Equine podiatry - vets and farriers

I had a very short weekend. I had a workshop on Saturday dealing with equine podiatry. And I had 2 exams today, so I spent most of my spare time over the weekend studying. I still managed to visit my horses and pet and brush everyone. They are all doing great. All of our snow is gone now, and the pasture has dried out. Some of the first few blades of grass are trying hard to green up, but they don't last long when there are 5 horses wandering 3.5 acres (winter pasture) in search of spring nibbles. I'm hoping in a week or two, I can get the new fence up so that the horses can access the hay-field-now-turned-pasture. We decided that since we aren't getting good hay on our fields (they are old and need to be reseeded), we are turning them into pasture. It's actually better to buy hay - easier and not that expensive. We had some awesome horse hay this year - large square bales of grass/alfalfa mix. It didn't actually have that much alfalfa, just a smattering, but the horses prefer that hay over the stuff we baled. And we have only gone through half of the hay that we got so far, and the horses are in fat/sassy condition! I'm excited that the amount we purchased will last us pretty much through the whole year! We only got 22 large square bales!

The equine podiatry lab I had this weekend was very interesting. It was sponsored by the AAEP (American Association of Equine Practioners). Its design was to improve communication between veterinarians and farriers in order to ensure that horses are getting the best care they can, and to make sure that the two equine fields are working with one another instead of against (as can sometimes happen in cases of misunderstanding). We had lectures about detailed hoof and lower limb anatomy by an equine foot surgeon, and then we had lectures about farrier basics (how to trim and shoe) by a farrier. I was most interested to hear the perspectives of what is proper trimming/shoeing by both farriers and vets, since my main interest is in barefoot trimming. I listened to the lectures with intense scrutiny, trying to figure out where their philosophies differed or agreed with mine. I was rather pleased to hear that most of what the farrier taught us, I agree with. He obviously didn't get into the controversy about shoeing versus leaving horses barefoot, or say anything about therapeutic shoeing. What I definitely agreed with were his descriptions of proper angles. He even said that not every horse needs shoes! He said horses need shoes when they are wearing their hoof faster than they grow it. My only point of disagreement was when he said that shoes help with concussion. One of the other student's asked him to clarify, since she couldn't understand how a metal shoe would prevent concussion, and he did actually sort of say that they only really help by supporting the hoof. So I felt like even the farrier knew that metal shoes don't cushion feet. He said that the carriage horses he trimmed wore metal shoes with rubber bottoms because they wore their feet so fast, but also needed cushion and traction.

I also learned why farriers carve out that bit of sole on the outside edge of the toes (the part that barefoot trimmers say never to touch). It seems that if the sole contacts the shoe there, it causes bruising because the sole is striking an unyeilding metal edge. I do wonder what that means for all those fancy new shoe designs that do allow some sole pressure - I still have more to learn. The only anti-natural hoof trimming words I heard spoken where by the hoof surgeon, who said he's not sure he buys the natural barefoot philosophy that all hooves need to be modeled after wild horses. His reasoning was that wild horses live on dry hard ground, where as our horses out here (in the midwest) live on moister, softer ground. What he must not understand is that the barefoot trimmers are learning that horse's feet ARE different in different terrains and we need to compensate for that as well. What I did learn is that the vets, farriers, and barefoot trimmers actually have the same ideals as to the perfect hoof shape. What I haven't discerned yet, is how each wants to deal with hoof problems. I really look forward to getting more insight on that. So far what I know suggests that vets and farriers like to micromanage foot issues and possible resort to surgery (cutting nerves and tendons) and specialized shoes, when a barefoot trimmer would rather try trimming as the treatment and see how it helps. Maybe it's just me, but I like the least invasive philosophy. Of course, I don't know how to do the highly specialized treatments, where as I think I could figure out how to trim some of these feet, so maybe I'm biased based on my knowledge level. By no means do I think that ALL shoeing is bad though. I do think that there are some cases where a stabilizing shoe might be necessary. I wish there was a good study out there that compared different methods of treating laminitis, founder, and navicular disease (seem to be the most common hoof ailments) with the different philosophies. It'd be a great study!

