Not My Horse.com Blog

Horse people definitely keep secrets from the people they love.   

I know a woman who took on 17 rescue horses at one time and never told her husband.  She stashed the horses at different places around town and brought them home one or two at a time to fatten up and put a little training on them before sending the horses on to new homes.  Her husband, who didn’t pay much attention to what was going on back by the barn, never knew.   

He would have thrown a fit if he had known he was paying to feed 17 extra horses.  So she just didn’t tell him. 

Here’s another story:  A friend with several horses had a dream about a paint horse.  The same horse appeared in her dreams several more times.  Imagine her shock when she was surfing the net one day and saw a horse for sale that looked exactly like the horse in her dreams—except the markings on the side weren’t exactly the same.  So she emailed the owner and asked for a photo of the other side.  When it arrived, the markings were the same as on her dream horse! 

She believed it was her destiny to own the horse and secretly purchased the paint without her husband knowing—since he was already grumbling about the other three equines she was taking care of.  For over a year she kept her new horse a secret, paying for board and training by selling kids clothes on ebay—every time she need money for the paint somehow it came to her, which reinforced her belief that she was doing the right thing.   

Her husband only found out about the horse by accident—someone phoned with a question that didn’t make sense and that tipped him off.  He barely spoke to his wife for months, but the marriage survived.      

Women will do sneaky things to accumulate the funds to attend training clinics.  They’ve told me about siphoning off grocery money for months so the cost of the clinic wouldn’t show up in the checkbook or on a credit card bill. 

They buy tack on ebay and tell their husband that they got a good deal on a crockpot. 

Since most horse people are women, it’s mostly men who are being deceived.  A woman, who wouldn’t even think of going out for a drink with another man without checking with her husband first, will lie to him about the cost of the stack of hay in the barn. 

An otherwise faithful wife will sneak behind her husband’s back to take her horse to the chiropractor.  “My husband complains about the farrier bill.  He’d go ballistic if I told him what I paid the chiropractor,” one woman confessed. “He just doesn’t understand.” 

I get that.  I don’t understand either when my husband insists one of his horses needs $100 in herbs to cure whatever.  If I spent $100 on herbs for myself, I’d probably hear about it, but if he spends $100 on herbs for his horse that’s another matter entirely.When a non-horse person and a horse person share lives, deception seems almost inevitable.  Whether little white lies or major secrets, the horse person doesn’t always want to tell the whole truth because she believes the other person won’t understand or will get angry.  And as a non-horse person I have to say that she’s probably right. 

I really don’t like to be lied to, but I have to confess I can be as nasty as the best of them when my horseperson tells me he just spent a bunch of money I think is a total waste.   

It’s a sad situation. 

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Desi is back from his medical appointment at the vet school.  Naturally the diagnosis couldn’t be anything easy. 

Instead of “He’s not going to get better so it’s probably best to put him down.”Or “Do this and he’ll be okay in six months,” the diagnosis is “60% chance of recovery, but this could be chronic and even after he’s fixed it could happen again.” 

So now we’re looking at 30 days of stall rest with a 10 minute-hand walk per day.  Then Desi can go into a 30×30 pen for four months, maybe six, with up to 45 minutes of walking and jogging toward the end.  And if that doesn’t work, it’s time to consider an expensive operation…which has an 80% chance of success. 

But even if the operation fixes the problem, there’s no guarantee the fix will stick.  The vet warns the ligament may well start detaching again when Desi goes back to running around. 

I read the comment on the last post from the person who said she got bad vet advice.  At least Desi’s doctor is an experienced professor at the vet school, with a whole trail of students following along behind him, asking questions and giving answers.  That gives me hope that at least the diagnosis is correct.  I just wish the prognosis was better. 

I’m trying to stay positive, but I keep thinking “all this money and effort and it may not even work…and it’s just a horse.” 

For now, I’ve got to go out and help my husband shovel a horse trailer and pick-up load of sawdust out onto a pile for bedding for Desi’s new quarters.  Hope I get more sleep tonight than I did last night.  Desi, stuck in his new little pen, hollered for Little Mary every time she left his sight.  My husband slept through a lot of the rukus.  Not me.

