Month: October 2017

Thanks to Olivia doing this little exercise, we learned that Frankie apparently naps for like 22 hours a day. I’m equal parts jealous of his life yet pretty sure he also has a sleep disorder. But how does Henry spend HIS day? Let’s find out…

8am: OMG BREAKFAST!!! If it’s above 40 (which is basically 11 months of the year in Texas) he was turned out all night. He’s always the first horse brought in for breakfast because as soon as he sees the barn worker’s truck he starts screaming non-stop, and if you’ve never had the privilege of hearing a Henny scream, it’s unnecessarily loud and high pitched. “Trumpeting” would be a good description, if trumpets sounded like Mariah Carey. No one wants to listen to that.

8:15am: He makes lots of terrible faces at the mare next door while she eats her grain, because SOMEONE’S fat butt is already finished. Then he paws his hay everywhere because he’s angry about… literally everything. So many feelings.

8:20am: He starts licking his salt block and passes into ZenHenny mode. He finishes his hay, which is now scattered from one end of the stall to the other. Then he demands to be taken back outside (as long as it’s not over 80 degrees).

9am: If it’s under 80, he goes back out. If it’s over 80, he gets his fans (yes plural) turned on and left inside. Hims is delicate. Hims cannot go outside when it’s hot. Hims melt.

10am: If he’s outside, he’s instigating a game of Bitey Face with the quarter horses across the fence. If he’s inside he’s peeing and then taking a nap in it, or begging every single person that passes by his stall for a cookie. It usually works.

12pm: If he’s inside, he gets more hay. If he’s outside but the day is getting too hot, he’s brought in and given hay. If the weather is nice, he stays out until dinner, mostly either grazing or pestering the other horses over the fence. Sometimes he likes to lay flat out and play dead during random odd times of the day just to make sure the barn workers are paying attention.

4pm: I always arrive right at dinner time (except for the serious heat of the summer, in which case I ride him at 6am), which basically ruins his whole day. I give him a handful or two of his dinner and chat with the barn workers while I groom and tack up. Usually there’s a “what did Henry eat today” story. Like… sunflower seeds, Doritos, Bugles, Goldfish crackers, cinnamon sugar cookies, french fries, bananas… it’s always something. Whatever snacks the workers have, he usually tries, because he’s the barn favorite and is S-P-O-I-L-E-D. Oddly enough he’ll eat all that crap yet he absolutely will not eat an apple under any circumstance. Henny logic.

4:30-5:30pm: Ride. Alternate between pretending to not know what “go” means and pretending to not know what “whoa” means. Spook at the same round bale every day, both while headed out AND while headed in. That round bale is obvs a portal to hell. Or food. But portal to hell is more likely, let’s be real.

5:30pm: Post-ride rinse and graze, if it’s warm (usually), or curry if it’s cold. Get a few minutes of psoas stretches and back/butt massage while he pretends to be pissed (he secretly likes it but cannot ruin his street cred by admitting it), then liberal applications of fly spray and anti-fungal spray because HIMS DELICATE.

5:50pm: OMG DINNER!!! The mare next door has already been turned back out, so he makes ugly faces at the stall wall instead.

6:00pm: if it’s nice weather, he goes back outside with his hay. If it’s still hot he stays inside and eats his hay, and the barn worker comes back and turns him out once the sun goes down. If it’s super cold he stays inside with lots and lots of hay that he first spreads everywhere and then eats every tiny morsel of. It’s like a DIY scavenger hunt.

All night, when he’s in: Pee, then sleep in it. While not sleeping in pee, he grinds all the poop up so that it’s thoroughly mixed into the bedding. Everyone loves this.

All night, when he’s out: find some kind of prickly weed or ant mound, then sleep on it, inevitably causing something terrible to happen to his skin. Because he has the smarts, y’all.

Alyssa recently told me that my horse stalking skills, especially when it comes to stallions or young horses, are really impressive. She asked me how in the world I remember all the different horses, bloodlines, what they’ve done, etc. The answer is pretty simple: I spend a ridiculous amount of time obsessively watching and looking. Also I have nothing else of particularly important use taking up space in my brain, so it’s totally possible for me to dedicate like 98% of my brain cells to the cause. Everyone’s gotta be good at something, right?

The weekend of stalking really kicked off on Friday morning. Mundial du Lion (which hosts the world championships for 6 and 7yo event horses, with a CCI* and CCI** respectively) was live streaming from France, and there were a few horses in particular that I really wanted to watch in the dressage. One of course being a Mighty Magic in the 2*, who’s ride time just happened to fall in the middle of my morning commute. No big deal… I just pulled over to watch on my phone. Technology is amazing.