The afternoon part of the workshop was devoted to teaching us the proper way to remove a shoe, trim a foot for shoeing, and then to put the shoe back on. We used horse cadaver feet from horses whose bodies where donated for research after euthanasia for various ailments (BIG THANKS TO THOSE WHO DONATE ANIMALS TO HELP THE NEXT GENERATION LEARN!) I trimmed a rear hoof and we figured out that the person next to me was trimming a corresponding front hoof to the horse I trimmed (the growth rings corresponded and same color hair). My foot was very overgrown and flared on the outside edge. I say very overgrown compared to my horses, but it wasn't like he'd been completely neglected. I'd say his rear hoof was about like Griffin's rear hoof before his very first trim - long and flared to the outside. This horse's front hoof showed that he must have had some chronic hoof condition - it looked like laminitis and coffin bone rotation to me. The front hoof had a very flat sole and a dished toe shape. The leg had also been clipped, probably for ultrasound evaluation of tendons, so the horse must have been lame on that foot. The rear foot that I had did not show the laminitic conditions of the front hoof. I trimmed my back hoof,and discovered that the three farriers that were there to help us each independently had something different to say about what I needed to do to the hoof I was working on. The last farrier, which is also the farrier at our teaching hospital, gave me the most detailed and best advice about what more to do on my hoof to make it right. I learned that I really respect our school farrier. So, I trimmed my hoof, and put a shoe on (it is hard to get the bottom of the hoof completely flat to fit the shoe properly!). I couldn't get the first three nails to come out of the hoof wall, but then I sort of figured it out. I was glad I wasn't practicing on a live horse! Then I took the shoe back off, and trimmed the hoof how I would do it if it was one of my horses and I was doing a barefoot trim. After I was done, he had no flare and a beautiful hoof shape! Before that, he still had some flare because I was instructed not to take that part of the hoof wall off, otherwise he'd have nothing to nail a shoe to. I did not show the farriers what I did though, because I didn't want to disrespect them. There were some other students that I talked to who also have done barefoot trimming, and one of them was finishing his hooves with a barefoot trim too! We also dug into the sole to look for abscesses and to examine just how far in the corium (lamina) was. My poor horse's front feet had very little sole at the toe area - then we immediately saw the corium. He didn't have any abcesses though. Many of the feet that others were trimming had severe bruising in the soles. It really makes me wonder about their histories. I also wonder about the reason they were euthanized and wonder if there was some alternative method that could have "fixed" them, or it perhaps the reason they were euthanized was simply due to cost and time the treatment takes. Of course, for some, their problems may have had nothing to due with their feet.

And since I trim my own horses, I already had an idea of how hard farriers work! Other students professed a newfound respect for their farriers and said they never want to trim their own horses! I personally find trimming my horses to be a very intimate activity. I feel it makes our relationship closer.

Spring break is over

Well, that was a fast spring break. I was back in classes today.

I did not get any pictures over break because it was so wet, foggy, and muddy. Over the course of the week, ALL of the snow disappeared! That made for a lot of mud!

Kachina was still safe in her pen when I arrived home last weekend. I wanted to trim her, and then turn her out with the others. Then all 5 of my horses would be together! Griffin was doing great with the herd and even let me catch and scratch on him, after he hadn't seen me in a week and a half!

Well, we started out on Kachina, but she was so irritable from being penned up, that it took 3 days to trim her! If I was faster, I could have gotten it done much sooner, but she has a very short time where she's good and patient. After about 10 minutes, she becomes very uncooperative. I'm slow and meticulous, so it takes me longer than 10 minutes. And once she'd reached that irritated point, there was almost nothing I could do except leave her be. Even my fancy rope trick around the leg had minor success. It takes forever to trim a horse that either won't stand still, or keeps taking their foot away from you when you just get situated to trim. And I even had my friend holding her head to keep her still. Well, I did finally get all 4 done. Then we led her out into the pasture and turned her loose. Once loose, she completely let loose! She was galloping, bucking, rearing, doing rollbacks, just being plain silly! We thought for sure she was going to fall because the remaining snow was slushy and icy. But she didn't. And she tried to get Griffin to play with her, but he was not really interested. I was surprised. She was so light on her feet and playful. She made Griffin look like a big clumsy oaf. When she reared up and struck out at his head, he just ducked out of the way and halfheartedly evaded her. She pranced and floated over the ground. Hours later, she was still running and playing. No wonder she was so terrible for me to trim. She had way too much energy. She is a very elegant little horse. I need to find some use to put her tiny flighty frame to! She'd make a very attractive little cart horse (she has the cutest trot), but I worry that she might be too flighty for that profession too.

