Not much to report!

I haven't blogged about Pangea in nearly a month. A MONTH! Mostly I've had little to write about, honestly - I've been working insanely long hours at my two full time jobs as well as trying desperately to keep up with full time school (yes, three full time things plus riding doesn't work out very well) - and I haven't been riding very much due to the heat and Pangea's inability to cope with it. She's been doing a lot better, thankfully, but she has struggled over the past few months to keep herself cool. Lots and lots of sweat and one sunbleached coat later, and we seem to be reaching the end of summer, sort of. As I write, it is currently overcast and 68 degrees. I know it will warm into the low 90's later today, but I'll take that as "cooling off." We're not supposed to reach into the 100's again in the foreseeable future, so I am hoping it won't happen again until next summer!

Most of what Pangea has done over the past month is nothing at all, save for going in the AquaTread once a week, a few dressage rides, and a few trail rides as well. She is still teetering on the edge of comfortable enough to be strongly rideable, and I have been debating whether or not to really pursue a foxhunting career with her. Is she going to stay comfortably sound enough to do it, or not? I figure I will keep trying to find her magic combination for the rest of the year, and then reevaluate. To be honest, if she isn't going to make a foxhunter, then she'll be semi-retired and become a happy trail pony and momma. I don't want to hear ONE NEGATIVE WORD from people about her being a momma. I've made the mistake of talking about breeding in the past, and I am not keen to get the same negative response. My horse, my money, my decision, end of story! ;)

Anyway, back to Pangea's comfort. As her issues have unfolded, I have realized they are far more complicated than I ever imagined. It isn't just that she had an old stifle injury that was unattended to, it was that her entire body has been compensating for years due to that and her feet. The soreness in her body made her stand in odd positions - camped under a lot in front, for instance - which in turn made her wear her sole thin at the toe and grow a long heel... which made her body sore. Her entire body developed a sway to the right, feet included. We have come a VERY long way in helping to improve her posture, but she is still very body sore and restricted. Two chiropractic adjustments have failed to help her, and dental work didn't improve anything either. (I thought the dentist was great but the chiro was not great... we'll be looking for a new one.) Regular trims and a balanced diet have done an awful lot of good for her feet, but she is going to need boots if we want to get any further on tougher terrain. Devil's Claw Plus and Cosequin ASU were very helpful, but not quite enough. She is currently going through a course of Acetyl-D, and if that isn't helpful enough, will do a course of Adequan as well. She had a massage yesterday for the first time, as I suspected it would do her a whole lot of good, and holy lord did she ever need it! She spent the entire time trying to bite me and kicking out violently at all the knots the massage therapist uncovered. As she's not a biter or a kicker, it speaks an awful lot about the level of pain she was feeling. (At least she wasn't trying to kick the massage therapist... she was just kicking out backwards to show how she really felt about the whole thing, instead of aiming for her!) She was stuck basically from head to tail, poor thing. It's all compensatory soreness... it's all just a big mess. She'll get another one next week, and we'll see how she feels then.

The saddest part about this whole ordeal is that had somebody bothered to properly treat her injury when it first happened, none of this would be happening now. Now, it is up to me to play clean-up crew, and it isn't pretty. Truthfully, she doesn't owe me anything, and if I can't get her to where she needs to be to be a consistent riding horse, then she'll be retired to broodie and trail duty. There isn't anything that she has to do for me in order to earn her keep. Just being who she is is enough for me.

A few of the things we've been up to this past month:











Also, systematically destroying flymasks. She is very good at that.

A few shreds at first...




... to the full Phantom of the Opera.




No more nice Cashel masks for you mare... this is the fourth one you have destroyed this summer!! She wore the one Gogo had for FIVE YEARS for three days and completely ruined it. She also blew through a Quiet Ride mask and now TWO more regular Cashel masks, one with ears and one without... fail! I hear Horseman's has super cheap masks with durable mesh... gonna have to check them out for sure.

We'll see how the massage worked!

Trit-Trot, Feets, and First Ride!

Since Pangea has been here for nearly a week now, and has settled in so very nicely, I thought it would be prudent to toss her in the roundpen to see how she was moving. A creaky teenaged mare who is on absolutely no joint maintenance and who just tumbled off a four day trailer ride to a strange and alien planet (let's face is, sometimes Texas is really that strange)? I expected her to be a bit stiff and creaky starting out, at least until her joint supplements start to kick in. Instead, I had this on my hands:



For comparison, here's a video of Gogo taken last July when she was looking really quite sound all things considered:




How about that.
Given how well she has settled in, how good she seems to be feeling, and how well she looks, I decided that I just couldn't wait another week... I had to get on her!




