Telpe's Bling

...there's one in every barn.

This is Telpe being ... well, she's just being Telpe and I'm not sure there is much else to say about it except -- this is the horse your momma warned you about.

This is the kind of filly I warn buyers to look out for... now give me a minute to explain that. I've done a lot of match-making over the years and one thing I've tried to explain to new or first time horse owners is to look at a horse's scars. Most horses that have done anything at all are going to have something to show for it. That's not a big deal. But you have to understand that if three of four legs are criss-crossed, and there are marks on the chest, head and/or butt... you have to KNOW that this horse is an instigator.

Telpe has all that and more, from a ripped eye-lid to a fractured hind leg.

I'm certainly not saying not to buy a horse like that, they frequently have more drive and more personality and in many ways can make a better horse than one that's complacent. (They certainly are more fun for authors because of the conflict and chaos they create) But you have to understand what you're getting into. This is a horse that will actively seek out every hole in your fence; this is the horse that will stand at the gate and fiddle with the latch until they figure it out (yes, Telpe's gate has a clip on it that requires a thumb to open)((it's on the *outside* of the panel so she can't easily reach it)); this is the horse that will go through any gate or open door, just to see what's in there.

The reason Telpe is wearing a tire is a little complex. She normally stays with the herd in a 20 acre pasture, but she has been a little thin (she's 2yo and growing too fast too keep up with) so I brought her up to stay in the barn for awhile, treated her with an extra dose or wormer and have been 1) feeding her extra and 2) minimally restricting her exercise.

Over the course of a couple of months, her weight is coming up nicely, but we'd noticed that she was drinking a lot of water. Waaaaay a lot, like two to three times daily what a mature horse should be drinking. After consultation the vet, we decided it was likely a behavioral issue (boredom) and that in additional to several-times-weekly (light) work (which she was already getting) that she needed some extra toys.

What I usually do it wash out an empty milk jug and drop a handful of grain in it and toss it in the stall for them to throw around, but those don't last more than a day with her, so I hung up the tire for her to play with, and dropped a handful of grain (where she couldn't reach it -- I thought) in the inside of the tire. It took her less than 14 minutes to get to the grain, but she seemed very happy with her tire since her neighbors were, of course, quite jealous that she had a tire and they didn't.

Now, the problem didn't come until two days later when I put Miree's grain in Miree's nosebag and let Miree eat out of her nosebag. That's a problem because, up until getting the tire, Telpe had been eating out of Miree's nosebag.

SO I'm out at the barn, doing various chores, waiting for those that get morning feed to finish up when I notice it's suspiciously quiet in Telpe's corner. (Those of you who have toddlers or teenagers know what I'm talking about).

.... so I'm sitting here trying to describe the situtation and find I don't have any words that don't seem to overstate the obvious - so from this point, I'll just let the photo do the talking.

Where's the ka-boom?

There is usually at least a small ka-boom when someone asks a question that should have a simple answer that actually requires discussion.

Like a couple of days ago, Js was out helping feed. He brought back a stack of empty buckets and waited in the doorway.

"Do the girls in the shark pen get a bump?" Now, I knew that 'the girls' meant 'the mares' in the 'shark pen' - is what we call the mare pasture because of the daily feeding frenzy.

'a bump' is a "bump bucket" ... that is, when I pasture feed (set feeders out in the pasture with loose horses) I fill five buckets for four horses. That way, when the dominate horse 'bumps' the others down the line, the last horse still gets to eat.

The only problem is that kind of question makes my brain implode.

Because it's not a simple "yes" or "no" kind of situation. Because: two of the mares share a bucket, so "yes" there *is* a bump, but .... he didn't ask the right question. What he meant to ask was: "How many buckets did he need to carry out there?"

If I had answered his original question: "do they get a bump?" "YES" (because there is a bump available) he would have filled and carried five buckets for four mares, which normally would be right - but in that particular case, with the two mares sharing, it would have set out two bumps instead of just one - which is not a disaster, but it is wasteful.

If I had twisted my mind around what I thought he needed to know and said "NO" - what if I had misunderstood what it was he meant to ask and there was another meaning .... and so I took a deep breath ... "What you mean is, 'how many buckets do you need to carry out there?'."

He stared at me for a moment and then nodded. problem solved.

