smellshorsey

How to Keep Dirt Out of Your House

Some of you live in clean houses. How do you do it? Do you keep your boots in the barn? What about the shoes that take you from the barn to the house? How do you get them into the house without muddying the house? I have a system, and it doesn't work.

I've set up several obstacles in an effort to keep the pasture, barn and dirt-in-general from tromping right into the house. First you're supposed to stomp your feet with every step you take across the driveway. I know this technique must be successful because my driveway is dirty.

Next is the boot scrubber-scraper by the back door. It's better in theory than in reality. For one thing, the next one I get will have a handle because if you get a really good scraping-rhythm going, you'll find yourself balancing on one leg for an instant before crashing to the ground, then you need to scrape your whole dirty self off before coming on in. (Maybe you are less clumsy than I am -- I broke my foot watering a plant.)

After that, you're supposed to use a regular door mat. I wish I had this one with its reminders to get your cell phone, keys and wallet. Doormats soon get clogged with dirt and animal hair at our house and aren't very effective at removing dirt. Hosing them off and scrubbing helps restore them, but it would be just as easy to hose and scrub the dirt out of the pasture.

Those family members who would like to continue living in this house are expected to take their shoes/boots/dirty socks or whatever off while standing outside. There's a chair for them to sit on. They're expected to look at their footwear and bang it against the side of the house, their foreheads, whatever hard surface they can find in order to knock the rest of the dirt off. I think there is a serious lack of effort in this department unless I'm watching. (And of course I don't do it either unless they're watching.)

Then there's the shoe rack in the laundry room/mud room designed to keep the every day shoes from taking one step farther into the house. The really dirty boots are supposed to go in a plastic laundry basket by the door. Right now it's overflowing with Homeless Things. How do the Homeless Things -- the dog leash, a busted leadrope, a halter for a horse we no longer own, too-small flip flops and other items -- end up in the dirty boot box? Why, because they're homeless. Next time I have a mood swing they'll find themselves in the yard.

And then there are the dirt-picker-uppers that litter the laundry/mud room. The brooms that won't sweep themselves, various failed floor cleaners and even a path covered with floor mats and old towels. The best is the Swiffer vacuum, though the battery only lasts about two minutes. It helps.

Clearly, my system is not working. There's as much rich pasture dirt in the house as in the pasture. Our Berber carpet, which is basically made of plastic, is really holding up well, but like me, it too will soon begin to despair and give up. At that point, I'll have to call the professionals. Shall I call a professional moving company and get me out of here? Or how about a professional carpet cleaner?

How do you keep your barn (and other) dirt out of your house?

Some Professional Advice on "To Breed or Not to Breed?"

Thanks for all your comments on "To Breed or Not to Breed?" Breeding a nice mare to a nice stallion and wanting to keep the offspring (assuming said offspring lives, etc.) in spite of what Fugly says has many benefits, ranging from just plain fun to learning about life to, as MiKael pointed out, being allowed to follow your dream. Is there anything more important than that?

So, I called my niece, the horse vet, for professional advice on what to do next and her opinion on the whole project. If I was hoping for an endorsement, perhaps I should have called someone else.

"Oh, Anne! You DON'T want to do that," she said. Her passionate, unequivocally negative response surprised me.

"I don't?" I said, shocked and disappointed.

"Absolutely not. I've seen so many bad horses that were raised by mother-daughter owners. Some of the worst horses I deal with.  Not that you and Lily would necessarily ruin the horse, maybe if you had good professional help you wouldn't, but horses raised as pets in the yard usually don't understand that they are horses," she said. "If it's a male you could geld it and cut off some of those problems, but you'd still have to discipline yourselves to treating it like a horse."

Now, she loves me and knows me. On the plus side, this reaction means she thinks that I'm basically a kind (pushover) person whose existing horses are pets but were, fortunately, raised by someone else. So I'm not insulted even if I am shocked. I do indulge my animals, husband and daughter. And myself. (I'm working on denying myself chocolate.)

