Month: January 2020

As you may remember, at Thanksgiving the SO (hereafter known as Crazy Cat Dude or CCD) brought home a black kitten from the local rescue because he’s a sucker. This delighted me, mostly because I was the one that acquired the last two animals (okay 4 if you count horses), and now we’re totally almost even. Ish. If you’re bad at math.

We went back and forth for a couple weeks on his name. I wanted something monster related, preferably movie monsters since the other cat’s name is Gremlin. May as well have a theme, and let’s be honest, cats are both dramatic and monsters, so it kinda works. We never really found anything we both loved, but we did settle on one we both at least liked – Count Orlok, or just Orlok for short. CCD is super into classic horror films, and don’t tell CCD but I kinda think the cat looks like Count Orlok, so it fits.

Of course, right now CCD is living at home and I’m living at the farm, so I’ve spent approximately 4 total hours with the kitten. Mostly I just get constant updates and pictures and videos. He’s a cute cat, less shy than Grem, definitely less sensitive, and a little dumber. They’re definitely very different. Honestly I think that works out well in this dynamic. He’s very happy and naive and bold, but not at all alpha or sensitive or timid. He just wants to play and sleep and be a dude, bro.

At first Grem was pissed, as cats usually are when you introduce a new cat into an established household. She hated him, and she hated CCD for bringing him into her kingdom. She wasn’t aggressive, she just didn’t want anything to do with either of them. Majorly majorly offended. Every time I stopped by the house to pick up mail or a package, she would come running up to me, screaming and demanding that I pick her up and pet her and take her away from that horrible place. Oh how the tables have turned. I used to be her second choice, taking whatever affection she deigned to throw my way. Now I’m her clear favorite and she loves me. HA.

She’s definitely coming around, though. Once she finally settled enough to start playing with him a little she decided he wasn’t so bad after all. Turns out she can WAP him all she wants and clamp her teeth around his head to her hearts content, and his goofy dumb ass just loves it. That’s way more fun than when she tried to do those things to the dogs, who would flee in abject terror. I think Grem has now decided that Orlok must be her toy.

She no longer sits around staring at him like she wants him to die. She doesn’t quite love him yet, but she doesn’t hate him anymore. She is, however, holding a bit of a grudge against CCD. I’m definitely keeping the preferred parent status even while being largely absentee, so this is working out pretty well for me.

We still have to figure out the best way to fit the animals and all of their accoutrements (CCD will not stop buying cat toys and furniture, omg you should see the living room) into the tiny house, but that’s a post for another day.

That’s a lie. They probably don’t really call me anything, and I don’t even know who “they” is. But they should call me Dolphin Rider, because that’s basically my profession these days.

Henry has been back in work for about 4 weeks now. I’ve started him back really slowly, gradually building up the work load. We started doing mostly walk with some trots, incrementally lengthening the time and adding more sets, then tossed in a few hill repeats, and last week we started adding lateral work, more circles, and cantering.

You know who’s been really excited about cantering?

He’s lost a lot of strength during all his down time, especially in his topline, so I’ve been riding him in his bitless bridle. He looooves to stretch in that thing, and it’s easier to ride him longer and lower in that, which is where I want him right now. He’s kind of learned that that’s his “stretchy work” bridle, and his dressage bridle is his “up in the contact like a proper dressage horse bridle”. I also like riding him in the bitless when I’m really trying to tune him more to leg and seat. Since he’s just coming back, is rusty, and we aren’t doing anything remotely earth-shattering, I’ve taken the easier and more casual route with the bitless. The one downside of that bridle? When he’s feeling particularly feisty he loves to plant his nose between his knees and crowhop to his hearts content, like he’s trying out for the damn rodeo.

I have talked about this before, but he sucks at bucking. Like most of the time there’s way more head flailing than there are hind feet leaving the ground, much less getting very high in the air. I love him dearly but he legit sucks at it. He remains blissfully unaware of that fact, though, and absolutely loves trying. I find this to be endlessly amusing, and he always seems so damn pleased with himself, so I just ride it out, laugh at him, let him play a bit, and then leg him on. Even on his friskiest days he’s good for maybe 15-30 seconds of what I have come to call dolphining before he levels out and settles into a normal canter. He rarely does it when he’s in regular work, but if he’s had some time off or it’s particularly cold/windy or we’re doing something he deems “exciting”… game on.