Our little exchange stayed on my mind because it struck me I've seen that conversation gone over in writers groups - how important it is to say what you mean and how hard it can be to get exactly the right thing down on paper. Or how much fun it can be to ask one question and answer another... yes, I'm evil that way. ;)

- and so today, my son was with me, waiting in the truck while I fueled up and we had parked beside a piece of (very odd looking) heavy machine.

"What is that?" he asked.

I stared at it blankly ... and finally realized it was a "Traffix Device". It said so right on the big ugly butt of the thing. Traffix device and Traffixdevice.com

And I told him so, in a confident tone that implied I knew what I was talking about. ... "It's a Traffic Device."

But having had to put up with me for his entire life thus far, he wasn't fooled, but he smoothed it over. "What's it for?" he asked in an even tone.
I shrugged. "No idea."

He blinked at me and stared in the way that kids do when they know they can't say to their parents "that was stupid".

I just shrugged again. "I guess you asked the wrong question, then."

...but the funnest part of it all was just a couple of hours later, he turned it back on me when I was the one to ask the wrong, inane question. We had a laugh over it, but (and this is probably a whole 'nuther post) the best part for me was knowing feeling that - boy-childs do (sometimes) listen to their mom's, but more than that, that something had connected inside him and grown him a little bit and given him a little sharper focus on this tough world we live in.

Chicken Dance

We have chickens again! .... of course that's totally not horse or writing related, but what the heck. :)

They are in a pen for now, but once they get used to the area we'll start letting them out. I got my first chickens a few years ago for natural fly control. They scratch in the horse poo -- that kills the fly larva and it breaks the cycle so we have less flies in the barn. They really do a better job than anyone can imagine that hasn't had free range chickens at the barn. (So see! ...this post is horse related, and writing related as well if you're writing about horses that would be in a barn.)

And the eggs! We were totally spoiled with fresh eggs and have been missing them terribly. These girls are young but have started laying already... and, yes, I'm already licking my lips... fried eggs, scrambled eggs, egg salad sandwich -- yumm!

We won't mention that they were delivered to me in a dog crate at the Last Hoorah endurance ride... or that one immediately escaped ... or that me, my son, and Thomas were running around chasing the chicken at the ride camp...

oh no. we won't tell any of that because silly (stupid) crazy stuff like that never happens to me. oh no. not me. *sigh*

Helpy-horsies

I often get emails asking if a horse would do this or that specific thing and most of the time my answer is "it depends". Horses are as individual as people. They can be bold or shy or have unusual likes, dislikes or habits.

I would buy a horse doing almost anything in a book if the author had developed it's character to foreshadow the possibility. One nosey young mare I raised had a long list 'did you see?'s, including changing the station on the radio and pulling the spark plug wires out of my truck. Another one loved to 'help out' with the welding by dragging the cables around and changing the settings. I heard last weekend that one of my grown up fillies has been rearranging the tool shed - the people had been blaming the grandkids, but the truth is out!


Right now, in my herd, I have a high percent of young horses. One thing I have noticed is that from about the age of about 1-2 years up through their 3 and 4 year old years, they are very anxious to have people-interaction and to please. These are the ages when they'll push their way between you and the riding-horse you're trying to halter and crowd the gate or when they'll do things like bite the saddle or pull the bridles off the hangers.

This age tends to be an in-between age as far as training because they already know the basics of how to lead and tie, let people handle their ears and hoofs and accept a light saddle pad and girth, but their baby bones and muscles aren't ready for a rider yet. They can feel neglected with the lack of training and that's where you can get into trouble with an intelligent horse because they start looking for ways, by their baby horsey logic, not only to help you out but ways get your attention. It can be good or bad, depending on how dedicated they are and what they come up with.


A couple of weeks ago, I was swapping horses between pastures and my trio of young fillies all got in the act.


One of the other young ladies got away from me before I unbuckled her halter and so we were doing the dosey-dance around the cedars in the front pasture. After watching for a few minutes, LUINIL apparently decided that ASILA couldn't figure out which way to go, so she trots out alongside her and starts leading her out to the pasture. (grrrrrr!) I cut loose with a bit of harsh language - shocking poor LUINIL - and when she turned and looked at me, I called her to come. She had the funniest look on her face, and looked at ASILA like "what the heck", and came right to me. ASILA kept running around, being silly and after a few minutes, here comes TELPE, nosing up and standing quiet with me and LUINIL.