But I'd never thought about this pitfall before. "You'd need to treat the foal like a horse, treat it like its mother treats it. Train it and ignore it," she said. But it's so cute! How could we do that? I guess that's her point.

So I said, "What if we got professional help and didn't ruin the horse?" So we talked about who could help us, how it should be done, the perils of pregnancy and birth and the heartbreak that can happen. We talked about the expense and the stallions under consideration.

She said, "I don't think you or Lily could handle it if something went wrong. Bad wrong." She's the one I called when the hamster needed to be euthanized. She's the one who's seen us at our crazy worst with our pets. She has a point. But we're several dead cats and hamsters under the bridge, so to speak. And isn't this part of the learning process about following your dreams? That sometimes bad things happen and you have to take a detour, redirect, redream and try again another way? So I got her to go along with that.

But then we got to the thing that's probably going to stop me. Lily is 13. If we breed Lucy tomorrow and she foals next year, Lily will be 19 before she can start jumping the foal and really using him/her.

Sure, at 19 Lily could still be riding like a fiend and could somehow win enough scholarships to afford to go to college AND take a horse. But there's so much important in life that needs attention at that age. School, college decisions, boys, a social life. Will she still be my horse-loving girl? And if not.....? I guess we could sell the horse. But this isn't part of this dream.

Lily and I discussed the timing of all this, the foal's age and development and while she believes she will be riding and competing at Rolex in the near future -- and I hope she will but think her schedule is too optimistic by a decade or more and is certainly out of our budget -- she understood that she her goals and the foal's maturation rate don't coincide. Yes, she can be riding and training the baby before it's five, but she can't really be asking for hard physical  work.

More thinking to come, but that's today's state of mind.

She hasn't done all that Buddy can do. Or Lucy, either. I think I'm going to get her to sit down with one of her former trainers who competed at Radnor with an affordable QH and understands dreams and finances. Maybe if we set goals for this year, and next year, etc. Lily is a talented, dedicated rider, but doesn't know quite as much as she thinks she does.

This is tough and I don't want her life lesson about horses to be that it's all about the money. I want it to be that if your dream is big enough, you'll find a way.

To Breed or Not to Breed

Lucy's a smart girl. Here she is hoping for something. Food. An adventure. Maybe a boyfriend?

True, she's got Buddy to boss around. But perhaps she'd like somebody more studly. Like a real stud.

Lily has been dying to breed Lucy for several years. And now I wish we'd done it last year. At some point, Lily is going to want something fancier than Buddy. That could be Lucy, since Lucy is a lovely mover (though not fancy fancy). And she is as athletic as a cat, and way too smart. Lucy is 9, I think, and Buddy is 10. Or maybe they're both a year older. Lily is 13.

I don't know if I can or should convince Paul, but I'm looking into some of the studs in our area. Right now the leading contender is a lovely Hanoverian. Lucy is a nicely bred TB mare. I think this would make me a backyard breeder and on Fugly's bad list. Though breeding a registered, nice TB to an approved Hanoverian probably would keep me out of that category, though it still wouldn't mean I know what I'm doing. (I need to quit reading MiKael's blog or looking at all my neighbor's foals.)

My father, who would legitimately be on Fugly's bad side for all the mixed up horses he bred (and took care of and thought they were beautiful and useful, to his credit), said that having foals was one of the most fun things he remembers doing and what's wrong with us for not already having done it?

Paul ain't into extra horses. Vet bills. Random events, like taking a gamble on the gene pool and the birth process. He's also not into paying $$$ for a nice horse after Buddy has taken Lily as far as Buddy can go. So maybe there's hope for talking him into it.