Those first few days of cantering again, though… boy. I don’t think he took one single step of normal canter. I was off to the world’s least impressive rodeo, and he morphed into Flipper.

At one point he even squealed. He legit thought that he was the most impressively naughty bucking bronco in the whole world, while I was just trying not to laugh too hard.

This went on for the entire first week of canter work. By ride 3 of that week I was getting a few actual canter steps after a lap or two of dolphining. On ride 4 it was hot so he tucked his freak flag in and was normal that day, then the next ride it was windy and out it came again. He definitely is getting less and less enthusiastic about it as we ease back into a regular schedule, but sometimes he just can’t help himself. Like when we’re cantering uphill. Or like when we cantered with Bobby the other day, and Bobby peeked over his shoulder at us only to find Henry bouncing around like an idiot behind him. He found that to be quite entertaining.

Henry is moving back into his real bridle next week, and we’re going to start adding poles into the mix, so he’ll probably be really bummed about that. He’s enjoyed his time as a completely lawless hooligan, leaping and bouncing around all over the place. It would break his naughty little heart to know this, but I kinda like it when he feels fresh enough to try to play a little like that. Maybe I’m weird but coming from him, I find it endearing. He’s coming up on 13 and shows no signs of maturing out of it anytime soon. Never change, Henny, never change.

I am a strong believer in the power of genetics. Obviously. Otherwise it would be kind of dumb for me to breed or be so obsessively interested in pedigrees and bloodlines. While we haven’t gotten particularly far along in equine genetics, we do know that certain traits are heritable, or at least seem to be more heritable than others. Here are a few studies if you’re interested in nerd things:

http://www.hanoverian.com/ludwigherit.html

https://thehorse.com/110473/its-all-in-the-genes-horse-traits-and-heritability/

https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/evj.12196

If you really want to lose a couple days, there are studies out there covering the heritability of everything from facial hair patterns to OCD to cribbing to speed. Go to town.

Obviously many breeders and breed associations are obsessed with this. The goal is to make superior horses, generation over generation, and data can certainly be essential to that. Most registries track the offspring closely, assign breeding values to stallions, and even make handy dandy charts to show how a stallion’s offspring tend to trend as far as size, gaits, foot shape, back length, hock angle, etc. While nothing is heritable all the time, I do believe that a lot of things are highly heritable, and some stallions (and mares) are more prepotent for certain traits. A lot of people base a lot of breeding decisions based off of that theory, me included. Looking at the trends among the offspring is much more valuable to a breeder than looking at the stallion himself – you want to know how he produces, what traits seem most heritable. That’s the important part.

Of course, we also know that getting all the necessary traits for success into one package is a tough thing to do. The horse can have all the speed in the world, but if it doesn’t want to run, it won’t be a successful race horse. It could have gaits like Totilas, but if it doesn’t have the brain to withstand the pressures of the job, it probably won’t be winning any medals. Or if it doesn’t stay sound, or if it’s ridiculously hard to ride, etc etc. There’s also the flip side, where the horse might not be particularly talented, but it loves to work and is easy to ride and wants to do a job. Many horses live somewhere in that area. But the truly tip top horses… they tend to have a lot of those qualities combined into one horse.

The recipe for success certainly isn’t as easy as breeding a tip top horse to another tip top horse. Zenyatta’s foals are good examples of that. These traits, while definitely carrying a heritable tendency, just don’t come through all the time, or even most of the time. And to make things even more complicated, there are certain individuals that seem to either seriously out-produce their own quality or seriously under-produce their own quality. It isn’t at all uncommon for a relatively mediocre performance mare to become an absolute tip top producer. Breeding is hard, and relatively unpredictable, at least from our current understanding of genetics.

