Author Archives: Katie

Camp for wayward animal prints

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Animal prints.  They can be super chic or super trashy.  Scalamandre…

Scalamandre’s silk velvet fabric

…or Jerseylicious.

Jersey-icky

Or they can be Campy, when we put them on horses.  Those of you who know the sedate side of me (and my tendency to harp on what’s wrong in the Age of Vulgarity) will understand when I say — and I don’t care about the Camp — that there’s something wrong here.

At least that was my thought when I saw an ad for Farnam’s Super Mask with Shimmer Weave mesh (sounds like a Cover Girl commercial, doesn’t it?).  It comes in 4 colors, with different trims and two of those trims are animal prints.

Not just any animals, mind you, but animals that eat horses. The lynx and the cheetah.  They eat horses, don’t they?

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Farm Show

03 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Farm Life, How to Spend Your Money

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If you live on a farm, it’s important to keep your sense of humor.

I live on a farm, and I don’t even grow things, so the weather can’t ruin my day — or year — the way it can for real farmers.   Still, if I didn’t keep my sense of humor, things would be a lot more grim.

Laughing is a good alternative to crying when your tractor breaks down during your final mow and you can’t repair it yourself and the only person you trust to repair it is too busy repairing other people’s larger and more numerous tractors to return your phone call.  And when you think about the fact that it might cost $3000 to repair your tractor if and when he gets around to coming back.

Laughing is a good alternative when you’re about to walk out your front door and you spy a bear walking down your driveway.  And then wonder what you would have said (or more likely, screamed) if you had suddenly found yourself facing him.

Laughing is a good alternative when every spring, rocks burst forth from the earth as if you had planted a crop last fall, despite the fact that you saw none before the last snow fell.

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How to spend your money – the perfect stud chain

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in How to Spend Your Money

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A place for everything and everything in its place.  What a great idea.

I suppose the fact that I didn’t have a place for my stud chain when I took it off the new horse when he arrived is the reason I can’t find it.  I’ve looked everywhere for it.  But as my darling and analytic ex-husband used to point out to me, if it’s not where you think it must be, it must be where you think it’s not.

I looked there too.  It’s nowhere.  Maybe I’ll find it some day.  But I couldn’t wait for some day.

So I dug out my old TTouch lead — the one that has a brass-plated (now corroded) chain attached to the poor man’s version of a leather stallion lead, this one made of woven nylon.

That would have to do until I could replace the stud chain I lost.  But when I went to ebay, where I’d bought the last one, there were none available.  Little wonder.  The last one was a great deal, at $26.19 including shipping.

Where to go for a 30″ solid brass stud chain?  Sellers of such are few and far between, it seems.  I found one online, which sold a chain that looked just like the one I’d lost, and then I thought of Quillin’s and their impeccable reputation. I searched for “stud chain” on their site and all I got was “stallion shank,” so I picked up the phone and called Kentucky.

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Tuck and Rolls

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by in Sunday Photos

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Ralph Coffin jumping his horse over Sylvanus Stoke’s Rolls Royce, 1916.

Are horses Conservatives?

31 Saturday Mar 2012

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That’s what I’ve been wondering ever since I read a review of Chris Mooney’s new book, The Republican Brain:  The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality.  Now, before you get in a tizzy over the subtitle, take a deep breath and think about horses grazing in a field.

There, that’s better, isn’t it?

If you’re a Conservative, you can relax, because despite the title of Mooney’s book, it looks like you and your horse are on the same page.  At least when it comes to amygdalas.

In case you didn’t know, the amydgala is where “the fight or flight reflex” is housed.  And while I can’t tell you how the relative size of the equine amygdala compares to ours (can someone enlighten me?), I can tell you that the equine amygdala as a percentage of cerebral volume is higher than that of a cow or a pig.

Horse Frightened by a Lion by George Stubbs, 1770

However, when it comes to Elephants and Donkeys, it’s even more enlightening.  It turns out that the amydgalas of Conservatives are bigger than those of Liberals.  The “startle reflexes” of Conservatives are also keener, it is said.

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Keep calm and carry on

30 Friday Mar 2012

Posted by in Inspiration, Training

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Regular readers of the comments on my blog probably feel like they know the woman who goes by the name “Elaine” the way they know their other barn friends.  They’re also familiar with her current horse Dini, whom she often mentions, and who you can see below.  (If you’ve been missing Elaine’s comments, you should check them out, since she’s shared some great stories here on the blog.)

Prince Houdini, otherwise known as Dini...or the Prince

Elaine is a friend and a student, and Dini is a horse I had in training before I broke my back.  Dini’s had the winter off, and Elaine has big plans for him this spring.   We just talked about bringing him back into shape again with March-ing! and long-lining.  Bravo to Elaine, she’s going to be doing the work herself. I’m there to support her.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the latest copy of Dressage Today, and read a letter from Elaine about her and her beloved Dini.  She hadn’t told me she’d written it, but she knew I’d see the letter if it went to press.  That’s Elaine.  She’s forthright and speaks her mind (as I do) but she’s a strategist. She’s had to be, with her current horse, whose thrown her a series of curve balls that would make most horsewomen retire their boots.

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The sun shines

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in Farm Life, Training

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Those who followed the recent Thunderstorm-Thoroughbred-New Horse events at my farm, recounted in today’s earlier blog post, and who are hoping for clearer skies along with me, may be happy to hear tonight’s report.