She was really quite good! Our indoor is a Cover-All, which is great for late nights or inclement weather days but also very noisy in a strong wind. And our area is known for, erm... rather fierce winds. As in, don't-bother-doing-your-hair, cover-your-mouth, you-might-want-to-wear-long-sleeves kind of winds. We had some of that going on today, which made for quite a lot of scary rattley ghoul noises coming from the doors of the arena.

Aside from trying to offer a trot a few times, and walking a bit faster and sideways the first few times past the door, she was fine. (As a comparison, here's Gogo's reaction to a rattly door monster. Never a dull moment.)

We walked for 1/2 an hour, and called it a day. Half of it was spent on a long rein (or well, as long as I could give her considering her freshness and spookiness to begin with), and the rest was spent in varying forms of on the bit. Her inclination, like her father's, is to break over at the third vertebrae when she gets tired, so I was careful to switch it up and give her lots of stretchy breaks. After all, the last time she's done legitimate dressage work was probably about 6 years ago. Gotta cut her at least a little slack! Our arena footing is also deeper than I'd like right now (dang barrel racers...), so I don't want to wear her out.

I plan on treating her reconditioning like more of a rehab than anything else. We'll walk for a month, trot for a month, canter for a month, and then see where we are. To begin with, I'll sit on her three or four days a week, and put her in the AquaTread one or two times a week. She needs to be in relatively steady work, but not more than five days a week. We'll sort out a schedule where we switch it up between doing dressage-y walk work, walk work over poles, and walk work up and down hills, all geared towards strengthening her topline and hind end, and creating lateral flexibility. We'll also walk - and possibly trot - in the AquaTread.

I also got around to doing those nasty awful feet of hers... ugh they looked so gross!





Yeck. Lots of flare on both fronts, moderate concavity, frogs that have clearly been pared away at her last trimming (which was less than 4 weeks ago!), and all four feet have some level of extra sole growth extending all the way around the frog. Her foot needs that right now... it would be detrimental to take it away. This is a foot that has been routinely pared away as per regular pasture trims, and it is throwing down any bit of support that it can in order to keep itself functional. It would do harm to remove this right now. Some trimmers like to take away the 'lumps and bumps' on a transitioning horse's sole, claiming that it causes pressure points. I haven't found this to be so. In fact, all I've found is that you might be taking away crucial support that the horse has worked hard to lay down for itself, and it will probably come right back - as is the case with this ridge of sole, which I see often on transitioning feet. This will go away by itself as soon as her sole is strong and healthy enough to support itself through the regular callusing process. It just has not been given the chance to do so up until now.



(LF trimmed, RF not yet trimmed, showing flare and cracking.)

These feet also show signs of a major nutritional issue. Notice all the little rings and cracks? Not only has it been plagued with a superficial fungal infection, but it has been in the throes of subclinical laminitis for probably a very long time. Not enough to cause a full on laminitic attack, and not enough to cause lameness (though I quite imagine she was probably often sore after trims), but the writing is on the wall. How many feet do you see with lots of little rings and marks on them like this? Chances are, you either see it very often, or you never see it at all, depending on your horse's nutrition and your farrier! Most farriers will heavily rasp the outer wall of the foot in order to remove these (often seen as superficial, instead of the warning sign that they really are!), so owners never notice that they are there until the foot shows up with a problem. If your horse's feet look this like, you are in need of a major dietary and lifestyle overhaul.

I can't wait to see what kind of a foot she grows in with her dietary chance and differing hoof care. Chances are this foot will tighten up, get quite a lot shorter, and stop producing rings. (Or at least it will if I am somewhat worth my salt!)




That's about all that could be done for today. I was conservative in the back of her foot, seeing as I found big angry bruises on her heels on BOTH hinds (!!), but she seemed perfectly comfortable and happy afterwards, walking solidly heel first over the gravel driveway without any issue. I normally don't dress the outer wall like this, but she had small fungal infection in the form of lots of thin little superficial cracks, so I got rid of those. Quite a lot of cracking remains, but it is all superficial. Many of the rings still remain as well, and that's fine - they will grow out in due time. I saw no need to take off excess hoof wall in order to make them 'prettier'. She still has some flaring issues, but that will go away in time with some diligence. The most important thing is that she is landing balanced and is comfortable on all surfaces. That's all I really care about right now!


She's enjoying sampling all this delicious green stuff too, that's for sure.... bet she hasn't seen green grass in a looooong time!






I also wanted to mention that I'll explain later on why I called her Pangea instead of Pangaea, simply because so many people were asking about it. I have my reasons... you'll find out soon! ;)

Getting Ready

(Reposted from February 19th, 2012!)

While we all brainstorm and try to figure out a good name for the new Pangea blog (can't really make a new blog without a name), I'll keep posting here on Bay Girl's blog until a name comes to me. Keep sending suggestions!

