midwest and had no problem keeping 5 Thoroughbreds positively hog-fat on it all summer – but it was an old alfalfa field and animals hadn’t ever been out on it when I bought it.  If you let your horses graze everything down to the dirt and you never pick up poop or rest any part of the property and let it grow back or seed/fertilize, I can guarantee the nutritional value of whatever grass remains is about the same as snacking on cardboard.  Horses can only live on grass where there is grass, and this means sufficient grass that it never gets grazed down to the ground.  You either have to have a lot of acreage or separate your property into different pastures and rotate, letting the grass have a chance to grow back before you put horses out on it again.  (By the way, the presence of high, untouched weeds or long coarse grasses that the horses didn’t touch does NOT mean there is still something left to eat out there…use a little common sense.)

A really great book if you have a small property and are trying to figure out how to configure it is Cherry Hill’s Horsekeeping on a Small Acreage.  I’d check that one out for sure.

By the way, large acreages can present their own problems too!  It becomes a lot harder to check horses daily for injuries, maintain fence, watch for the presence of animal holes or other hazards, etc.   And of course it is much harder to secure from thieves.   I know a lot of people with large properties who keep a smaller sacrifice area down by the barn, and use it as a catch pen.  They call the horses down at least once a day and lock them in, usually with a bribe of a few handfuls of grain or some tasty hay that is even more appealing than the pasture.  I’ve worked at a place where they ring a bell and everyone comes running – a huge convenience when it is time to ride and you don’t want to hike out over 100 acres looking for your mount, who may otherwise very well toss his head, laugh at you and head for the hills!

How much space do your horses have?  What are the challenges you face in maintaining it?   Have you had a property for a long time and had to learn what the “right,” manageable number of horses on it was — or are you trying to adjust to that number right now?

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Theft – You know it’s going to happen!

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: Uncategorized

Guest blog from Ellen. We’ve talked about this stuff before but you can’t discuss it too much. We see theft stories every single day and often they are heartbreaking – a child’s horse, a pregnant mare, etc. Not to mention expensive equipment that may not be insured.

In a five mile circle of my front gate are fifty horses in thirty yards or pastures waiting to be stolen. A few Arabs, a cluster of stout grays, and any number of Oklahoma paints. Out here in the country, there aren’t any streetlights and more importantly, there aren’t any locks on the gates.

Think about it. You and I might take real care and interest in safely loading our horse. But our horse loaded without much regard for safety or comfort is in the trailer and the gate slammed shut in the proverbial sixty seconds. Would a serious thief cut the fence? Maybe, but he doesn’t have to because the gate is left unlocked.

I know a vet assistant two miles away who not only doesn’t lock her interior big pasture gates but never closes her gates to the road. Beyond the insurance nightmare of horses on the road, the personal nightmare of theft is being kept at bay by dumb luck. Can anyone say Schlage Lock. Not a combination, but the serious lock that has serious keys you can keep control over.

Wonder about feed supplements, tack, tools and tractors? Yup, they get stolen too. Of course, taking a picture, keeping sales receipts, and burning our identity under a saddle flap would help recovery. But why bother, it’s the other ranch that loses their stuff, right?

Even professionals get burned. A vendor with $200,000 worth of saddles, tack and custom gear waved good bye to everything after Tulsa’s Arab Nationals. The towing unit could have had lo-jack tracking and ignition cut off. The trailer could have had padlocks on the safety chains. But the thieves got the time to do their thing and even that extra moment to strip the radio out of the tow vehicle.

We can’t make theft go away. And frankly the fewer jobs to go around has something to do with crime going up. But we can make it hard for the thieves to make a dollar off a horseman.

Some very good points! I would particularly note that it is super easy to hook up a horse trailer within minutes and take off with it. If you go to work or church every week, the thieves in your neighborhood know. Put a hitch lock on your trailer and make it less of a target.

Another point – lights! Motion sensor lights do so much to discourage theft. There’s just a lot that you can do to make your property one of the least appealing targets in the neighborhood and that alone will often protect you.

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Best of FHOTD: Beginner mistakes that can kill your horse…

Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: Uncategorized

REPUBLISHING this one from 5/11/09 by request, and because it’s always a good topic!

As I’ve posted before, I didn’t get a horse early into my riding career. I lived in the ‘burbs and my mother steadfastly declared that no way was she going to that smelly barn on a daily basis. So horse ownership had to wait until I had a driver’s license and as a result I was at least a mediocre owner, if not a good one, by the time I had something with four hooves to call my own. In the meantime, I took nine years of riding lessons. While my instructors were far from George Morris, I did acquire the basics and the ability to ride the “advanced” school horses – aka those given to frequent spooking, bolting, bucking and similar behaviors.

 

Still, I made a lot of dumb first-time owner mistakes. My horse lived in a tie stall for quite some time, something I feel guilty about to this day. I am lucky that the barn had a good farrier, because I wouldn’t have known good from bad. I’d read every horse book on earth, so that was somewhat helpful. Still, it is probably a very good thing I’d grown up in a barn full of adults all too happy to screech things like “pick up that lead rope, he’s going to step on it!” at me when my teenage brain had wandered.
 
