Horse Maintenance Day

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Horse maintenance days are a necessity if you want to keep your horses healthy and happy.

Just a word of warning…this is going to be a looooonnnnnnngggg post.

So grab a cup of something yummy and hunker down.

When you have horses, or any animals for that matter, in order to keep them healthy you have to periodically do a little maintenance. The most frequent maintenance for horses is de-worming.

So, on the coldest day of our brief winter, the head wrangler decided it was the day to worm the whole herd of horses.

Of course, it would have to be freezing. Things like this are always much more fun when it’s freezing.

I can guarantee you one thing, I had on my new thermal underwear for Wyoming and they worked good!

The menfolk rode to the back forty to bring up the big herd, while I slithered down on the side of the road so I could get a good shot of them thundering up the hill.

 

 

horses running

 

As you can see, there wasn’t much thundering going on. They came up the hill like they were just going for their Sunday afternoon picnic.

Oh, well. At least I tried.

 

girl leading horse

 

 

We got them all corralled into the pen and I started catching. Most of them are pretty good, but some of ’em can be downright ornery when it comes to being caught.

 

I have to admit though, the most fun came from the orneriest one. There was a especially hard to catch and rather wild-eyed mare in the bunch that came to us wearing a halter and it was rubbing sores on her head.

Do you want to guess why she had been wearing that halter for so long? My guess would be once her former owners got it on there they couldn’t figure out how to get close enough to her to get it off.

So, with not many other options, we pulled out the only rope we had on hand and did a little ole’ fashioned cowboyin’.

 

man roping horse

 

It certainly didn’t help matters any that the only rope we had handy was a kids rope that is much too short for practical purposes.

But did that stop us? No way! What fun is it if there aren’t a few flying-by-the-seat-of-your-wranglers moments to keep things interesting?

 

man throwing rope around horse

 

 

man throwing rope almost catching horse

 

 

horse being caught by the thrown rope

 

 

horse caught by rope gotcha

 

 

Gotcha!

 

She was none too happy about it, but we did get the halter off of her.

Everyone turned out for the excitement. We had the pharmacist whose job was to dole out the wormers.

 

pharmacist boy holding wormer

 

 

And the secretary who kept up with which horses had already been wormed.

 

secretary boy keeping track of horses being wormed

 

 

boys list of horse names

 

 

There was a momentary cause for concern when it appeared a self misdiagnosis had been made.

 

boy pretending to be taking horse wormer himself

 

 

I guess he saw that it was green apple flavored.

 

Some of these horses could really benefit from spending a little quality time with a toothbrush.

The perfect time to get a good look at your horses teeth is while you are worming them.

 

man and woman looking at horses teeth

 

Unfortunately, when some horses get old, their teeth wear down badly or they just lose them outright. I think Fancy would be a good dentures candidate…what do you think?

 

horse getting dose of wormer

 

 

After perusing all the photos of the day, we concluded that sticking out tongues could be a genetic family trait.

 

 

man sticking out tongue at the camera

 

 

girl sticking out tongue at the camera

 

 

Needless to say, the horses were much more enthusiastic about leaving the pen than they were about coming.

 

horses running away from the barn

 

 

About half the herd had run past when they decided…whoa, I think that thing is gonna jump up and EAT us!!!

 

horses stopped looking at camera man

 

 

All in all, we got all the horses de-wormed and nobody got killed in the process. That’s always a plus.

 

Adios,

Rachel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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3 Comments

  1. Hi Rachel
    Just discussed your blog (3 guesses how that happened!!) whilst in the process of creating my own first ever blog.

    My daughter and I up in Massachusetts really enjoyed reading about your horse muster…. Amazing how different our lives here are, living on the coast in New
    England. Since I grew up on a sheep farm, I can really relate to this (though it was sheep that we rounded up on our farm for deworming etc). Not quite as lovely as horses…and we certainly didn’t have such cute ranch hands operating the drench guns !!
    Thanks for sharing this experience, and your beautiful photos. I look forward to reading more 🙂

  2. Loved, loved, loved this post!!!! 🙂 Very interesting (who said “everyday life” is boring to others?)! And it was a happy mixture of pictures and text – good job on the writing, Rachel. 🙂 😛

    ~Amanda

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