Prep for cold, no horse sense

Winter is coming today; at least for a day or two. The temperatures are predicted to drop into the low twenties with winds gusting twenty to thirty miles per hour. No matter where you live, that’s chilly. In preparation for that Mama and I put windows on the open (south) side of the chicken coop. A couple years ago my Mom and Dad gave us a couple dozen old windows.

We have used them in various ways on the farm. Putting them on the chicken coop to cover the areas built into it for ventilation is one of the ways they get used year by year. I plan to use as many as I can on the hot house we are planning to build sometime in the future, but that may be another year out – two is the doors open for us to go to Australia.

I also removed the multiple hose bibs from the spigots on the farm. During warmer weather we use them to hook up multiple hoses to one spigot but in freezing weather they get pulled off and all hoses removed so the spigots do not hold any water above ground which would cause them to freeze and bust. That would cause me a good deal of work to replace or repair the rupture. It makes it a little more time consuming for Mama to fill the water troughs but it is an easy preventive exercise.

Mama called me yesterday morning to tell me that Misty was acting differently; like she was really struggling to breathe. She was not moving very much and she was hanging her head down. That is not normal for her. So Mama called Wes. He came out to the farm on his lunch hour to check the horse out. It turns out she has colic.

There are three types of colic a horse can get and the kind she had was from overeating grain. The two more severe types are less common but manifest the same symptoms. While Wes was there Misty went into her jumping and bucking fit and Mama told Wes how much that scared us. Wes laughed and told Mama that that was a horse’s way of showing how happy she was that someone was there to play with her. Boy, are we ignorant!

Wes went on to show Mama how to teach her some manners; how to back her off if she is following too closely, how to get her attention and calm her down when she it too excited; how to tell if she is mad or happy. He may take Misty and run her with some other horses for a while to teach her how to behave around humans and other horses, but I do not know if that was settled yet.

Mama mentioned that we may be traveling next year and she was not sure if Victoria could handle Misty on her own. Wes offered to keep her for us during that time and speculated that when we got back she might be broken to ride.

No telling if that is going to happen or not but it is a better outcome than I had thought possible only a day of two ago.