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My husband has two horses; one of them is limping.  The limp has been getting better and worse for months.

To try to fix Desi, Marc has taken a series of seminars on equine positional release, which is some kind of physical therapy, as near as I can figure out.  He and the horse shoer have spent countless hours on his feet, trying various shoes, non-shoes, trims and boots.He’s had Desi to the horse chiropractor, and has had the massage therapist come to him. Nothing seems to work. 

Last week he took Desi back to Dan, the vet, who suggested taking him to the vet school at Washington State University in Pullman.  They are the closest people who have an x-ray big enough to get a good look at a horse’s back and hips. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t like to see any animal hurting, and I don’t begrudge Marc and Desi all that it has cost so far.  But I’m wondering how much a series of horse x-rays cost.  I don’t even want to think about what the bill is going to be if surgery is required. 

One of the worst parts of being a non-horse person married to a horse person is watching cash flow out to cover horse expenses.  Up to a point I don’t mind.  Everybody is allowed to have a hobby, right?  But am I totally heartless for resenting the $4500 spent for a fifth saddle, which he never uses?  He was going to sell one of the others before buying it, but a “super good deal” came up, so he bought it right away, and never sold the other one. 

Maybe the saddle is an extreme example, but other non-horse people gripe about expensive supplements, fancy blankets, $700 show shirts, etc. so I don’t think I’m alone on this.  When the hobby is a horse, a living breathing creature with all the emotions attached to owning it, things can get complicated.  I view a horse as a big expensive animal that hurts people.  My husband thinks of a horse as a companion, a willing partner who reads his thoughts, understands his emotions, and provides hours of fun and relaxation. 

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WARNING!  This entry may offend horse lovers since it talks about eating horse meat.  If you decide to comment, please remember your manners.  All personal insults will be deleted. 

The other day I got to wondering why some people eat horse meat and think it is delicious, while other people gag at the mere thought. 

It came up when a horse person mentioned she had once eaten horse meat (she was in a foreign country and did not want to offend her host.)  I asked what it tasted like, and she whispered back, “Actually it was quite good.” 

Horse meat is flavorful, tender, low in fat and high in protein, and is part of the cuisine of many countries.  But in other nations and cultures, eating horse meat is illegal or strongly taboo.  

I decided to do a little research to find out why. 

Turns out religion played a part in early prohibitions against eating horse meat.  Jewish dietary laws have always forbidden horse flesh because it comes from an animal without cloven hooves.  Some anthropologists suggest this ancient taboo relates to the fact that horses are the least efficient of domesticated animals at turning grass into meat. Since these ancient peoples were mostly nomadic, they needed to get the most meat out of the least amount of grass consumed.  Survival depended upon it. 

In the 8^th century, Pope Gregory instructed Saint Boniface, a missionary to
Germany, to prohibit the eating of horse flesh among those he converted, due to its association with Germanic pagan ceremonies. Nearly 1,300 years later, some Roman Catholics still observe this ban, though not Italians–who produce and export more horse meat than any other country in the world. 

Early Muslim religious leaders discouraged eating horse meat for a different reason—they wanted as many horses as possible available for military and other uses.  With the decline in need for horses in war, some clerics now consider its consumption acceptable. In central Asia’s Muslim countries with a nomadic tradition, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, horse meat has always been eaten without question. 

Eating horse meat has generally seemed to be more acceptable during war or famine.  For example, most Americans would never consider eating horse meat. But during the Second World War, when beef was expensive and in low supply, many housewives were happy to obtain it to feed to their families. 

Ask your grandmother is she knows someone who ate horsemeat during the war.  I questioned my aunt and she said, “Sure and I was glad to get it.  I grew up in South Dakota during the depression and all we had to eat, sometimes for days in a row, was pancakes.  I didn’t want my kids to have to go through that. 

They had rationing back then and meat was hard to get.  Some women were squeamish about cooking horse meat, but not me.  I didn’t know how to cook it, so I went across the street to a Polish woman and got some recipes from her.  Believe me, it was a lot better than nothing but pancakes!” 