Like I said earlier though, I do believe that heritability, or at least some genetic tendency, is generally a relatively reliable thing. I become even more convinced of that when I watch JB and Presto at play. JB, the yearling, is very well bred for dressage. He doesn’t quite have the big flashy movement yet, but his natural balance is quite impressive. I have watched him do more textbook perfect canter pirouettes than I can even recall at this point. He’s naturally much stronger behind and across his topline, and has much more natural “sit” ability than Presto does. Which makes sense. Presto is bred to do this:

It’s really interesting to watch them, because they both love to run and buck and roughhouse and all the things that babies do, but their natural predispositions – their purposely bred genetic tendencies – definitely come out. JB’s balance. Presto’s boldness. They’ll be galloping together and then all the sudden Presto will veer down and zip past the edge of the pond, or jump down the bank, or leap over the ditch. He likes the more fun “offroad” path and aims for it on purpose. JB tends to always decline those options, instead choosing to redirect himself to a less risky path, probably throwing in a lovely lead change in the process. I can watch them forever and be endlessly fascinated by it, theorizing on why and how they’re wired to react the way they do. Most of it makes a lot of sense.

I chose Presto’s sire specifically because of the rideability and seemingly natural cross country prowess of all the offspring I’ve seen. He appeared to have a relatively high tendency to produce whatever qualities combine to contribute to success in that phase, particularly with amateur and junior riders. Of course, I do believe that the mare is a, probably the, crucial part of the equation, so I went with a mare that had similar qualities too. Watching Presto now, as he shows me some natural predisposition to his future job, I become even more sold on just how heritable all of these things can be. Certainly, a lot of it is “nurture”, but you can’t discount the basic influence of what we breed into their nature.

I can’t wait to see what scientists keep learning about all of this as we move along and our understanding and technology increases. I’m relatively convinced that there’s a genetic factor to almost everything, maybe even the things that seem anomalistic to us now.

Taking care of your own horses 24/7 definitely gives you a different perspective on them, and you start to learn some weird things. Particularly when cleaning their stalls and picking up their poop day in and day out. Like for instance, I came to notice that Presto’s turds are consistently small for a horse his size, like for real they look more like pony poops. Which led to a closer examination and determination that he has, well… a tiny butthole for a horse his size.

Seriously I don’t know why you people keep coming to this blog.

Anyway.

Aside from such earth-shattering revelations as tiny buttholes, I’ve also become keenly aware of and interested in their stall-keeping habits. Right now the horses are out for about 12 hours and then inside for about 12 hours. They have nice size stalls with runs attached off the back, so they’re free to come and go between the two spaces as they please. It seems like most of the horses prefer mainly pooping outside and peeing inside, which is nice. Easy to clean. Sometimes they’ll have one or two piles inside, but nothing major. Henry and Presto, however, are polar opposites at extreme ends of the spectrum.

Henry is very much a “poop where he’s standing” type of guy. He doesn’t seem to give it any thought, he just shits wherever he happens to be at the time. There could be 5 piles in his stall in all different spots. Or they could all be piled in one corner. Or he could have mulched it all up into soup. Or maybe it’s all outside. Every day is different, depending on how he spent his night. He seems to give zero shits about laying in poop and has zero motivation to “keep his room clean” so to speak. His is always the dirtiest stall and always takes the longest to clean. You just never know what you’re going to find and where.

Presto, on the other hand, is the opposite. In the entire two months that they’ve been coming inside at night, he’s pooped in his stall a grand total of twice. His poops are almost always relegated to the very end of the run, spread in a semi-circle next to the fence. Usually he has one pee in his stall, in the exact same spot every day, and he never lays in it. He uses hardly any shavings and it takes maybe 4 minutes to clean his stall and run.

It was kind of surprising to me to find that he’s such a neat stall horse. He’s not a clean horse otherwise, in fact he rolls at the edge of the pond every single day thus always has mud clinging to him somewhere. His mother was a pig in her stall too, so I have no idea where he picked up this inclination. At previous barns where he didn’t have a run, he wasn’t very neat, and often walked everything into a mess when he got bored. Something about having two spaces (and more space) makes him happier I guess?