Sadly, not all horses are fortunate and every day, horses get sold to rank beginners – people whose knowledge base is limited to having ridden a friend’s horse a few times or gone trail riding on vacation. They have a couple of acres, and their impression of a horse is that it is kind of like a big dog. It will mow the lawn and you can ride it. An amazing number of horses survive this kind of ownership, but the fact is, some do not. Few beginners understand how easy it is to kill a horse. I see these people on message boards daily, asking questions that make me want to march the streets campaigning for ownership licensing and a test. Sometimes it is too late and they are already posting about the loss of their horses.  
 
Since I know that a lot of beginners do read this blog, today we are going to talk about the mistakes that really can kill your horse. Those of you who aren’t beginners, please add to my list!
  
1. Turnout in a halter that will not break – i.e. nylon or rope. If any of you have a stack of Western Horseman magazines from the 1970s, I need a favor. Can you scan that ad showing the dead horse hung up on the fence? They don’t use that ad anymore – I’m sure some parent sued for their child’s emotional distress – but it’s a damn shame because it got the message across. I am still, in 2009, reading message board posts from someone who turned out in a nylon or rope halter and came back to find a horse hung up with a broken neck. Even a horse who ties very well may panic when his head gets trapped unexpectedly. This can happen when he’s scratching an itchy spot on a t-post or something like a piece of loose metal on the barn (of course, that shouldn’t be there either). Some horses will even catch a back foot in their halter as they scratch themselves, and you can imagine the injuries that result. The solution is simple – either turn out with no halter (this is always the safest and if you can’t catch your horse, you have something to work on, don’t you?) or turn out with a breakaway halter.

A related problem – tying too long. When your horse is tied, a loop of lead rope that hangs down to your horse’s knee or further is absolutely too long. If the horse paws and hangs himself up, you’re likely to see a panicky episode that will scare you to death and can very well result in a severe injury to both the horse and any human who tries to free him. Tie with no more than 2-3 feet of rope between the horse’s nose and the tie rail or ring, tie with a quick release knot, and make sure you pull on the lead and check it before you walk off to ensure that the horse can’t get a few more feet of slack free with the first tug. This is particularly important when tying to the side of the trailer at a trail ride or other event – I always see horses with so much slack in the lead that it scares me. Tie high and short and keep hay nets high and short as well – nothing at leg level. Not ever. Don’t even get me started on “staking out” – yeah, I know there are .0005% of the horses in the world that someone has trained to do this and they’re just fine, but most of the time, it is a train wreck waiting to happen. Don’t do it.
 

2. Uncapped t-posts and other unsafe fencing. Your realtor is most likely NOT a horse expert. Every day, I see properties full of barbed wire and uncapped t-posts marketed as “turn-key horse farms.” While there’s a fairly easy and cheap fix – capping the posts and replacing the barbed wire with another form of fencing like electric rope or tape – beginners are often told “oh, it will be fine.” Look, I could publish gory pictures all day showing that it may not be fine. And while it’s true that horses hurt themselves on other kinds of fence, it’s simply not as common and the injuries are rarely as severe as the injuries from barbs that dig in and tear the flash. With regard to capping t-posts, I once almost lost a horse myself because I failed to do that. A horse who tries to jump out can impale himself on the top of an uncapped t-post, and a horse who is scratching may cut himself. Mine cut herself on the underside of her face, right between the cheekbones and right into her jugular vein. T-post caps are cheap and they slip right on. Go pick some up if you haven’t already.

 

 

3. Pasture obstacles. Horses are not, no matter what anybody tells you, “smart enough” to stay away from tractors, old cars, playground equipment, loose sheet metal, sinkholes and other pasture hazards. If there is a means of self-destruction in their turnout area, they are likely to find and use it. It is important to go out and physically walk your pastures looking for hazards before you ever put a horse out there. I’ve seen old farms where coils of old, rusty barbed wire hid in the weeds. A few years ago, there was a much-publicized case where a beautiful warmblood stallion fell into an old well on a property and broke his neck. You can read several cases on Netposse where the horse was found on the owner’s property stuck in a sinkhole or something similar. I’ve also seen cases where erosion has taken back the edge of a ditch to where the horse can fall in without ever getting outside of the fence.  I’ve seen horses kill themselves on things like a rough piece of sheet metal coming off the back of a shed, a support cable for a telephone post, farm equipment that was parked in the pasture for just a day, and the list goes on. If you can’t immediately remove a hazard, shield it from the horses using a few corral panels. These are a quick way to build a barrier around something like an old well, a collapsed building, or some metal pipe to nowhere sticking up out of the ground.
 