There is a lot to be done when it comes to getting a new horse! Ordering supplements, picking up feed and hay, signing documents, making sure everyone is on the same page... yikes! And this time, I'm doing things a little bit differently than I have in the past when it comes to feeding. Feeding horses is part science and part artwork... you can calculate all the formulas you want, crunch every number you can think of, and still get it all wrong. There are factors you can't control, such as the mineral content of your water supply, the health of the soil your hay was grown on (unless of course, you grow your own hay), and your own horse's particular digestive process. It gets a bit overwhelming, eh?

I had particularly good luck with Gogo's feeding schedule. It worked great for her, with one notable exception: she always has the tiniest, tiniest bit of white line separation despite her strong, beautiful, sound, healthy feet. Years into feeding her, I finally figured it out: she had a soy sensitivity, attributed to the soy in her ration balancer. That was the only thing we could attribute to the soy... the rest of her looked fantastic:




First picture was taken late in the fall, the second was of her shiny shiny shiny springtime dapples.

She was fed Buckeye's Gro N' Win ration balancer (in varying amounts, somewhere between 1 and 2.5 lbs a day), more or less free-choice timothy/orchard (fed between 6 and 10 times a day), ground flax, and Cosequin ASU (and a few other supplements, but none that I liked enough to stick with). I liked that protocol, except for her particular soy sensitivity, and would use it again.

However, this time around I thought I would try things a bit differently. The hay I am feeding is a mix: there are bales of tim/brome/orchard/alf, and bales of straight timothy. The four-way grass mix is very, very nice, with lots of beautiful soft leaf and color. The tim is a bit more mature with more stalks and seed heads, and will be used more as chew time versus the four-way mix. Both of my suppliers stock hay from the same location year-round, so there will be a fair bit of consistency. Local hay is very hard to get right now due to last year's drought, and all hay grown in the area is coastal. I'm not interested in feeding coastal, so I went for the colder-weather hays brought in from up north. Just about any hay supplied to the area right now is trucked in from outside locations, so it doesn't make all that much of a difference in price.

I'm also not feeding grain. In my area, there seems to be a lot of local emphasis on large grain meals and hay only fed twice a day, which is a recipe for starch overload, ulcers, boredom-induced bad behavior, colic, laminitis, general malaise... the list goes on. There is a general misconception that hay doesn't provide any nutrients for some reason, that only grain can do that... I've heard people say it! (*facepalm!*) I personally am all about supplying my horses with the large majority of their energy and nutrients from their hay, and supplementing with a good vitamin/mineral supplement and possible fat if extra calories are needed. Pangea, being at this moment in time rather sedentary (i.e. not in work), will get the majority of her nutrients through high-quality forage, and be supplemented with a quality vitamin/mineral supplement that is specifically balanced for these particular types of forages. It has a base of flax, added and balanced amino acids, and several strains of viable good bacteria as a probiotic. For her level of work, this and her hay should in theory supply her with everything she needs. We'll see how it works!

She'll also be on Cosequin ASU, and my good old favorite, aloe juice. Instead of a pelleted grain, the carrier for all these supplements will be a small amount of sun-cured timothy hay pellets, just enough to wash everything properly down. I wanted to use molasses-free beet pulp as my carrier, but you have NO idea how hard that is to find around here... not to mention the question of whether or not that would be too much of a hassle for barn staff.

The major flaw in the design of all of this is the feeding schedule at the barn. As is the norm around here, hay is only feed 2x a day, once in the AM and once in the PM. Well that's not gonna fly for me! Horses are browsing grazers, designed to take in small amounts of forage throughout the day, and when their digestive system sits empty all sorts of foul things can happen. I'm not keen to let that happen, so I decided to look into a slow feeder. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a slow hay feeder allows the horse to eat a controlled amount of hay in a slow trickle fashion, versus just gobbling down their portion and then have nothing to do with the rest of their day.

There is only one problem with slow feeders. They are MAD expensive. Like, several hundred dollars for a feeder. Well, there had be a cheaper option, yeah?

I did some more research, and I found a picture online of this homemade hay feeder. A much better idea! But I could do even better.

Voila:




A garbage bin, an old basketball net, and... that's it! All you do is fasten it to the fence, lift off the lid at mealtimes, and dump in the (fluffed up) hay. Maresie does the rest!

Cost? About $18. If I had used an old haynet or a recycled garbage bin or barrel, it would have been even cheaper.

It was super, super easy to make... all I did was punch holes in the bin and tie the net on, then tie the bottom of the net closed. It's a pretty tough net, but if she chews through it, I will use a tougher small mesh hay net instead.

We'll see how well it ends up working!

(More on slow feeders here if you are interested!)


SHE ARRIVES TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!