No storms today, but it was overcast and a little windy.  The little windy part is another trigger for my hypersensitive Thoroughbred, who, when he first arrived here, would fling himself agains the gate at the first 15 mph gust and not stop until he was brought inside.  That behavior, too, has diminished through the years as we asked him ever so gradually to endure just a little bit more.  Now the winds have to be 30 mph or higher before he freaks out.

He ran at Hialeah in Florida, so it’s always been my suspicion that he witnessed something frightening happening as a result of high winds — a hurricane, perhaps, or a barn collapse.  I was also told that a trailer he was traveling in blew apart while on the highway.  Bet that sounded windy.  Do I need to tell you that he’s not a good loader?  He gets on now without rearing and flipping over, but he still gets light on his front feet in an instant.  That’s my boy.

Happily, the new horse, who possesses the calm demeanor of a successful Kindergarten teacher, couldn’t care less about the wind, and is a role model for rationality.  Unfortunately, as you’re well aware if you read my earlier post today, that highly developed rationality makes him question why he should do something just because I’m asking him to.

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Bad weather

29 Thursday Mar 2012

Posted by in Farm Life

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Yesterday morning, my retired Thoroughbred had an episode.  An episode of what, I’m not sure.  When I got up the hill to feed breakfast, he was weaving maniacally (he used to weave all the time, now it’s rare and half-hearted if it happens).

When he wasn’t weaving, he was tossing his head up and down, barely missing the top of the window in his shed row stall.  His eyes were open as if he needed to see more than he could see, and his nostrils were flared.  It was as if the skin on his face had stretched along the fine bones of his classic Thoroughbred head.

When I opened the door, I saw his legs shaking — first the left front, then the left hind, then both fronts.  Periodically, he’d spin around in his stall, a series of beautiful pirouettes.  Light and graceful he’s always been, and on the rare occasions when he shows me his talent, it still takes my breath away.

He was staring down the hill.  I thought it might be a bear.  Or some other creature, terrifying alive or terrifying dead.  The only other times I’d seen a reaction as extreme as this was when I’d seen him weaving so fast his head was a blur…and then as I drove out to the road, saw a bear ambling along not five feet past my passenger door.  The other time was during the winter, a less extreme reaction than what I was seeing now, but similar.  For days, he was uneasy.  And it was only when the snow melted that we saw the dead deer by the stream — its body preserved by the snow and ice, its neck broken against a tree.

As my horse had hysterics, I watched from outside the stall, and my Yankee-Irish horse whispering boyfriend went into the stall to try to calm him down, his voice soothing and his hands stroking my horse’s back and hindquarters.  I saw my horse lift a leg and I said, “Watch out, he just lifted a leg.”  My boyfriend was out of the way when my horse let go with both hinds.  Perfectly synchronized, perfectly elegant, perfectly dangerous.

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Pigs in the stall

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Farm Life, Horse Care

≈ 8 Comments

Have you ever been told that your horse is a pig in his stall?  Have you — please tell me it’s not true — ever said it yourself, about your own horse or anyone else’s?

If so, you should know that it may be common as far as insults to equines go, but it’s totally inaccurate.

You see, pigs are actually very clean animals — some of the cleanest on the planet, based on their behavior.  Although they like to wallow in the mud, it’s only because it keeps them cool, since pigs can’t sweat.  So, along with encouraging people to stop referring to horses as pigs in their stalls, I’m going to encourage people to stop talking about “sweating like a pig.”

Perhaps one of the reasons that pigs are so averse to manuring in their homes is because they have excellent senses of smell.  That’s what makes them such good truffle harvesters.  And those famous noses are pretty close to the ground, no matter what breed of pig it is.  Just as horse’s noses are when they eat or sleep lying down in their stalls.

Interestingly, both pigs and horses share a vomeronasal organ (VNO) — an additional chemosensory organ absent in humans.  If you’ve seen a horse exhibiting the flehmen response, you’ve watched a horse bringing scent into his VNO. We have no idea how well either pigs or horses smell compared to the way we smell, but based on anatomy, they seem to have an advantage.

Horses’ stalls are their houses and their havens, just as much as ours are.  In order to understand how they might feel in their stalls, we should try living in a small closet.  That should be fine, right?  As long as we’re in there alone all night and there’s another closet nearby, and there’s a hole we can peek out of?

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Herd in Iceland

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Uncategorized

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My Yankee-Irish horsewhispering boyfriend subscribes to Harper’s.  The April issue arrived recently, and I came across it on the kitchen table.  The last page is the place where the feature called “Findings” regularly appears, and it’s my favorite part of the magazine.

For those unfamiliar with Harper’s Findings, they’re a lengthy list of interesting or amusing factoids.  Animals feature prominently and that makes it even better.  For example, this month, I learned that:

Caudal fin of the right whale

Since 9/11, the feces of right whales were found to have reduced levels of stress hormones.

Physicists can derive the shape of any ponytail using the Ponytail Shape Equation and the Rapunzel Number.  They’re talking about hair styles but I know this would work for real pony (or horse) tails.

People in China are less likely than residents of the UK to focus on the eyes when asked to evaluate the faces of sheep.

See why I like this page?  Where else will you find information like this?

This month’s Findings was (were?) even better than usual, because it (they?) displayed a triptych of photographs of flaxen manes against chestnut coats as a banner along the top of the page.  “Look! Horses!,” I exclaimed out loud when I saw it, but then I say the same thing when I’m driving through Millbrook and there’s someone in the car who might have missed the tenth pair in two miles.  Sometimes I’m still a little girl in love with horses.

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