Americans’ preference for Angus over Appaloosa certainly has a sentimental element.  We have always considered the horse a companion animal—like a cat or dog.  Cultural icons such as Black Beauty, Flicka and My Little Pony make the idea of eating a horse even more abhorrent. 

Then there are the romantic notions surrounding the American cowboy.  Can you imagine eating a Trigger burger? 

But Europeans, with several millennium of practical agrarianism behind them, have less prejudice against the meat.  The issue at the moment seems to be mostly sociological.  Horse meat currently holds the stigma of being something that poor people eat, and is regarded as a cheap substitute for more expensive beef and pork.  Still, there are certain favorite dishes in every European cuisine that contain horse meat. 

I’ve never knowingly eaten meat from a horse, though who knows what was in some of those concoctions I’ve been served in third-world countries.  I also don’t eat lamb.  I was taught by my father that lamb is “nasty.”  He hated it—probably because he had to eat so much tough bad-tasting mutton during the depression.  To this day, when I smell lamb cooking, my brain tells me, “No, I don’t think so!” 

Isn’t it interesting how our tastes in food, including horse meat, are influenced by our culture, our religion and our parents?

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“Last year, a haystack was just plain horse food.  This year, it could be pure gold.” 

That’s the first sentence in an article written by Mike Irwin in the May, 2008 issue of North Country Rider, published in Wenatchee, Washington.  Hundred of thousands of tons of hay are grown in eastern Washington, and if the cost of hay is going up for horse owners there, I can’t imagine what’s in store for the rest of the country. 

Experts are predicting that by mid-summer hay prices across the nation will skyrocket, the result of high demand, low supply, expensive fuel, and a horse population that many believe is growing out of control.  Whatever you paid in 2007, double that figure, add a little more, and that’s what you may be facing in 2008. 

Part of the problem is that harvested hay acreage is dropping nationwide.  Farmers are abandoning hay to plant wheat and corn, two crops with higher commodity prices.  Another factor is drought in the southeast part of the nation, where many of the big horse and cattle farms are located.  Lack of rain has reduced hay production by as much as fifty percent, forcing livestock owners to look elsewhere for feed and forage.  Can you blame hay growers for happily selling their crop to the highest bidder? 

And then there’s the cost of trucking.  Diesel is currently up over $5 a gallon, which adds to the price of every bale transported from the field to your barn. 

It hasn’t helped that the do-gooders won their fight to get slaughter houses shut down in the US.  Until a year or two ago, most unwanted old, lame, broken down, badly-bred horses were sent to the canner to be turned into a number of useful products.  Now thousands of horses are slowly starving to death in the back lots of people who can barely afford to feed them. With no other option, horse owners are forced to keep horses they would have otherwise disposed of, causing the price of hay to increase as demand exceeds supply. 

So what does all that mean for us, the non-horse people watching our fun tickets being munched down by an animal we may have slight interest in?  I wish I had a good answer.  My husband loves his horses and they give him lots of pleasure.  What makes him happy is supposed to make me happy.  And usually it does. But I can’t help feel frustrated when I see so much going out to feed the critters, while I cut back at the grocery store to feed us. 

I’ve heard that some folks are going together to form co-ops to buy hay in large quantities—say 500 tons at a time.  Supposedly, in such large lots suppliers give a hefty discount.  I’d say it’s worth looking into—maybe there’s a group near you that your horse person can join up with. 

Horse owners tell me they are starting to replace up to 50% of hay with beet pulp.  The pulp needs to be soaked for 8 hours ahead of time so the horse doesn’t choke on it—creating more work for the busy horse person.  And who knows what going to happen to the price of beet pulp by the end of summer!  

Cottonseed hulls can be successfully substituted for up to 20% of hay, according to scientists at the University of Georgia Horse Center.  The hulls certainly can’t cost as much as hay, so they might be an option if you live close to where cotton grows. 

A third option is to feed pellets or cubes, so there is no waste.  Unfortunately, it appears horses require a certain “chew time” or “chew factor.” If the chew time is not met, behavioral problems can arise. The normal function of the digestive tract may also be comprised with less saliva production due to reduced chewing. An 1150 pound horse should consume 8.6 to 11.5 pounds of hay or equivalent per day. “Equivalent” is the key word, since a complete pelleted or cubed feed with high fiber content is not the same as a feed that has fiber present that has not been ground and/or pelleted.  Hay chopped to a stem length of less than one inch does not appear to provide the same fiber factor. 