It would be fun to raise a baby. I used to help my father. One of them was a cross between a Tennessee Walking Horse and a five-gaited mare. That horse was like a ten-speed. He could do any gait, though sometimes he got his feet tangled up. I made him walk, trot and canter (only) and taught him to jump. To my eyes he was a handsome thing. Here is one of the only photos I've got. Click to enlarge, if you wish. His name was Snuffy and he was a good sport. Because he was a mixed breed and wasn't at all delicate, he once stepped on a giant nail that went all the way up through his frog and the point stuck out above his pastern. He wasn't even lame. But back to the issue of breeding Lucy.

Lily has been forced to save money in a savings account since third grade that she can one day spend on something she really wants. She says this is what she really wants. I'm afraid the foal won't mature fast enough for her ambitions for it. And what if it's born with three legs? Fugly? Etc.?

I guess that would be a good life lesson.

And if we don't talk Paul into it? Well, there's always trickery. We simply don't know HOW Lucy got pregnant. Somebody must have hopped over the fence.

I would never do that. I don't think.

A Little More on Marsh Tackies

The local paper came out with  a little more on the story about Marsh Tacky horses today and had some more photos in  the print version of the newspaper. Unfortunately, they didn't do much more online, but here's one photo where you can see them a little better. Click to enlarge.

S.C.'s Endangered Horse Breed, the Marsh Tacky

UPDATE 10:12 a.m. Really good story about the horse's history and efforts to save them at American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Click on the link to the right ALBC Works with Owners & Others               to Conserve the Critically Endangered Marsh Tacky Horse

This photo is of a Marsh Tacky stallion, an endangered breed of horses descended from Spanish horses. There are only 150 of these tough little horses left. Though I live in S.C., I've only encountered one of these horses in my life. After reading about them, I think I need to get several. What's good about them? They're said to be sensible, athletic, extremely hardy horses who can handle anything. And with the price of hay, I'm very interested in horses that can survive on marsh grass. What's bad about them? Not so pretty and kind of small, though we all know that pretty is as pretty does.

Here's an excerpt from the story:

YONGES ISLAND, S.C. — During centuries of isolation on the Carolina sea islands, the short-legged, sway-backed marsh tacky horses became perfectly suited for toiling long hours in the swamps and oppressive humidity.

But their wild looks and workhorse reputation — their name comes from the old English word meaning "common" — didn't exactly make them prized among horse lovers. Today, only about 150 of them remain.

Now, breeders are coming together to save the tacky, whose ancestors were left by colonial Spanish explorers......

"You can work'em, you can ride'em. When you put them in swamps and mud like we have around here in the Deep South ... instead of panicking and floundering around, they can just plow right on through it."

Intelligent and superbly adapted to the Southern humidity and coastal marshes, tackies can be broken quickly and prove docile for even the youngest riders. They can survive on marsh grass and forage other horses won't eat — farmers and owners simply kept them tied up in their yards over the years.

"We haven't found anything they are not good at," said Jeanette Beranger, a program manager with the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. "They jump like rabbits, have a lot of endurance and can thrive on nothing.".....

"I don't think they are ever going to overtake the quarterhorse in popularity," she said. But they are ideal "if somebody is looking for an easy keeper that is safe with children."

The tackies' colonial Spanish strain comes from the same ancestors as cracker horses in Florida and bankers from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But DNA testing has found that the tackies are a separate breed, with unique characteristics thanks to their relative isolation. (go to this link for the complete story)

Is Eventing Becoming too Dangerous?

I just got an e-mail from Pony Club about the high number of eventing deaths in the last year. Pony Club was calling for all leaders and participants to make sure that members are competing at the appropriate level.

They cited the following story, which I will excerpt here, from the New York Times:

A failed jump by one of the world’s finest riders and a spate of deaths have unnerved the equestrian community.

Darren Chiacchia, 43, who helped the United States Olympic team win a bronze medal at the Athens Games and was considered a favorite for this year’s team, was training a horse on an intermediate course in Tallahassee, Fla., last month when the stallion crashed over a fence, crushing — and nearly killing — its celebrated rider.

