Pitfalls of a Pasture Horse

When your horse lives on pasture with 6 other mares...

And your horse has major attitude and refuses to be the bottom rung...

And they introduce 2 new members to the pasture...

And your horse is extremely food motivated...

You find this:



Here, let me put my man-hand in there for reference:



And then there was this:


A cankle!

And this:


Inside and right above the hock on the cankle leg

And worst of all, this:



Here, let me pick the scab off for you:


Eeeewwwwww...

Sigh. This was about two weeks ago. Fortunately, the swelling was only caused by soft tissue trauma, i.e. getting kicked and the tendon itself was not damaged. It took about a week for it to go away completely, but she was never lame during that period. The gash (from a kick) healed fairly nicely, and hardly a scar is visible. The rake on her haunches is another story; the hair has just now started growing back in!

Another Day In The Life...

I know, I know. Another picture-less post. I really don't like posting without pictures, but sometimes things happen that I want to share, to fill you in on, and pictures just don't get taken. But, I'm trying to keep the wording as minimal as possible.

Last night after a lovely park adventure with the dogs, we found a bleeding cat at home. It wasn't gushing blood or anything, but it definitely was a fresh wound. On a white cat. So it stuck out like a sore thumb.

Cowboy H, as wonderful, loving and caring as he is, helped me expose the wound and clean it up. I did the holding, since I know how to properly hold a pissed off cat while someone is pouring Hydrogen Peroxide into its fresh wound. What we discovered was a single, medium sized hole.

So, now we are trying to figure out what caused the hole. (It's definitely not a puncture wound.) There is the possibility that another cat hooked my Indy with one claw, right as Indy was starting to run away, and the one claw pulled the skin a little, leaving a larger than normal hole. The other possibility is that yet another one of my cats was the victim of an idiot with a bee-bee or pellet gun. We can't feel anything under Indy's skin near the wound, but the hole is about the right size.

In the mean time, we now have a holy cat.

A lead head and a holy cat.

The Homestead is becoming an interesting place...

Well, I Never Thought of That...

Editor's Note: After discussing this with Cowboy H, I learned that Olivia has a pellet in her head, not a bee bee. A bee bee would not have mushroomed the way the pellet did. The fact that a pellet gun was used is even more upsetting because they can do much more damage than a bee bee gun.

If something, like a bee bee, is embedded into a bone, then it wouldn't move around. Which is exactly why the bump on top of Olivia's head wouldn't move. It is stuck in her skull. And its staying there.




Do you see it? Its a little hard to miss. One of the girls at my work could see it from across the room. My poor baby. She got pretty lucky though, apparently it didn't go all the way through her skull, and so far she's still normal (for her that is.)

Now, to find out who's shooting bee bee guns in a cul-de-sac neighborhood...

Maybe I'll have to stick Cowboy H on them.

He can do a little detective work.