So there you go.  You can suggest these options to your horse person and see what happens.  Don’t count on it making much difference though.  It looks like owning a horse just got a lot more expensive.

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I love lists.  Here is one I made up the other day of helpful hints to get more use from a horse around the house:

    * Avoid toxic weed killers.  Have your horse munch down all those pesky dandelions.

       *Never work in the yard again.  A horse is fully capable of mowing the lawn, trimming bushes and eliminating low hanging branches.

     *Make your horse take out the trash. (your beloved will be thrilled to train her horse to pull the cart)

     *The family goat needs a companion animal.  Get the horse to do it.

     *Keep your video camera handy.  So much crazy stuff happens around horses you will be able to get hilarious footage.  Submit it to America’s Funniest Home Videos and win $10,000.

     *You don’t have to get off the couch during a game.  Horses can easily be trained to open the refrigerator door and bring back your favorite brew.  With just a few more days of training, she’ll be able to get the chips, too. (Non-horse women married to horse lovers:  the same goes for Gray’s Anatomy—no getting up to find more chocolate.)

     *Don’t be misled by the rumors started by cat lovers.  Horses DO make excellent lap warmers. Give one to your mother-in-law.

      *Horses are very good at destroying things.  Take advantage of this trait by giving them all of your partner’s annoying cowboy music CDs…and that T-shirt with the horse head on it that came stuffed in the coffee mug with the matching horse head which somebody gave you with the mistaken notion that you also care about horses.

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I spent this week looking after my husband’s horses while he went on a business trip

Every time this happens, I get panicky. 

Desi and Little Mary are his pride and joy, and I always worry that somehow something’s going to go wrong and I’ll be responsible.  I know I should at least learn how to put on their halters, so if they get out I can bring them back.  But that seems a bit senseless, because if they get out I’m never going to be able to catch them anyway. 

Each time my beloved leaves home overnight, I do a mental check of the whereabouts of the neighbors who know about horses and can help me get them back inside the pasture if they escape.  The one time everybody was away, I didn’t breathe for three days. 

Then there’s the feeding schedule.  Throwing them hay isn’t too bad, except that I always end up with as much hay on me as gets into their bins.  It’s the supplements that get complicated.  Each horse has its own recipe of oats, seeds, powders, kibbles of various sorts, water, apple cider vinegar, and mysterious substances I’ve never identified.  I dump in the oats (different amount for each horse) powders and kibbles, add the liquids and seeds and stir the whole concoction until everything is the proper degree of wetness and head for the barn. 

As I come down the hill, I hear Little Mary’s gentle nicker and for an instant my heart warms.  She’s glad to see me! Then it becomes apparent that it’s the bucket that she’s glad to see. 

Little Mary always tries to keep Desi away from the food, so I have strict instructions on the proper order and location for hanging the buckets.  Then I’m supposed to put x number of flakes in each bin….whatever a flake is.  I’ve never figured out the exact dimensions of a flake, so I just throw in whatever seems right at the time. 

Water isn’t an issue in the summer because there is a pond in the pasture and a stream run through it, but winter can be a real nightmare.  We get a LOT of snow, which means sometimes I have to go out and break a trail to the water.  It wouldn’t be so bad, but the horses are always breathing down my neck and making me edgy.  I really don’t want to get knocked over into six feet of snow and trampled on.  Then comes breaking the ice and shoveling a spot out for them to stand while they’re drinking.  It’s exhausting. 

The thing I dread most though is when one of the horses needs doctoring while my husband is gone.  One time a horse had something wrong with its leg that required running water from a hose over its leg for 10 minutes twice a day.  The horse gained a lot of weight while my husband was away because twice a day I gave Rebel a huge bucket of oats, carrots and apples to keep him occupied while I hovered with the hose running, ready to sprint if anything went wrong.    

Another time I had to change the vet wrap every day—a terrifying task that I hated.