Mr. Chiacchia spent a week in a coma and is now recovering at a rehabilitation facility near his home in Buffalo. Meanwhile, the sport he devoted his life to faces an identity crisis. Considered alongside the deaths of 12 riders worldwide over the past year and a half, his crash has reignited a fierce debate over whether the risks involved with the equestrian discipline known as eventing — an arduous three-phase competition — have become too great......

An Olympic sport since 1912, eventing originated as a way to test the ability and endurance of military horses. It is often called a horse triathlon because participants compete in three events over one-, two- or three-day competitions: the delicate footwork of dressage, the beauty and control of show jumping, and the endurance and daring of cross-country racing. The winding courses of up to two and a half miles are designed to mimic the natural obstacles of rural landscapes.

“It’s considered by many to be the ultimate test of horse and rider,” Mr. Baumgardner said.

The cross-country phase is the most dangerous, as horse and rider are required to clear 20 to 40 jumps in an established time period. Penalties are assessed if the horse balks at a jump, if the horse or rider falls, or if their time is too slow. Riders look for courage and well-roundedness in eventing horses, which can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $1 million each.

All 12 of the recent deaths occurred during the cross-country phase as riders attempted to clear obstacles, including some that were startlingly simple. Most of the deaths resulted from what are called rotational falls, somersaulting flips similar to Mr. Chiacchia’s.....

.....amateur riders say that lower-level courses have also become more difficult in order to prepare aspiring riders for the next level. (emphasis mine)

“It’s not galloping cross-country over natural obstacles anymore,” said Ilana Gareen, an amateur rider and assistant professor of community health at Brown. “I liked the fact that you could go to eventing and just be a good rider, do well, and have fun.”

I left out a lot and there's more that follows. I haven't kept up with eventing since I quit doing my low-level but fun rides when work got too demanding -- and eventing had become impossible on another level.

I knocked myself out to compete in eventing. My employers let me work on flex time during the season so that I could come in early and leave work before it was too dark to ride. I took my vacation days to trailer to events and stayed in hotels worse than the stable my horse was in. (One motel had bullet holes in the door, I'm sure of it.) It was exhausting. It took lots of money. It was excellent fun and absolutely thrilling. I even got to cover the events I went to as a reporter for The Chronicle of the Horse. (I never competed at the top levels so there was no conflict -- I would not be interviewing or covering the stories about people at my level.)

But it began to dawn on me that some people competing at my level were not at all at my level. Many were professionals, and I remember at one event that there was a former Olympian competing a young horse at my level. I was usually put in divisions with professional riders, teachers, trainers and even my own coaches -- not because of any handicapping system or because I was good, which I wasn't. Amateurs and professionals were routinely mixed up.

I don't need to win, but I need to feel like I have a chance. It was discouraging. So I wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle of the Horse expressing my frustration. What I proposed were amateur and professional divisions. I found out that's a great way to get a lot of people mad at you.

The local and regional professionals don't want to be in a class with national and international stars. But what fun is it to beat people like me?  That was a long time ago, and some of these folks still hold a grudge. I'm no longer a member of any of the organizations so I don't know for sure that things haven't changed, but a search online of entry forms and other eventing information doesn't seem to show that anything has been divided into amateur and professional divisions.

I think that what I complained about may be in part what is behind these deaths, especially when the falls are attributed to inexperienced or amateur riders who aren't as good as the professionals they're competing against.

Well, DUH! Here's some more from the NYT's article:

Top competitors, coaches and course designers argue that the sport’s death and injury toll is most likely related to an influx of new riders to the sport. Participation in eventing competitions in the United States has grown by 36 percent over the past decade; riders filled roughly 46,000 competition slots in 2007, according to the association.

“You have people who didn’t grow up fox hunting or going on wild rides the way we did,” said Mick Costello, an event rider who builds cross-country courses. “They haven’t been used to tumbling falls. They get a thrill out of going fast, and a lot of them aren’t ready.”