Griffin and Chico are pretty good friends. They'll stand forever and play gelding games (particularily bitey-face).

The mares, well, they'd rather the newcomers just leave them be. They don't play. They just enforce the order.

We also did manage to trim 1 other horse after we finished Kachina. I did 1 front and 1 back to demonstrate on Chico, and my friend did the other 2.

And my super sweet boy sharpened all my hoof knives and nippers for me. :)

I'm on spring break!!!!!

Ah! It has been a rough couple of weeks. We've had about 3 exams per week for the last 4 weeks, but now, I'm on vacation! I'm not going to think about school at all this week! Today, I am picking up a friend visiting from far far away, and we are going to spend all week playing with horses! She wants to learn to trim her own horses, so I'm going to show her what I know and let her try her hand at it. I've got 4 horses that need to be trimmed right now, so we have plenty of feet to practice on! AND I get to show her around my home grounds. I just wish the weather was going to be nicer. This is the icky transition time right now. Our nice clean snow is steadily disappearing with the 40 degree weather, and mud and horse manure that piled up over the winter is slowly appearing. And it's supposed to rain this week. Ugh! After a few weeks of sunshine, I'm mad that it will be raining over most of my spring break! I'll probably post some hoof trimming pictures. Wish us luck! I have to trim Kachina too. Griffin is the only one of my horses that is good to go.

Over this last weekend, I participated in a bovine hoof trimming workshop. There are actual hoof trimmers for cows out there! They obviously focus primarily on dairy cattle. Boy, beef cattle would be a handful to try to trim. It was amazing to see the differences between how to trim cows and horses, both in the mechanisms in trimming and in restraint. Obviously, cows are not trained to willingly pick up feet for you and stand nicely so you can trim their feet. They have these specially designed chutes that you load the cow through, her head goes into a head lock, the rear door closes, and then you raise two sling-like straps that she walked over when she came in. These straps go around her thorax and belly and hold her up. Then you attach webbed straps to each leg, around the cannon bone, and two at a time (one back hoof and one front hoof) you raise the leg into working position. And the way the leg is restrained is intesting. You basically crank it up again a bar that holds it perfectly immobile. The rear leg is pulled back, much like like how we do horses, and the front leg is lifted up and to the side a bit (also just like with a horse). Then the trimmers (usually a team of two, from what our instructors were saying) go to town trimming!

Cows hooves need to be at an optimum sloped angle of about 52 degrees (compared to about 45-55 for front and rear on horses). Cows get all the same problems horses do too, especially with their super high concentrate diets that their bodies are not designed to handle. Did you know that ruminants in general (including cows), were actually designed to handle poorer quality forage than horses need? It's because a cow can get most of her protein from the microbes in her rumen (and those microbes can use plant parts that the animals cannot utilized and turn it into protein). Horses, on the other hand, have to get all their protein from their diet. They cannot use the protein in their "fermentation vat" because it is in the hindgut, and all the proteins are absorbed from the digestive tract before then. Proteins cannot be absorbed in large amounts in the colon. In cows, the fermentation vat is the first compartment, so everything that comes out of it can be used by the cow. It's amazing to think about that. I know I thought before that all these high sugar grasses developed for cattle were because they need that and horses don't, but in reality, it's not true. The only reason that we feed cattle such high concentrate diets is to force more milk and meat out of them. And doing that puts cattle always on a metabolic cliff, so to speak. They are so close to being beyond what they can handle metabolically...and we do often see cattle that have problems due to their diet. Anyway, I thought that bit of knowledge I've gained so far in vet school was fascinating. Back to hoof trimming.

So, because of how we manage cattle (feed high concentrate diets, live in manure and muck, standing in it most of the day, in the case of dairy cattle - often living on concrete, which is very hard on their hooves due to lack of cushion, plus we make them carry these huge milk bags between their hind legs), many cattle develop abcesses in their hooves due to irritation of the corium between the pedal bone (coffin bone), and the hoof wall. They also develop hairy warts between their digits, dermatitis, and laminitis, all which can cause them to become lame. A lame dairy cow produces less milk due to the discomfort, so most dairies these days trim. Trimming has helped prevent lameness, as has the installation of water baths containing hoof treatments that the cows much walk through when they are finished milking.