At a horse event recently, I overheard a non-horse guy talking to another non-horse guy about having to put some sort of fly goop around the eyes of his wife’s horse.  “I’m never going to let her go visit her sister during the summer again,” he vowed.  “Either that or she’s going to have to hire somebody to look after the horse while she’s gone.”

I understand completely. 

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This all started when I heard about a woman who intends to have her horse be part of her wedding because the horse is so much a part of her life.  Her plan is ride the horse while a friend leads it to the hay bales where the guests are sitting.  Then she will dismount and follow her dog, who will carry the rings, down the aisle.

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I can sympathize with the guy who commented a few blog entries ago that he couldn’t tell one of his wife’s horses from the other.

Both of my husband’s horses are brown with white socks on a couple of legs.  After 15 years I still can’t tell which is which, except when they’re facing me and I can see the white spots on their faces.

I regularly call them by the wrong names, which my husband takes as a personal insult.  “That’s “Desi” he says, like I don’t have a brain in my head.  How could I make such an ignorant mistake? 

It’s easy.  I get myself into trouble all the time with horse people.  We’ll be at an equine event and the woman next to me comments, “That Morgan certainly is small for the breed.”

“Yes,” I reply, “but the spots are pretty.”  She looks at me like I just said mustang meat is delicious and quickly moves away.

Oops, must have made another equine faux pas.

My husband remembers every horse he ever met.  When a person comes up to him, I can see the wheels turning as he tries to remember the person’s name and where he met her before.  “I’m the lady with the white Arabian with the trailer loading problem,” she says.

He instantly knows both her and her horse.  He even remembers her horse’s name—among all the Arabians he’s ever seen with trailer loading problems!

I don’t have that knack.  If I see a horse in somebody’s pasture, I may remember it from one time to the next.  But away from home, say at a horse event, unless it has something that clearly makes it different from the other horses (like it’s a fjord and all the others are quarter horses) I won’t recognize it.

I’m really confused about kinds of horses, as well.  Can’t tell a quarter horse from a thoroughbred or an appaloosa from an Arabian–though I think an appaloosa has spots and an Arabian’s tail sticks up in the air.  Am I right about that?

More than once I’ve messed up by remarking to a horse person about how pretty a nearby horse was. “Yes,” he nods, “except for that oversized neck, and the short legs and the one droopy eye.”  

How was I to know?  The horse looked fine to me.

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Dang! Somebody already had my million dollar mechanical horse idea…20 years ago!  Sorry, folks.  (See comment to my last blog entry.  Check out his web site) 

And you can even get financing for one, which is now available from the National City Bank of Ohio. 

According to his web site, the inventor, former jockey Frank Lovato, Jr., will soon be coming out with a line of saddles, pads, blankets and other accoutrements, including horse towels, for his mechanical horses.  I didn’t even think of that. 

However, there’s still a spot open for someone who wants to buy a mass transit bus and offer trail riding.  It doesn’t appear anyone is providing that yet. 

But keep an eye on the comments section.  Who knows, we may soon find out someone is selling mechanical horse rides to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park. 

Here’s the thing, folks.  I got so excited about my million dollar mechanical horse idea that I didn’t do my homework.  After Mr. Lovato, Jr. found me within hours of posting my idea to the web (How did he do that?  Does he have a geek or a computer program that notifies him immediately every time the phrase “mechanical horse” comes up on the web?), I decided I better google “mechanical horse” to see what else is there. 

Can you believe Google came up with 2,460,000 mentions in 0.5 seconds! 

My favorite is a headline from the Daily Mirror:  “Ride a mechanical horse for 15 min a day - and drop a dress size in eight weeks.”    The busty woman in the photo has an ascot tucked into the collar of her very tight blouse, wears tall black dressage boots and holds a cute little riding crop. She’s perched on this contraption that doesn’t even look like a horse.  At least Mr. Lovato, Jr.’s machine has ears. 

I also found a mechanical horse club, but that turned out to be for devotees of a certain type of British delivery truck that went out of production in the 1960s. 

So don’t waste any more time on trying to invent a mechanical horse.  I’ll let you know as soon as I get another million dollar idea.

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