We're starting to get the hang of it around here! My husband will take pictures for friends later and we'll try to get them up here.
The 35 year old gelding, "Papa", is a pig! He came in with a butterball belly and we have been slowly getting it down to something more 'horse-like'! As a result, though, he started feeling more energetic and was chasing the little crippled filly around their enclosure yesterday. SOOOO, I haltered him and led him out to where the 'big' horses are and let them chase HIM around a bit! The filly, Teddi, was quite content to be left alone on her little wobbly legs.
Each of the dwarfs gets a half a cup of senior equine in the morning with some glucosamine/MSM mix and a little applesauce in it. (We learned the trick with applesauce years ago and keep the cupboard in the barn stocked with piles of the individual servings. That way when we need to administer medications, the horses never know they are getting it -- everything in the grain still tastes and smells like applesauce). Then they get a little grass hay to chew on through the day. In the evening they get another half-cup each and a little more hay. They both had almost a week of psyllium to help clean out their guts and will start their innoculations in a week. So we seem to be doing it OK. Quite a lesson!
When I was younger I was part-owner of a thoroughbred broodmare ranch in southern California and that was a real treat! Pregnang mommies and babies and a LOT of cleaning and handling and early training. When my own children were growing up I had married and moved to northern California and thought I had given up horses. Not with teenage girls! So we had a couple of horses then and one day I took the kids to see a local farrier competition and during the day we saw one corral of string horses brought in for the free shoing. With them was one very ancient looking mare with kick marks all over here and mites in her ears and so very underweight! The kids begged and begged to get her, with tears in their eyes, and so we picked up "Lady" for butcher-block price and brought her home.
At first she was so shy of being hurt or even touched that we we had to halter her, tie her, and then use a kid's squirt gun to get the medication into her ears for the mites! That worked, and without that itching and pain she did start to settle a little. In the meantime, we had her on good feed and were grooming her daily and she started really picking up.
In three months she was an incredible horse and we found out with some research that she was a three year old standard-bred filly. We found where her papers were and bought them for more than we had paid for her, and started working with her. When the kids got done with her, she was doing trails and the kids were having a wonderful time getting her into that really smooth trot these animals have and which is so comfortable to ride. Later they bred her and got a wonderful foal out of her.
That was our first rescue.
The years went by and the kids all left for college. I sold the horses, because they didn't go to college, too and I was not about to be out there everyday taking care of their small herd! And I'm not about to neglect animals in my care.
Today we live in southern Oregon and had a small, three stall barn (of my design) build on the back acre specifically for rescue animals.
Missy came in first. She is 20 and a registered quarter paint. Beautiful animal ridden to the ground and put away hot so many times that she is quite crippled in her front legs now with arthritis. She gets special meds for that and her legs rubbed down and wrapped every night for her comfort. She loves to lie down out in the sun during the day and get the weight off her legs.
Then Cameo. THIRTY years old, a rack of bones, almost no teeth and an abcessed hoof came. Easily 500-600 lbs. underweight. We puts her on soaked beet pulp pellets, equine senior, and alfalfa-molasses (Alf-mo). Her hoof healed nicely and today she looks and acts more like a nine year old than a thirty year old. She would be a lap horse if she could -- she's just a little big for that, though, at over 16 hands.
A few weeks ago Snow Angel arrived. She is 24, a 'crash and burn' polo pony originally from Argentina -- a beautiful white/gray Anglo-Arab. She broke her hip years ago and so is pretty bad in the hind end with atrophied muscles. Also way underweight when she arrived. And VERY shy of people.
She's coming around nicely. Weight is coming on and she enjoys the grooming everyday now and let us wash the matting out of her tail recently.
All these old ladies have been around the block a few times and so know what it is like to be handled. Finding out that we are gentle and understand them a bit has settled them all down and I have decided this is an incredibly rewarding thing to do. I can walk up to Missy or Cameo and clean their hooves right there in the field without tying them up. For those of you who have handled horses that have been mistreated in the past, you know that is really something!
With the minis (I at first refused them: three horses, three stalls, that was enough!), we are definitely full and busy. But it is lovely seeing them come around and knowing that the best that can be done is being done for them. They're lovely old girls and the two little ones are delightful.