It's hard to describe the difference between the mechanisms of trimming horses and cows. Their hoof shapes are obvously very different and cows have two claws, instead of one on each foot. But other than that, the basics are the same. Cows have a rear cushion area (like a horse's frog), and the front hard digging area with a sole. The sole, hoofwall, and corium are the same as in a horse, but just a different shape due to the shape of the bone underneath. Think of a cow's "coffin" bone as being 1/2 of a horse's...and so two halves make a whole! The "frog" on a cow is not grooved like a horse's. In fact, the whole bottom of the hoof is pretty flat, and the junction between the cushion and the sole is very blended, almost indistinguishable. Pastured cattle will develop a concave sole (concave toward the midline of the hoof, so that with the two toes together, there is a round concave portion in the middle between them such that the outside of each toe contains the hoof wall and bears the weight). Cattle that are kept in free stall barns where the floor contains a lot of areas with concrete, and their feet remain wet from tracking through manure, often have softer soles and hoof walls, so their feet wear more and wear so that they are flat. Because they lack concavity on the inner surface of each hoof, abcesses form easily because the back of the pedal bone is not cushioned. This can also happen in cattle with overgrown hooves.

Trimming a cow involves trimming the toe to the correct length (I think that length was 3.5 inches), scultping the sole to get the desired toe angle (in a long hoof, this involves trimming away the excess sole at the toe, being sure to leave enough for cushion), then scooping out the inner toe area to create the concavity to allow cushioning of the rear part of the pedal bone. Now, here is where it is different from trimming a horse. On the cows there is a weight bearing "sound" toe (which in 95% of the time, this is always true - in the hind limbs, the "sound" toe is the inner toe, in the forelimbs, it is the outer toe). 95% of the abscesses always occur in the "unsound" toe, due to unaccustomed percussion of the bone. So, the hoof shape is trimmed to the "sound" toe, and then the "unsound" toe is trimmed more aggressively, and in most cases you really trim the heel down so that it is shorter on the unsound toe. On the "sound" toe, you don't touch the heel at all because the cow needs that to walk on. Also, on the unsound toe, you really model the concavity on the inner toe. As you do that, you often uncover abcesses that haven't surfaced yet. Modeling like that will relieve the pressure inside the hoof, and shortening the heel will "rest" that toe to give it a chance to heal. In really bad abscesses, they will actually put a 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch wooden block on the "sound" toe to prevent the unsound toe from bearing any weight to give it a chance to heal. And that apparently doesn't hurt the sound toe at all, to be bearing all the weight itself. Crazy. The workshop was so interesting.

So, the first day, we had lectures in the morning, then trimmed cadaver feet to practice. Then the next day, we went out to a dairy barn and ran live cows through chutes and trimmed them up! As vets, it will be very important for us to recognize causes of lameness that might be due to lack of trimming (or bad trimming).

Another interesting thing I learned - a cow's back should be perfectly flat and horizontal with the ground. If you see a cow with a hunched back when she is standing or walking, she is lame, even if she doesn't overtly appear to limp. We trimmed a poor cow with a huge abscess coming out the top of her hoof that was due to an overgrown wart that was invading her hoof. She was so lame and was trying so hard not to put weight on that back hoof, but that is really hard to do when you have that huge milk bag hanging between your legs. She got a block on the healthier toe - the wort was invading the "unsound" toe.

Sorry for the long winded discussion on cows, but I'm learning a lot!

Griffin made it through the first night free

Later on the same day that I released him, I went back to check on Griffin, only to find that he had his first tying lession without me! I worried about that, since he was in the trees so much chewing on them. It looks like his rope got caught, he must have fought a bit to free himself because the rope was wrapped around the bunch of short stems a few times, and he had mud down one side as though he had fallen. When I got there, he was standing still, just hanging out, waiting. I walked right up to him, untangled his rope from the stems, and then took his rope off. Looks like he had himself a good lesson though and learned something about tying.



The next morning after the release, he was doing so well with the mares (they were tolerating him really well) so I decided to turn Chico loose, with a drag rope to slow him down a bit if he got too aggressive with Griffin. The previous picture is their first sniffing.