With work and my long commute and barn stuff, my days become a balancing act of trying to fit everything in during daylight hours, so the less time I have to spend cleaning stalls, the better. Thus Presto, who always has the cleanest stall of the four, always wins the unofficial Stallkeeper award. If you think about it, it kind of fits.

The whole “I’ll shit where I want and you’ll pick it up because that’s your job” attitude is very Henry. And the desire to please the human and do the good boy thing is very Presto. I’ve found myself pondering this often when I’m cleaning stalls; how weird it is that each horse’s poo habits fit so perfectly with their personality? Obviously the horses aren’t thinking “I’m gonna poop outside because the human prefers it” or “screw her, I shit where I please”… that’s not how their brains work at all. Yet somehow their habits do end up matching their basic personality anyway.

And then I was listening to a book about FBI profiling, and I was thinking maybe you could build a psych profile on a horse based solely on it’s stall keeping habits. Thinking of the four I take care of, you totally could, and you’d be pretty spot on. Perhaps this is a book idea in the making? Could you tell your horse’s psych profile from it’s stall? All this time people have been using whirls to attempt to read personality, but maybe instead we should be gazing into their dirty stalls.

Yes, these are the kind of ground breaking topics I ponder when I’m cleaning stalls. You could probably profile me based on that, too… tiny buttholes and horse personality profiles…

Despite having been out at the new place for about 4 months now, I haven’t had much opportunity to really explore the area. First it was still super hot, then Henry was lame for a while, and it just didn’t happen. But now (knock on copious amounts of wood) Henry is back in regular work again, and we finally got the chance to do some poking around.

There’s a boarding barn pretty much right across the main road from us that recently opened, and they’ve got a covered arena, a decent size outdoor arena, and a lot of land. Fun fact, Sadie did her very first little show there as a 3yo literally a decade ago when the farm was under a different name and management, but I hadn’t been back since then and didn’t remember a whole lot about it.

Bobby mentioned wanting to go trail ride somewhere, so I figured this could be the perfect opportunity to go check out the farm. I’ve been following on facebook and it looks like they’re set to make some improvements, including clearing more trails for conditioning, adding some XC jumps (particularly ditch/bank/water), and putting in a rider gate right across from the stop sign at the end of our road. That would make it all of a 200-300 yard ride to get from our gate to their property. Considering I want to spend most of Presto’s first year under saddle just hacking him out and trail riding, easy access to 80 acres would be a big boon. Plus it would give me a bigger space to do Henry’s conditioning work, or just get him out for a change of scenery. Naturally, I would like to be best friends with these people.

So I made an appointment for us to hack over and ride out there on Sunday. Bobby trailered over to our place, and we got on and rode over to the other farm. On the way over we just rode down to their driveway, which is about half a mile down the main road. It isn’t a particularly busy road but the cars do tend to travel fast… luckily both our horses are well-used to road traffic, so it wasn’t a problem. I wasn’t super clear on exactly what was their land versus other people’s land, but once we got there we figured out that the one big empty front field actually has a gate out onto the main road that spits us out really close to my road, letting us avoid that half mile walk down to the main entrance. Bonus.

The space kind of brought back memories of the fields we lost at the barn that closed last year. It’s slightly rolling, which I think will be super nice for my needs. These wide open spaces just make my heart so happy.

We managed to make almost a 2 hour hack out of exploring everything and poking around the farm. They’ve got great bones to work with, and lots of land, so hopefully their vision will come to fruition. It would be great to have an extra big place to go hack the boys, especially if they put XC jumps out there. What a luxury it would be to not have to drive 2 hours each way to do some cross country! There’s also talk of doing some schooling shows (there are already some western dressage ones – their discipline of choice – set for this year), which would also be amazing. In what world have I ever been able to be within riding distance of a show facility? It could be great for Presto especially, as I start putting miles on him.

The facility is offering a one year riding pass for $125, which would be a pretty great deal if I utilized the space even just once a week. I’m excited to see how it comes along and what else they add. Bobby and I definitely had a good time poking around on a gorgeous 70 degree day!