What they were doing is showing ASILA that 'by me' is where she should be. Horses have an interesting concept, it's a little hard to explain. They don't really understand "come to me". They can learn the human version easily enough, but as a directive, it's not a natural phrase to them because "close-together'=safe is so deeply instinctively ingrained that it's never needed. "Go away" is, basically, a punishment with the reward being the removal of the "go away" allows them to return. Consider that a horse herd like a little pack of magnets. It takes an effort to pull one away, but for it to return you simply release it.


I'm not ASILA's 'mom', so it isn't natural for her to come to me. She doesn't like wearing the halter and rope and she had no way to know that I was trying to take it off of her. By LUINIL and TELPE coming to stand beside me, they created a .... go back to our magnet example .... 'pull' to bring her in to me. And it worked. After a couple of minutes, she slipped right up between the other two and I was able to take her halter off.


The other 'escapee' was our young gelding LANDROVAL. He had found a good patch of grass outside the gate and would dance around and circle without letting me catch his halter. TELPE came up, as close to us as she could, but it wasn't a strong enough pull for him. He would go to her then dart away again and snatch another mouthful of grass.

The third helpful young lady in this little saga is Miree (MIREYENION) who is practicing to one day be Boss Mare and so she's very much clued in to who is being good and who is being bad. She gets pretty upset when someone is bad - she'll be extra good, I guess to try to offset the badness(?). And she needs a lot of reassurance as to her goodness and the rightness of the universe.


So she was pacing at the gate, getting increasingly agitated with LANDROVAL's badness and when I finally caught his rope and walked him through the gate, as soon as I slipped his halter off and stepped away she lunged and took a huge bite out of his shoulder!!


I usually don't tolerate aggression like that, but I also have a policy not to interfere in 'horse business' as long as they don't kick or bite when a person is close. But in this case - she was right, he had been bad - and she was soooooo proud of herself, I just couldn't help but give her just a tiny bit of praise. She's not normally a biter or an aggressive mare - and I can't help but think there may come a day when I need her to watch my back.

How Many What?

Why is that such a common and such a difficult question?

When someone hears that I have horses, they'll ask a few nicey-nice questions and then pop the big one ... "how many?"

My jaw drops and my mind goes blank. It's not that it's a bad question, and I don't consider it rude, but it's a little more complicated than that.

"How many what? How many horses or how many equid? We do have a donkey you know. Are you asking how many I own or how many I feed each day because not all of mine are living with me and not all the ones that live with me are mine. And what about the co-owns and the leases? Do I count them as half a horse each or do the ones that live with me each get a count of 'one' with no count for the ones I own that aren't here?

The jaw flaps a little as I try to make up a number, because, really, once you get over about four, it doesn't really matter. Not until you have to buy wormer and that's by weight, not by head. Vaccines are by head count as are feed buckets.

So, I own, outright: Gwaihir and Gandalf (who is not a horse), Telpe, Miree, Landroval, Luinil (who is technically leased although she hasn't left yet), Beri, Cimmi, Witness, Vaniah and Shahin. That's eleven if you count the donkey, but the last three don't live with me. Marah, Morwen and Glamdring do, and I co-own them with my Uncle. He pays their bills and I do all the work. Halaalwe is living here in exchange for Witness living at the breeders. Sarah, Hadha and Asila belong to someone else who boards them here.

So, I guess, I own somewhere between eight and a half horses, or thirteen depending on how you count the co-owns and the leases, and a donkey. I have fifteen here that I feed every day, but only eleven that I buy vaccine for, and only nine for wormer because anyone under 500lbs only counts for a half. ... so how many do I have!?

More on Horsekeeping

One thing that I hear a lot of yapyap about that doesn't really seem to sink into people is that horses are a 24x7x364 kind of responsibility. It's more appropriate to say that you have to keep up with them 28 hours a day, 10 days a week, 400 days a year. You simply don't take time off without taking a chance.

that doesn't mean you have to keep your peepers on them literally all the time, you take reasonable and calculated risks, because usually they're going to be fine. It's just that when things do go wrong they tend to go horribly wrong. And that tends to increase exponentially by the number of horses.

Yes, I've come home late from a party and found one cold and stiff the next morning. There's no good or easy way to deal with that.