I shouldn't have worried. Chico is the least aggressive to him so far out of all the horses! He still herded him with his ears back, but no trying to chase him out of the country. Someone in my past had me convinced that Chico was just plain mean to other horses, but it certainly is not true. I should have more faith in him.



But of course, the second that one starts moving Griffin, they'll all perk up and follow along to help. Horses are funny. In the following picture, I caught the action just a couple seconds too late. Chico was going to herd Griffin away, but then lost interest and was turning around to go eat hay. You can see that Cody and Catlow are right behind him to help though.



I'm still going to keep Kachina in for a week. Her and Griffin are so buddy-buddy. I want him to get a chance to build a relationship with the herd, and me, before I turn his best friend out with him. He's been great today about letting me approach and catch him in the pasture too.

Success!

Turning Griffin loose was exciting, but also successful! I know it seems like I'm lazy, but facebook is so much easier to load pictures into. So I'm just going to include the link here. Under each picture, I have captions telling the story of how the big event went. I'll just say, no one went through the fence. That's a good thing!

Check out the story!

Below are just a couple pictures from the album to whet your appetite!

Big day tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day!

I'm going to turn Griffin loose with the herd. Please wish me luck!

For some bonding time, I hung out with him this evening and gave him a good currying. He really has warmed up to me. He still gets antsy when I am near his butt. He'll stand still while I'm brushing, but the second that I stop to clean out the brush, he has to back up and swing his butt away so that I'm at his head. That's where he feels most comfortable. Then he can sniff the curry comb while I clean it out.


His chest is especially itchy. He loves when I scratch there. He also has the most interesting whorl on his chest. I think this is called a "wheat ear". Some people think that whorls in certain places or of certain patterns mean something about the horse...I'm not sure, but I do think it's true that a horse with many many wierd whorls might have some mental developmental difficulties.


LOOK! Proof that spring really IS coming! Griffin is really shedding out! I had a cloud of hair swirling around me as I brushed him tonight.


Then I went over to brush Kachina and try to get some photos of her bites. They don't show up so well in pictures. But basically, each one of these scuffed hair marks is a little bare patch. The worst are right behind her jaw.


These pictures do not do these bites justice. They are huge! But they are also buried in hair.

Big news

Okay, here goes. I didn't want to tell anyone before because things were too early yet, but I just had my first doctor visit and ultrasound and things are going on schedule.

I'm pregnant!

Yes, I'm pregnant, in vet school, about to get married, and I have 5 horses. Life has been quite crazy lately! This is my first baby. Once Todd and I decided we were getting married, we realized we didn't want to wait to have kids. I'm 32 and he is 45. We aren't getting any younger. Vet school can wait a year if it has to, but my body is not getting any younger!

I'm 10 and a half weeks along, which means I'm due September 10th. That is a few weeks after the fall semester starts for my 2nd year of vet school. If everything goes as planned, I'm going to take that year off school, and return as a 2nd year student the following year.

If we had to wait until I was done with school, I'd be pushing 38 by the time I have my first kid! I didn't want to wait that long. Fertility declines and other health problems become more likely then.

I had my first ultrasound this morning. It really made the whole pregnancy so real! Before, I felt like I was getting fat, felt sick all the time, and I was tired, and cranky. No real proof that I'm pregnant (aside from those positive tests and all). But watching the baby in real time on the screen, moving and kicking his/her legs and arms...just plain being so ACTIVE, it has brought a new light to the whole pregnancy. Suddenly, feeling sick doesn't seem so bad, and I'm actually excited again! Being sick and tired, sort of makes it easy to lose excitement.

These are pictures from today :)




And now, maybe you can understand my concern about having 5 horses, two of which need a lot of work...they should both be getting to the riding point this summer. I am planning to work with them on the ground as long as I am able to. I will get them as far as I can. But I can't ride them. Not this year. Maybe next summer...but Kachina will be 5 then, and Griffin will be 4. I know that's not too long to wait, but I feel like the more they are exposed to when they are young, the more solid they will be. What to do? I'll take it one day at a time.

Colorfest in Oregon

Oh, how I wish I could go! And oh, how I wish I had room and time for more horses! Can I just quit vet school and gentle mustangs for the rest of my life?

Trimming Griffin

This past weekend, I was going contemplating attempting to turn Griffin loose in the pasture, even though I think he probably won't let me catch him when he's loose. I was just going to do it with a drag rope, start by leading him around the pasture, and then play it by ear. I'm pretty sure I could get him recaptured easily with grain so I was only really worried about if he'd respect the fence. And I would have all the other horses tied/penned while I took him out.