Mr. Costello and others acknowledge that the increasing skill of top riders has pushed them to create more complex courses. They have recently been designing “speed bumps” to slow the riders, to little avail. “These people are so good, they just take it in stride,” he said.

I'm sorry. I grew up foxhunting and racing my friends on dirt roads. We did wild, crazy things and lived to tell about it. That doesn't make me Olympic material or prepared for courses designed to challenge the professionals. They've taken out the fun and replaced it with unacceptable risk.

 

And by the way. You can have a good, fun event horse for under $25,000. In fact, you can remove a zero and still get something sound and fun. You won't beat the Olympians, but you probably wouldn't beat them if you spent $100,000. Not that I'd know.

 

What Kind of Stall Flooring Do You Prefer?

I should probably have a whole category called, "Things I Wish I'd Done Differently." One is the "flooring" in our stalls. We have no floors. We have dirt. I initially used straw for bedding on top of the dirt floor until Lucy got into the feed storage (another topic for my category of "Things I Wish I'd Done Differently) and had to be kept in the stall with butterfly pads in her hooves and all kinds of anti-founder precautions. Thank the Lord and our good vet, she didn't founder. (And I moved where I stored the feed.)

But I had to take the straw bedding out of the stall so she couldn't eat it and replace it with peat moss/gold.  It did make nice manure. Now I use pine shavings.

Incidentally, the horses are not kept in the stall (unless they've done something stupid and need stall rest) but have 24/7 access to their stalls. That means they can go in there any time they need to go to the bathroom. They take full advantage of this.

Now, what's good about a dirt floor is that it's easy on horses' feet and joints. What's bad about dirt is that every time I strip the stalls I strip a layer of dirt. (And then work lime in, etc. before adding the shavings.) If you saw Lucy in her stall, you'd think she was a pony. She's standing in a hole. Buddy's stall has only been in use for two years (didn't keep the pony before him in a stall) so his dirt floor (under the shavings) is fine. For now. It would also help if Lucy didn't go into the stall to pee every single time.

If I were to do it over, and I'm going to have to at some point before Lucy disappears from view, here are the choices:

1. Concrete, asphalt or other permanent surface. Good part: permanent. Bad part: Everything else.
2. Gravel. Good part: semi-stable surface that lets liquids flow through. Bad part: I don't like adding rocks to my nice soft sandy land, and it doesn't sound comfortable. Plus, the horses would figure a way to churn it into their bedding and I'd end up with heavy, rocky manure and my problem not solved.
3. Stall mats. Good part: made for the job and should be a comfortable surface under the bedding. Bad part: bazillion dollars and would be a hassle to install. Plus I'm not convinced that it could hold up to all that pee.
4. Tamped clay. Good part: Nice, natural surface that is semi-solid and permeable. If I'm smart, we'll slope it so that the liquids run out instead of forming a basin. Bad part: I'm sure I'll be digging up layers eventually, and also imagine that with Lucy's habit of peeing in the stall and ONLY in the stall that even it will become saturated, slope or no slope. Still, it could be redone yearly. I think that's what is suggested.

I think I've read of other options but these seemed like the basics. Before I make my next move, which will not be soon, what flooring do you have? What do you think is ideal and/or most practical? What would you do over?

Sometimes You're Forced to do Things You Don't Like

Quite a few years ago my husband, Paul, was pulling out of an office driveway in his Diesel VW Rabbit when a city police car traveling at a high rate of speed without its siren on around a blind corner slammed into him, spinning him across four lanes and into a tree. Paul's head shattered the driver's door window and the backseat of the car was crushed, but Paul survived and in fact turned out to be okay. People stopped to help and the policeman who was driving the car interfered with them, ordering the off-duty EMT who was a witness and was trying to cut Paul out of his seatbelt to stop, saying that the EMT was "destroying evidence." Witnesses were so outraged that they left their names and numbers.

