Calming placebo mask

Do you want your horse to calm down with a piece of tack? This is something new to me! A face mask that brings the horse's nerves down. 

I've heard of thunder blankets for dogs during fireworks, heavy blankets for people with autism, and I know swaddling helps babies. So it's only logical that we can calm horses with some sort of wrap.

Now you can buy a spandex (titanium) mask for riding for 120$ . Some are calling it the placebo mask. If you feel it's helping your horse calm down, you'll be calmer.

You can get them with or without padded ear coverings, to further block out stimuli.

 

Linda Tellington-Jones, who I've respected since 1987 with her TTouch work on my horse Baasha, has lately employed medical wraps around a horse's head and body to simulate physical awareness during groundwork. I put Mag through a wrap session and see no problem with it. Now I wonder if this mask thing was based on her body wrap work. 

However I'm calling this the placebo mask cuz....I just can't call it anything else: )  

 

Do you whistle to your horse as a verbal aid?

My trainer has always done this with Mag. She whistles a tone that lowers to request him to slow down. I thought it was just her but I just watched a video of a German trainer teaching a horse to trail ride and he did the exact same whistle. (Here is the link to the video, at :53 he whistles and brr's the horse. He explains he's letting the horse go for demonstration purporses, to show that this horse will just go faster and faster to get away from stress.) 

I asked AI and it said it's not just Germany. Link explaining it. 

When I moved here I noticed there is no German word for "whoa/ho." They blow through their lips and make a brrr sound. It sounds silly to me but the horses know what it means. 

Now I guess that whistle is also a cue. 

Have you ever done this in the US or Canada, or heard anyone do it? Curious!

Here's a pic of me today enjoying the sunlight shining on my yarn, warming it up. Such a pleasant sensation while crocheting!

And here's Bellis today doing what she does on every sunny day in Winter - lining herself up to the sunshine sideways to get every bit of warmth into her body. 

 

 

 

Do horses have vanity?

"J, someone was wrong on the Internet again. More than one person." 

"How?"

"They said that letting children paint hand-prints on a horse is demeaning, dominating, and strips them of their dignity." 

Horses don't care if they have colorful paint on their bodies, in my experience, they don't understand the concept of looking ridiculous/silly. 

However, from Baasha, I learned that horses can feel insulted if you laugh at them. If I put something ridiculous on him he didn't care. But if I laughed, he crumpled and turned away, suffering. 

J retorted, "Your horse rolls in the mud every day, proving he cares what he looks like. He wants to be mud-covered." 

 "What!? He doesn't know how awful (or cool?) he looks, he rolls cuz of bugs or whatever."

There are horses who despite mostly clean stalls will make a pillow of a pile of poop, they have no concept of how they look afterwards. 

I'm sure that the therapy horse in the image was at best amused, at worst patiently enduring so many little kids touching him. But was his dignity insulted?  I don't think so.  

Flashback to 2005, riding my horse in downtown Seattle. My friend put a riding-diaper on her horse to catch poop. I said, "That's not dignified!" So I brought plastic sacks. Later, on my kneees on the sidewalk, trying to get the poop into the sack, she said, "You look real dignified down there.": )  

This is not the image of the hand-painted therapy horse, I lost that one. But this one popped up an hour later in an advertisement for riding therapy. Is he thinking, "Dear Lord don't let the other horses see me!"? LOL. 

It's what made my favorite part of The Horse and His Boy, "Do I really look ridiculous when I roll? I never thought about it. Do Narnian horses roll? What if they don't!?" The author really didn't get horses (proven on many other points) but I still love the vanity of Bree. 
 

Sunrise

A mosquito wouldn't let me sleep so I got up and took a walk. I was rewarded with the prettiest sunrise of my life. Normally a cell phone won't capture the colors correctly, but this came pretty close. 

Mordor's ocean! That blue part at the bottom was actually teal, a gorgeous green "wave." 

 

This is one of my favorite trees in the neighborhood, swaying in front of what looks to be the horse-head nebula.

J drove by me and honked on his way to work. A friendly neighbor stopped with her dog to say hi. The dog didn't jump on me so I pet it and said "good dog" in English.