Well, I didn't get around to it, because I decided that he really needed a hoof trim before I turned him loose. I haven't been keeping myself in very good shape since summer ended, because I sit at a desk all day. I try to go for walks, but it's been COLD. And I only get to do horse stuff and outside work on weekends. So, I'm pretty out of shape. So, trimming Griffin's hooves was quite the feat! I had hardly any strength to squeeze the nippers, plus he's got really hard thick toe walls! I only managed to do the first 3 hooves on Saturday because I had to be someplace and ran out of time. He was pretty good about those three hooves though. But then, Sunday rolled around and I attempted to do the last hoof. He wasn't having any of it. I'm not sure why he was so bad about that hoof. Maybe it was the fact that I went right to the back and I usually start with the fronts? Regardless, he became more and more uncomfortable with me back there, till he got to the point where I could get him to stand still, but as soon as I held his foot off the ground, he'd panic and little and take it away, then squirt away from me and circle as I tried to walk at his hip to get him to stop. Before he got really bad, I had actually nipped one edge, so he had one heel trimmed and the other not. I couldn't leave him like that! But it was beginning to look like I wasn't going to convince him to cooperate. He wasn't just being naughty either. He never pinned his ears or kicked at me or anything, he just was nervous about me back at his hind end (he always has been), and had worked himself up to where it felt better to step away from me, than to relax and let me have his foot.

So, at this point, I realized I needed to somehow turn the situation into the other way around. I wanted him relaxed when I held his foot, and uncomfortable if he circled around me. So, I got another rope and looped it around his hind leg. Then I preceeded to ask him to stand and let me pick up his foot. Everytime he got worried and took his foot back and started circling, I just stayed right with him and pulled on that rope around his foot. He really didn't like fighting to keep his balance with that rope on his foot. As soon as he stopped and relaxed, I took away all tension on the rope. We did this several times until he stopped circling at all. He still was taking his foot back, but he was rapidly getting less and less inclined to commit to completely evading me. So, the time he actually let me hold it up, pull it back and wipe on it, I just gave it back to him and called it a day. I wanted him to sit and think about how that had just ended.

I came back a half a day later to see if I could finish his hoof. I looped the rope around his hoof again, and this time, he didn't circle away from me at all! Having that rope was a good reminder for him. I was able to get him to stand relaxed and allow me to finish trimming the rest of his hoof. Trimmed and filed. He was perfect, like he used to be. I owe it all to that rope around his leg! I like little tricks that change a horse's mind.

After that, I removed all the other horses from the pasture (except Kachina, I figured she could stay in), and then took Griffin for a walk around the fenceline. Kachina followed us like a puppy dog most of the way. The rest of the time, she was tearing around and playing. Griffin was quite the gentlemen throughout the whole time. He really respects the halter and leadrope and I just have to pull a little to get his attention was Kachina was telling him that she really wanted to go run off with him.

So, I decided that when I do get to the point of letting Griffin out, I'm going to pen Kachina back up. I think that she will be a bad influence on him and get him running around a lot. I'd like his intro to the herd to be calm. After a week or two of just Griffin with the herd, I'll turn Kachina back loose with them.

I really hope adding a second gelding into the mix with a gelding and three mares doesn't create friction. Chico has already shown that he will defend his mares against strange geldings. I just hope that Griffin is not considered a strange gelding anymore.

A funny side note: Well, sorta funny. Kachina is the bottom of the pecking order, but she's not necessarily resigned to being lowly and depressed. She doesn't necessarily outright challenge the others with the expect that she'll move up, but she is NOT intimidated by them, and she'll let them know it! She still will get out of their way when they tell her to, but then there are times when she will "play" with them. She mostly plays with Chico, and that's probably because the two mares are just grouchy and interested in making Kachina mind. Chico will play back. It is a regular event to see them rearing and playing. Kachina really gets into it. She's lighter than chubby Chico, so she'll readily get up on her hind legs and paw at him.