We were grateful that Paul was able to recover fully. And it was so clearly the policeman's fault. So were we ever surprised to be served papers that the city was suing us for the accident. This part was not the city's fault, but I was served the papers within hours of learning my mother had breast cancer. Paul and I were taking a walk to help me take it all in. And when we walked back up our driveway, there was the paper server. The good news there is that my mother's breast cancer didn't require chemo and didn't recur. But that seemed an extra cruelty -- to serve papers for an accident that could have killed Paul and wasn't his fault on such a day (mind you, I know they had no way of knowing. I also doubt they would have cared.)

That's when we had to hire a lawyer, and found a good one who took it on a contingency basis. We were never going to take this to court, but they sued us. All we wanted was for the city to pay for Paul's hospital bills and his car. We offered to settle for a very reasonable amount. Nothing doing. The city attorney thought he would be a hero by instead making us pay. I will never understand this part, especially with all the witnesses who had come forth.

The city forced us to fight them. And because we were right and we had a good lawyer, we won. We won far more than we had asked for in settlement. So the city took the case to the state Supreme Court. We won again.

It took years and was so unnecessary. What started out as gratitude that Paul was okay turned to anger as we were dragged through the courts by the city and the process went on and on. It took so much of our time, our emotions and our lives. We felt that our good, hard-working trial lawyer well deserved his 30 percent.

I hope you never need a lawyer like this and that you never have such an experience. Life is too short to spend it fighting with jerks in court. But if you have to, it's good to know there are good lawyers out there. We used a S.C. lawyer, but if you find yourself needing a good lawyer you'll want to look at philadelphia accident attorneys.

Oh. And why was the policeman endangering citizens by flying around a blind corner with no siren? He was answering a false alarm at an ATM machine.

I'll always be grateful that no one was in that crumpled back seat, and I'll always believe it was the hand of God that protected Paul.

One of Abused Trexler Horses Dies, Bones Found Were from Horses Starved to Death

Apparently good, restorative care isn't always enough to save an abused animal. Horse #47, Jabask Gdancer, pictured here, of the Trexler herd has died. This is an excerpt from today's story, which you'll find here and here:

There are new developments in the case involving the Trexler family horses.

The agency says that a female Arabian horse named Jabask Gdancer passed away about two weeks ago. Josh Gowans with the Humane Society says the animal developed colic, and could not overcome what the agency says was a lack of proper care given before they seized her.

Gowans said, "Given the conditions of the horse and what it went through, we do feel like its general condition is such that it couldn't recover from the ailment that it had."

That's not all the bad news. Preliminary tests on the horse bones found on the Trexler property show that many horses died of starvation before the herd was confiscated. You can see the video and read the story here.

But here is some good news, though it adds to the burden of care that the Humane Society is carrying. Here's a photo of one of the foals recently born to one of the confiscated mares. More are on the way.

The three Trexlers are facing eviction from the house where they are now living. You can find more posts on this sad affair by browsing through smellshorsey's "current affairs" category.

Camden May Get Year-Round Horse Arena

Good news! Camden, S.C., long a center of horse activity, may get a year-round equestrian arena. Camden already has the Carolina and Colonial Cup Steeplechases at Springdale Course, the National Steeplechase Museum and a foxhunt with lots of preserved acres for hunting or just riding. The city itself is very horse-friendly, though there are signs that say, "Horses Not Allowed on Sidewalks."

Here's the news:

Kershaw County Council voted to give $150,000 over three years to a year-round horse arena if the nonprofit spearheading it is awarded a $3 million grant from the state.

The S.C. Equine Promotion Foundation wants to build a large-scale equine arena in Camden that could mean more than $22 million annually in state tourism revenues and 300 jobs in and around the county, an economic impact study said.

This is a long way from being reality, just as $150,000 is a long way from $3 million (especially in a state that's not rich), but it's a step forward.