On Saturday I was volunteering at a horse trial, running dressage scores in the morning and XC jump judging in the afternoon. While running dressage scores is not my favorite job (why was it 90 degrees? why was my ring so far from the office? why was I so sweaty?) it did give me enough free time for one horse in particular to catch my eye in warmup. I finally got close enough to see his number, looked him up on the sheet, found his name, and looked him up. Ah, he’s a 6yo by Diarado out of a Sandro Hit mare. No wonder I liked him (Sadie is in foal to Diarado for 2018!). I made sure to come up and see his showjumping round and then of course I got to see him come through my fence on cross country. He won the Prelim.

On Sunday morning I was up before to sun to watch the live stream of showjumping from Mondial du Lion. And when I say “watch” I mean with 3 windows open on my computer – the actual live stream, the order of go, and horsetelex – a European pedigree site. The order of go had the sire and the dam listed, but I want to see the whole pedigree and the blood percentage, and horsetelex is great for that. Sit there long enough, look at enough horses, and you start to see commonalities.

These championships have a fantastic record for producing future stars – fischerRocana, Horseware’s Hale Bob, fischerTakinou, Upsilon, Quimbo, Annie Clover, La Biosthetique Sam… I mean really, MANY of the best horses in the world competed at Mondial du Lion while they were up and comers. Oh, and someone we all know named Mighty Magic, who was 2nd his 6yo year and won his 7yo year. It’s fun to watch them all and try to pick out which ones will be the next Sam or Rocana.

Then last night I found myself clicking through the videos of the Goresbridge auction horses. Goresbridge is a big auction for young event horses in Ireland – lots of big ones have come through there, including Copper Beach and both the East and West Coast 2017 YEH 5yo Championship winners. It’s fun to click through for like half an hour, fantasizing about buying one, and then it’s less fun when you’re like “yeah this is never going to happen ever in my life”. I picked out my favorites though, so now it’s kind of a game to see how much they all end up selling for and to who.

I did pry myself away from the computer and volunteering long enough to ride my own naughty creature. On Sunday morning he waited to roll until I was literally parking my truck (I swear to god he made eye contact with me before he went down) and then after about 15 minutes decided he was done with letting me curry all the mud off.

There is so much sass in our relationship.

There is a lot of discussion among the breeding community right now about a suggested rule change proposal that would make it mandatory for people to keep a breeder’s prefix or suffix on a horse’s show name. You could change the name part itself, but not the prefix or suffix. So basically if you had a horse that was named Looney Tunes WTF, you could change the Looney Tunes part, but not the WTF part.

Like most things breeding related, I have a lot of feelings about prefixes and suffixes (this is shocking, I’m sure). I would never take a prefix/suffix off of a horse’s name, just because I know how important it is to breeders to have that easy recognition for their horses. It’s a nod of respect and recognition to where the horse came from, and all the blood, sweat, tears, money, and time that someone put into creating that horse. That’s not to say that there aren’t terrible ones like BRA or MF… I’d be less thrilled about those too, so I understand if someone wants to change a bad one. I still don’t think I personally would do it, but I would understand.

I also find it annoying how a lot of big sale farms just tack their prefix/suffix onto a horse they got in, jack the price up because it’s a (insert whichever one you want here – Fernhill, Cooley, RF, CR, FE, etc), and it becomes more of a “look where I bought this horse from” thing instead of a nod of credit to the person or farm that created the horse in the first place. Pretty brilliant for the seller though, since now everyone knows who sold the horse. I can hate it all I want, but it’s effective.

Even though I am a big fan of breeder prefixes and suffixes, I don’t really support this rule change proposal. I don’t think it should be up to USEF to monitor their useage and application. They got enough problems, man. Not to mention, what do you do about the fact that there are plenty of prefixes and suffixes out there that are used by more than one breeder. Who gets the “rights” to the letter R? What do you do with the ones that already have it? Sticky. Way too sticky.

I do have plenty of respect for the breeders who put into their sale contracts that the buyer can change the name but not the farm prefix/suffix. That seems totally reasonable to me. Granted, if that person sells the horse on, the next person isn’t bound to keep that.

All the new microchip recording stuff with USEF will help a lot of this, I think. Horses will no longer be able to just go *poof* and reappear under a new name with a new age. All of the information is much more likely to follow a horse throughout it’s career, and I think people will be a little less inclined to change the name. If nothing else, hopefully we become a bit more diligent about making sure the breeder information and the pedigree information get recorded with all the other microchip information too, and stay with the horse even if any prefixes or suffixes are dropped or names are changed.