Yes, I've gone casually to the barn and found one standing in a puddle, yes a puddle - horses are big animals, of blood. And that's something that can, usually, be dealt with. Pressure with one hand, cell phone with the other. ... as an aside, blood is not good for cell phones. - and I've stood and watched the vet drain puddles of blood out of a horse's stomach (via nastrogastric tube) when the guts shut down and were refluxing blood and fluids into the stomach.

So with 18 horses, I take calculated risks on a daily basis. I even travel on an irregular basis. Three day weekends are ok. Leave Friday, gone all day Saturday and home on Sunday. Any longer is hard. It's difficult to ask someone to take on, not just the physical difficulty of feeding 18 horses, but the emotional responsibility.

For the RWA National Convention, I left early on Wednesday morning and didn't get home until the next Sunday. My mother and youngest son pulled the load for me, and I have to say they did a good job with it. There was a minor incident, a relapse of a lameness that I that I suspected - Marah had a hoof abscess the previous week and needed to be up for a few more days. She's ok, just still moving slower than I would like.

But the 'biggie' was something that had apparently be going on for some time.

Leah came down from Dallas with me on Sunday and we went for a ride that afternoon. We rode around the back of our property and found where a fence had been washed down at some point during the recent flooding. ...not just down, but pushed down and washed across a popular trail - five strands of rusty barb wire tangled in with branches and flood debris and still attached to the downed fence posts.

No matter how long it had been down - apparently the horses hadn't been to that corner - it had to come up. A mare and a two fillies had followed us on our trail ride and were nosed in to the good flood-fed grazing. They would remember that and come back.

So regardless of the fact that I had a guest, regardless of the fact that I'd been gone for an exhausting week, regardless that I'd spent the last week in the A/C and it was hot as a witches cauldron down in that valley - regardless of anything ... once we got back to the barn, I gathered up my boys and we went back down and cut the downed wire out and brought it up out of the pasture.

Because that's what it takes - you can't be perfect, things are going to happen, but you have to handle the things that you find when you find them and know you've done the best you can.

and/but :) as a writer, it's fertile ground for conflict. Horses will find a way to debilitate themselves in the most innocuous circumstances, and usually when you most need them. You can ask any horseman about the preparation for a high-profile event. You can train for years, feed, condition, make all the lower level training events and the morning that you're packed and ready to leave, your prime athlete will come limping up to the gate, not just with a shoe pulled off, but with a section of hoof missing.

When your hero needs his mighty steed, it's likely that the stud has been kicked in the balls by a fractious mare, the mare will likely have been bitten in the back - where the saddle should go and leave the hero the choice of an elderly plowhorse or a half-trained colt.

Real-life Horsekeeping

Pasture management is a big topic among horse keepers. you can Google for information by county, how many acres it takes to support a horse or cow or goat on native pasture in a particular area. You can improve pasture by regular maintenance, mowing and seeding. it's typical to cross-fence and rotate pastures - all this can be Googled. Cows - as far as I know - are pretty straightforward, (Google again) but horses have such a complex social system that they take a little more management.

I have two largish pastures, a medium sized one, two smallish pastures, a 'run' that's really an alley between two pastures but easily accommodates an occupant. In addition to all that I have a barn with three pens designed with sheds, a holding pen and a riding area.

When I sort the horses into their pens and pastures, I consider their own statuses within the herd, their pecking orders... who gets along with who. I try to keep buddies together and separate trouble makers. If I have any skinnies or fatties, they have to go where they can be fed according to their special needs. Of course, the stallion has to be were he can't get to the open mares. Fencing is another consideration. We have some old fence, some new fence, some solid pipe and horse fence and some electric fence .... I have two generations of foals that were born and raised during our recent drought conditions that have learned they can slip through electric fence because for those years there literally wasn't enough moisture in the ground to conduct through their little hoofs - ...soooooo ... what's the bottom line in how the horses are sorted?

When all the machinations are done, and everyone is sorted, it finally comes down to the number of feed buckets I can carry at one time. That's where reality rears it's ugly head. Depending on if they get one, two, or three scoops of grain per feeding raises or lowers the number of buckets I can stack and carry and still open and close gates and, one-handed, pour the grain from the buckets into the feeders.

It seems to me that, when we research for our novels and stories, that we need to remember that things don't always work in real life they way the manual says thye're supposed to, and that there are usually circumstances that the manuals don't take into consideration - like how someone could possible carry 25 lbs in six buckets through two gates without the donkey tipping them out of your arms or the mares getting into the alley next to the stallion.