And one day this weekend, I was walking through their pasture and the horses were standing on one of their trails through the snow watching me. Cody was closest, then Chico, then Kachina. They don't like to walk off the trails because then they sink in the snow. I called them as I started walking away, and they began to follow me. But Kachina was not happy that she had to be in the back...she wanted to get close to me and Cody and Chico were being way too slow, so she took a lesser traveled trail along the bottom of the hill to bypass the slow pokes. When she got alongside Cody (about 25 feet away), Cody flipped her nose out at her (back off! I'm the leader!), and Kachina immediately flipped her nose back at Cody (yeah? Well, you're slow and fat!)and kept walking. Cody was not about to accept that kind of disrepect, so she flipped her nose at Kachina again, then pinned her ears, and went after her. The whole herd then disappeared up over the hill. It was hilarious to see that subtle communication among them!

But, Kachina has some major bite marks and bare patches because of her insolence. The poor girl has thin skin and it abrades easily, but that doesn't stop her from fighting back. Most of her bare patches are on her upper neck, and I'm pretty sure she got those while she was fighting/playing. Because when the mares get after her, they usually end up biting her butt. Her butt only has a few marks on it.

Pasture dynamics

I took all these pictures last weekend, but I chose to post about poor neglected Griffin instead. Now I've got a dap of time, so I'll post these pics. These pictures are a great illustration of the dynamics in the pasture.


I had been out for a walk in the woods, and so entered the pasture from a different side than usual. I came up over the hill and spotted the horses grazing on their hay and milling about.


Then they spotted me. Catlow is on the left, Chico in the middle, and Kachina on the right. Cody is farther to the left out of the frame of the picture.


Kachina immediately comes over to see what I'm doing and to get a little attention.


She comes up really close and I pet her, then back off to get a picture of her cute face. She looks at me curiously because I don't often have a camera along.


The other three are curious why Kachina came over to see me so fast, so they mosy over and spy through the trees. I bent down to look at the salt block half buried in the snow, and was picking at it with a stick. Meanwhile Kachina stands over me.


They are very curious about what I'm doing, so they all follow the leader up the hill.


I back up to get a good picture of them all together.


I love this picture because of how symmetrical it is! Two dark horses licking the salt block in the center, and two blaze faces watching me on the outside!


Kachina is often gazing into the distance, like a true wild horse, listening for...other horses, predators, the wind...


But she snaps out of it quickly and comes to see me again. This picture is hilarious to me, because I have one almost just like it from the BLM. It was one of her adoption photos. I don't have that photo on my computer right now (it's stashed away at home on a harddrive and right now I'm at school), but you can see a similar one from their adoption photos here. I think she's more filled out now and looks happier for sure.


She comes right up close...


So I run backwards again so I can get something other than her nose in a picture. My momentary run backwards, stops her in her tracks for a second (isn't her shadow cool?)...


But then she comes right after me again.


Well, Kachina is now too close, so I take some pictures of the others. All the horses are a little roly poly right now, but we've had some pretty cold days so I think that is good. This is definitely not all fluff on Chico!


It is still kinda chilly today (high of 15 degrees!), but it is sunny without much breeze, so in the sun it feels nice and warm. Catlow soaks up the sun and takes a little snoozer.


Cody is looking nice and rotund as well. She now has left her salt block and wants to see what I'm up to. She comes up behind Kachina. Kachina yields to her without any fight at all. Cody doesn't feel the need to be mean to Kachina now.


Kachina has moved off around me and now stands in the brush, looking back at me rather dejectedly.


It this point, I decide to leave the 4 on the hill and go work with Griffin.


Kachina is fitting in very nicely. She's definitely at the bottom, though. When I was up there spending time with them, I didn't see a single horse pin their ears at her or make to chase her. I'm sure by the end of this summer, the whole herd will be one collective unit that will actually whinny after any horse that I take out. Right now, Cody, Chico, and Catlow are all so dependent on one another that if I take one out, all the other fret about that horse until they are returned. They are quite pathetic about it. The horse that I have out is generally fine being with me, maybe a little barn sour, but I can take them off and do stuff and they don't call back for the others, meanwhile the others are pacing the fenceline, looking for the lost horse, whinnying pathetically. Even when I take Catlow out, Cody gets all upset. I find that funny, because before Kachina, Catlow was the bottom and the outsider. Cody and Chico have this very tight pair bond and seem to really exclude Catlow. But, if you take Catlow away, the herd is just not complete, so lead mare, Cody, frets about her being gone. Horses are funny critters.