Miscellaneous stuff from the week

The high point of this week was that the horses started going out! On Tuesday they started easing back into turnout, with those that have been handgrazed getting 1.5 hours and slowly building over the course of the week. I think tomorrow they may be up to "full time," about 4 hours.

Now that Dude and Bestie are both going out in the afternoon, when we arrive at 4 pm-ish they are both kind of dozy. Today when I got there they were both napping, but perked up when they saw me. Once they're up to "full time," they'll be out from around 11/11:30 until about 3:30/3:45. This had been hard for me in particular to adjust to, given the fact that they had both become accustomed to all-day turnout at the former place. Ah well.

I stuck with my resolution to work Bestie and lunged her every other day this week. I'm hoping to get on for a ride tomorrow. She's been pretty good and responsive on the line, even cantering both ways, which I didn't have much success with before. Not sure what changed, but it's great!

Bad week at the barn with three falls off horses. Two with no ill effects, one with a broken leg. Yikes. The last was a huge surprise ... I would never have thought that particular mare would toss her rider. Sympathy and good wishes go out to her for a recovery. Lots of emotions after something like that happens.

I've been holding the Himalayan salt lick that I got at Everything Equine for Bestie to lick for a few minutes. I don't think I'm going to put it in her stall because it seems like she'd lick it endlessly. There are some comments on the web about horses doing just that ... which doesn't seem good for them. Also some comments from a vet on how these things are pretty useless; that the minerals they contain aren't really that needed by the horse and that a plain old salt/mineral block is preferable.

There's really not a lot of good information about the Himalayan blocks on the web, mostly marketing hype. Maybe another fad of the moment. But Bestie does like it,no doubt about it, and the funny thing is, Dude wouldn't touch it. I held it up to him and he sniffed it and then turned his head away. I wonder what's with that? It's kind of interesting because we try to monitor his potassium intake due to the HPYY background, although we don't go crazy about it. Before we had him tested he always had a salt/mineral block in his stall, but he hardly ever licked it. In fact, we never saw him licking it and we never had to replace it. I heard an herbalist talking once about horses eating what they need from a pasture, like one day they'd eat plantain and one day they wouldn't, depending on what nutrients they needed. Maybe Dude was monitoring his own potassium intake?