Quite frosty this morning and enjoyed seeing the "hair raising" effects it has on the horses. Standing in early morning sunshine with white puffs being exhaled from the nostrils of my dragon like equines. Yikes! Did I write that? That's bad!
I went to a presentation at Equine Gatherings this past Thursday given by my farrier, Darrin, and his wife, Kerry Koob. Natural Hoof Care was the topic. In the year and a half since he has been doing my boys I cannot tell you how much I have really learned. It's not just about feet, it's the total horse. 2 hours was just not enough to listen, question and absorb all the info given. But I did come away with some new ideas to keep my boys happy and healthy.
Paddock Paradise. You can Google it, Jaime Jackson, wrote a book about keeping with the natural roaming instinct of horses. In other words, getting them moving in as natural an environment as possible. I always had the right idea, feeding them in different areas, but they were designated areas and becoming a mess and a waste of hay. So first thing yesterday morning, in my jammies, I loaded up a bale of hay and walked the perimeter fence throwing out a few flakes at intervals along the way.
You would have thought those two horses had been shot up with some happy juice! Running, bucking, snorting and squealing. In a few minutes they settled down and were happily munching away and moving from pile to pile. Now in the past they would eat out of a designated hay spot, recent rains made the areas a mess and there was lots of wasted hay. At 2:30p yesterday afternoon, there was still hay on the ground. I did not need to pull another full bale to get them through the night and this morning ALL, every scrap of hay was gone!!!! Nothing was wasted.
THAT made me very happy and I am sure they are glad not to be standing pastern deep in muck. So now I know I can feed them their hay and that it's not wasted, they are moving, and seem quite content with the change. Winter will be a bit tricky for me so I am now planning how to deal with it. Now that I have a guideline on how to go about this I can implement more of the natural environment my boys deserve.
I'll have to look that up. Sometimes I spread hay piles over and around the 1 1/2 acre paddock I keep my mare in and she seems to enjoy that. She probably prefers for me to keep the hay all in one place, though. She tends to be very lazy. The only time she bucks and plays is when I chase her for fun. We play paddock games where I hide behind trees and she comes to find me, too. When I pastured her with other horses and they wanted to play she'd just lay her ears flat and bare her teeth. She's kind of a sourpuss. lol!
ReplyDeleteI know you have two horses, but do you really feed a couple of bales a hay a day? My mare gets about 2 flakes of hay at each feeding, so about a 1/4 of a 3-string bale per day.
Our hay is $16.00 a bale now. I can't imagine feeding my mare a bale a day. Whew! She's already such a chubs that she has no waist line and no ribs to feel and looks ripe! lol!
~Lisa
~Lisa
OH gosh no! They get 1 bale, for both, each day. So they each get approx 4 flakes (depends on the bale) a day. Sorry, I did not mean for it to sound as if they were eating so much.
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