But the most interesting thing that I’ve seen while following along with all these discussions in the last few days was that several people (non-breeders) said that they would not buy a horse with a prefix or suffix if they weren’t allowed to change it. Like even if the horse was otherwise perfect, it would be an absolute dealkiller to have any kind of prefix or suffix on it’s name. That seemed kind of crazy to me, but I guess names are THAT important to some people?

Presto of course is registered as Like Magic WTW – with the Willow Tree Warmblood suffix. Because I’m proud of my friend and her farm and the horses that she produces, and I want Presto to be a bit of a “spokesman” for her program, wherever he goes. He will wear his suffix with pride.

What do y’all think? Hate prefixes and suffixes? Love them? Would they be a deal breaker if you couldn’t change them?

Remember how excited I was last week about the dark purple breeches? Yeah well. They accidentally sent me burgundy. Burgundy is not purple.

Which wouldn’t be bad, because they’re beautiful breeches, but a) I already have a pair of burgundy breeches, b) they do not measure how their size chart said they did, so they’re too small, c) the company (QJ Riding Wear) is in Australia. I emailed them to see what they wanted to do, since not only are they not the color I ordered, they also don’t measure as advertised. They were not very helpful and asked if I thought I could just sell them here. They seemed to have no interest in getting me my purple pair that I was so excited about, or rectifying the mistake. I said I would try, and that was the last I heard from them. No gold stars for customer service. Or maybe I’m just accustomed to how fabulous Riding Warehouse is to deal with and my expectations are too high.

Too bad, really, because like I said, I quite like the breeches. Very very Animo-esque and a gorgeous merlot color. If anyone is interested in them, I’ll sell them to you for a bit less than what they cost with shipping from Australia to the US. They are AUS size 14, which was supposed to have been their equivalent of US 30/32, but the waist measures just a hair under 30 so they’re really more like 28. A slim-fitting 28. They have a sock bottom, silicone knee patch, and silver detailing at the back zipper pockets. I’ll sell them for $75USD including shipping anywhere in the US.

And I guess I won’t be getting the purple, since the company seems uninterested in my plight. Boo.

It wasn’t a total loss of a week for breeches though, because I got my hunter green Ovation Aqua-X breeches in the mail and absolutely love them. The color is stunning with my chocolate brown boots, and I like the new sock bottom a lot. As usual, they fit me perfectly. Ovation to the rescue! Maybe someday they’ll make the Aqua-X in dark purple…

I also bought Presto his first rope halter (or as I like to call them – MANNERS), and ordered him a yearling size in rainbow. Because he’s my unicorn, and I can torture him however I want.

I can’t wait to see him give me that patented Presto side eye while he’s wearing that thing. I won’t even be able to take him seriously.

Still trying to decide if I should bother buying him a winter blanket or not. He’s pretty impressively hairy, I dunno that he’ll actually need anything to keep him warm. But then again, it might be nice to at least have a waterproof sheet on standby, just in case…

No, not these kind of horse toys:

I’m looking for suggestions more along the line of these:

But better. A lot better.

A couple weeks ago when Presto was stuck inside due to weather, he decided to take his angst out on the wooden support structure in his stall’s run. He’s not the first to go for those things, but he went at it pretty hard and heavy there for a few days, despite having a huge pile of hay to eat. Bored Presto is Bad Presto.

Michelle tried spraying the wood with all the different things known to man to deter chewing. Presto is a) smart b) not a quitter, so he figured out that if he could just endure the flavor long enough to lick it off, his problem was solved. Eventually she wrapped all the wood in a few layers of chicken wire, and that finally put a kibosh on the chewing. The wood beams were saved, and now turnout is possible again, so it’s not such an issue anymore.

Presto will likely find himself stuck inside again at some point though, with winter coming, and I’d rather he not find other naughty things to eat or do.  He has a Jolly Ball, which gets played with a little bit, but it’s not interesting enough to keep him truly entertained. He hasn’t been super impressed with the big horse sized ball either. His diet is very very very carefully managed and balanced, so I don’t want to get him any of those stall toys with treats or food either. Plus he’s so smart I don’t think those would last long anyway.

I’ve heard of different homemade type horse toys, involving milk jugs or soccer balls or ropes… has anyone made anything like that before? Did they work? Or are there any horse toys out there on the market that helped at keeping a particularly smart and hard to impress baby horse entertained for more than 5 minutes?