J said I should submit my photos to the local news station which puts an image on air every evening. I was too late and someone else got to them first. Her photo was not nearly as good as mine, dangit! 

 

What a waste: Our 2025 hay crop

We had problems this year. 

Last year we made enough hay, so much so, that we sold a third of it and still are running on it today, 13 months later. I was joyous, I'd neve experienced such a perfect crop: we paid our farmer 600 Euros, helping ourselves, of course, with the harvest and stacking, and were able to sell about 300 Euros worth so we fed our animals for 300 for a full year. 

This year it all changaed. Our farmer had health issues and couldn't mow our field. We had only one alternative and he flaked out on us. 

So, it's been painful every day to go out there and see a hay field that could have fed so many animals, as hay, haylage, or silage for local cows. But no. 

The fall-back farmer (who is the political/media presence for farmers in our city) finally came out and said we'd wasted everything, our hay is too old to harvest in any way - he said, taking a head of grass in his hands, "It's got mold already building inside - it's not a product I'd sell with a good conscience." 

I thought, nonsense, last year we harvested 4 weeks earlier and all was fine. But I guess his reputation is on the line. He is, afterall, the leader of the Tractor Lights event every year, where farmers dress up their tractors in Christmas lights and go around our town passing every nursing home with a glorious display. He also is in the news regularly representing farmers' rights.  I knew him from this Tractor Lights Christmas event cuz I work with the Red Cross. I work in the parade cuz they need us to mitigate problems that might occur with ppl riding on tractors without seatbelts, I guess. Anyway, this dude is an important figure in our city.

And he was condescending, telling us we need to get our act together and harvest our hay properly in June/July. Right, but this year we couldn't make it happen, so we paid way too much money to him for the mulching of our field, which was a terrible price to pay for such pure waste. 

I walked across my field today and it smelled so sweet and perfect, I simply don't believe that it couldn't have been used in some way. Oh well, I'm just "city folk" as they call us here.

Before picture, last week: 

 The green grass is my animals' track system, which runs around our hay field.

 

It's hard to see the difference, I know, but the pasture has been mulched down to the ground and hopefully will recover and produce good hay next year. 
 

 

 

The horse invention I've been waiting for

Mag has been in training for the last 2 years to help him with past trauma. Taking him out in traffic has been dreadful, and since this is Europe, if you ride horses, you ride in traffic. 

His trainer is a young lady named Ali whose style of natural horsemanship is of the slow variety. She prioritizes calmness over submission, and he still expresses himself dramatically every lesson. 

Mag is extremely mouthy, it's really cute how he puts everything in his mouth. But when I rode him it was annoying, (not only eating, he likes to grab the reins!) and when Ali is working with him on the street it's also no fun. It's a game for him, how many different things he can put in his mouth per session. Even cigarette butts, it's crazy. If a dog left its stick on the street, Mag will get it. 

My donkey, on the other hand, has learned I don't like it, and she never grabs snacks until I tell her it's OK to graze. She's the type that is always planning for famine, as most donkeys are, so I'm pleased that she accepts the rule. Mag has never thought about famine, he just gets stressed, bored, or playful, and grabs snacks. 

At home here Ali is forced to work in a fenced off section of field, so he doesn't have to even drop his head very low to grab long strands of grass. 

Yesterday facebook showed me a solution that I had thought up years ago, and someone finally produced. 

Anti-grazing-net. Not the strap that some ponies wear, but a simple fly-screen type mesh that straps around the horse's muzzle and prohibits eating. I love this solution because unlike anti-grazing reins, the horse can drop his head as low as it likes. 

I think most of all this would help little kids whose arms are not strong enough to keep their ponies from eating (though it won't help with rooting behavior). And it's not a crutch for the kids, they still have to learn. 

They are designed to be used with a bit if desired.

So glad someone else came up with this and actually manufactured it!

The online shop where you can get it is here. 

Brewer's yeast for horses

I'm curious if there is any merit to feeding brewer's yeast. My husband bought a bucket by mistake and I thought what the heck, let's see if it does anything. 

It's a probiotic, I guess, and the label says it's useful during shedding season, or for horses with loose stools. 

Germans always say shedding hair affects the immune system negatively, and horses require supplements bi-annually during these times. 

Someone please say so if it's not a good thing.