 
 
4. Grass can kill your horse. To make a long explanation short, the sunny and warm days of spring raise the sugar content of grass pasture. This can render grass dangerous to eat – the sugars upset the normal balance in the horse’s digestive tract, resulting in toxins which lead to founder, aka laminitis. Founder is without a doubt one of the worst things that can happen to your horse. In its most severe form, the hooves are so badly affected that the horse must be euthanized. Even in milder forms, it is a management issue and the horse may require a lengthy rehab period, expensive special shoeing, and to be “dry lotted” – kept in a dirt field with no grass – the rest of his life. The classic situation is a beginner who purchases a horse from a boarding barn where it has only gone out in dirt paddocks, brings it home to the idyllic farm they just purchased and puts it out on lush green pasture. The horse looks happy – heck, the horse looks ecstatic – but days later it can hardly walk and by the end of the week, it is dead. Rule number one: Horses do not know what is good for them. They can also founder after getting into the grain – your grain should be kept in a locked room or a spare stall where a loose horse at 3 AM cannot get to it. If you purchase a horse who hasn’t been out on grass, introduce him to it slowly. Start with 15 minutes of grazing and then back into the stall/dirt paddock he goes. Work up by increasing the time a little bit daily until the horse it out 24/7 if that’s what you desire. He won’t like coming back in – but you’ll save yourself a four-figure vet bill and a lot of heartbreak. Another option is a grazing muzzle, which allows the horse to be turned out with the herd and drink but keeps his grass consumption to a minimum. If you’ve purchased a previously foundered horse (your vet can tell you), fencing in a dirt paddock is probably your safest bet.
 
FYI, grass clippings from the lawn are never safe for horses. They start to ferment almost immediately in a bag or pile. Hand-picking grass for your paddock kept horse is fine, but the leftover from the mower belongs in the trash heap.
 
5. Other horses can kill your horse.   Some boarding barns are just not very smart about turnout. While a certain amount of roughhousing, nipping and the occasional kick is normal in a herd of horses, you will occasionally see a horse who is truly aggressive. He continually runs at other horses, ears pinned, teeth bared. He will start chasing another horse and it won’t end after three strides (that’s normal herd behavior – the chase ends when the submissive horse runs away) – he will chase that horse for laps around the pasture. This horse can kill your horse. This is how horses get so panicked that they do try to jump out of the fence. They can get cornered in a run-in shed or fence corner by a horse like this and kicked so severely they have to be euthanized. Absolutely do not allow your horse to be turned out with a horse like this, even if he does not seem to be the focus of the horse’s aggression. It’s much better that your horse go out in a small paddock by himself.

No, you don’t want to be the overprotective horse parent who has hysterics over a tiny nip mark, but if you’ve ever seen a truly aggressive horse like this in action, you know what I mean. You are the paying customer at a boarding barn, and you do have the right to demand your horse be kept as safe as possible – please don’t back down because someone scoffs at you and tries to make you feel like a stupid beginner. If you are going to make mistakes, erring on the side of caution is always best!

So, what else would you add to the discussion? What do you think are the most important things for first time owners to know – the things that absolutely CAN kill their horse if they don’t know them? I’m not talking about all of the fine points of tack fit – I’m talking about things that can result in life-threatening conditions.

 

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Nightmare Neighbors!

Friday, September 4th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Uncategorized

Someone posted this story to the comments yesterday – a horrifying tale of a neighborhood dispute gone bad which has already resulted in one dead horse.

http://www.kcrg.com/news/local/56756132.html

This brings up a very good discussion. Recently, a longtime reader of this blog contacted me.  She is in a very bad situation due to troublesome neighbors. For many years she has leased the same property with no problems.  Then, the Bottom Feeders Next Door moved in – the neighbors we all dread.  They abuse their horses, keep a rank stallion, and seem to have an inordinate number of angry pit bulls residing with them (you can figure that one out for yourselves). 

The BFND don’t care for my reader, the sort of quiet, hardworking, law-abiding, middle aged, spoil-her-elderly-horses-rotten person that most of us would LOVE to have living next door.  They have been pulling stuff like turning their stallion out along her fenceline to upset her horses and they have even verbally threatened to hurt her horses!  She is freaked out, to say the least.  The most she can get the authorities to do is “talk” to the neighbors. Well, I think we all know that’s a swift path to making things a lot worse.  The landlord won’t permit her to construct more fences, and she is having trouble finding another rental that will permit six old coot horses and isn’t a zillion dollars a month.  For now, she is keeping her horses in the barn, but with a COPD horse, that is no solution. 

So let me ask you this question today:  Who has been there?  What did you do?  Did you give up and just move? (I’d be most tempted to do that, but I agree that finding a great horsey rental can be challenging – been there several times).  Did you get a guard dog?  Was there something you were able to say to the police that got some action taken that actually resolved the situation?  What do you do as a single woman when nut cases move in next door and threaten to hurt your animals?  I’m not saying that to be sexist, but it’s just a fact of life that people are less likely to threaten you when you have a big husband who could kick their butts.  Any advice for my reader? 

And FYI, if someone has a place to live with horse facilities for rent in Western Oregon, send me an e-mail and let’s see if we can get my reader and her horses to safety.

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