Anyone that has owned a horse for any period of time, knows how difficult it is to keep them safe. Horses are big strong animals and it is very easy to forget that they are actually prey animals at heart. Big, Strong, and Fast are not at the top of their brain stem when things go wrong. THEY RUN!!
The problem begins then with them being big, strong, and fast, but ends with them colliding with something. The something isn’t important really because horses also don’t have thick skin like that of a cow. It could be a post, fence, stick, or anything in between. In today’s post, we’re going to talk about trash. Something you’d never expect to be a problem, but that actually did quite a bit of damage to one of our horses.
Meet Ruger:
Ruger is a 4 year old Quarter Horse/Arabian mix that we purchased a few months ago. He’s got about 45 days of training and has been coming along great. We’ve had him on a few trail rides and have been working with him almost every day.
He was a stud for the first 4 years of his life and was gelded 2-1/2 months ago. I only bring this up as it gives him a bit more animation than a typical gelding.
2 months or so ago, we purchased Caney Creek with the hopes of turning it into a school for kids as well as a fun place for people to hang out with their horses. It hadn’t been maintained in a few years and had quite a bit of growth on the fence lines. One of our early projects was to clear this growth and get back to a point where you could see the fences again.
The paddock that we keep Ruger in had massive briars growing down the fence line that had to be cut down. Some were the size of your thumb. I used the grapple on the front of my tractor to pull them out and burn them, but as with most things in nature, getting every single one off the ground didn’t happen.
If you read in an earlier entry, we’ve also been working on filling in the stalls and placing mats on the floor. During this project, there were a couple of bags of shavings from Tractor Supply laying around so we used them in one of the stalls. While working on the stalls a storm came up and the wind blew through the barn pretty hard. None of us realized it at the time, but one of the shavings bags must have been taken out and down to the bottom of Ruger’s paddock to meet a lonely briar that was there just waiting for something fun to do.
The day of fun and joy:
Ruger at some point during this day must have wagged his tail in just the right way to have that joyful briar grab holt. This would not have been a big deal because Ruger has been through his training to ignore scary things, but to his chagrin, the briar had an extra challenge. It had formed a close friendship with the above-mentioned yellow bag of monsters and together they would start a chase that Ruger would not soon forget.
Ruger again flipped his tail to swat some flies but then noticed that something had jumped from the ground and was about to attack him. At this point, he began to do what nature trained him to do, Figh… I mean, RUN!!! And run he did.
Jacob and I were in one of the stalls working to clean it out so that we could add dirt and mats when we heard a terrible crash over where Ruger stays. Dust and dirt were flying everywhere but we were unable to determine exactly what was happening.
This is when I noticed Ruger’s head fly past my field of vision and I began to run towards the point of attack, unsure what I would find. Once there I found a yellow bag and briar laughing deeply with a broken gate. Later we found Ruger breathing heavily and bleeding just the same.
So the moral of the story is to pick up anything and everything you might find where your horses stand and play. You might not think anything of it, but with the right set of conditions, they could quickly form bonds with other objects, equally unimportant, that become living breathing monsters to your horse.