Snow Day (or days...)

As I write, I can hear the little ping of bits of ice hitting the window.  We are on Day 2 of a winter event.  It's not really a snow storm, because there is very little wind.  Yesterday, the snow just gently fell all day and then as the temperature warmed slightly above freezing, the snow changed over to icy bits.  I can't really call them hail or sleet.  They are just very tiny bits of something more solid than snow flakes.  (I bet if I lived in Norway, there would be a very specific word to describe this type of frozen precipitation.)

A meteorologist that I follow on Facebook initially said we would get 8 - 12 inches by the end of our snow extravaganza, but I think that was a bit optimistic.  Our foray into temperatures just above freezing for a few hours contributed to some melting.  Plus we probably aren't getting much accumulation today, even though the icy bits are supposed to keep falling through today and tonight.  At our house, we will probably get 4 - 5 inches, but the barn will have a little more.

Of course, a forecast of any snow at all usually leads to a frenzy of buying essentials, and a forecast of significant snowfall can create massive shortages of pretty much any and everything.  I ran errands on Saturday and stopped at the tack store and the feed store.  The tack store normally has 1-4 customers in it.  On Saturday, there were only two empty parking spots.  I'm not sure what people were buying.  Emergency bridles?  That must-have sponge?  The riding shirt with the bling on it so that the owner could take "frolicking in the snow" pictures for Instagram and Facebook?

I was there with Gemma for a legitimate purchase that I hadn't been able to make during the week.  The horse Gemma is riding now, Star, needed a new blanket.  Hers had been shredded in what was the most brutal attack I have ever known in domestic horse land.  I only witnessed the aftermath, but eye witness accounts indicated Star was attacked and forced to the ground where the attack continued.  One of the barn staff thankfully had the courage to go in and force the attacking horse away so Star could get up and get out of the field; otherwise her injuries may have been life-threatening.  (No one knows why the attack happened.  Star has been in that field for a long time and the horse that attacked her has been in the herd for at least a year, maybe more.  Star was kept in a neighboring field for a few weeks to keep a single horse company, and the attack happened on the day she was returned to the field.  The only change that happened was that a horse that had been in the herd died - as a result of old age - a couple of weeks ago.  Star is a very unassuming horse and basically keeps to herself and avoids conflict, so I think the reason behind the attack will remain a mystery.)

I got to the barn shortly after the attack while the owner was waiting for the vet to come.  Star was trembling and sweating - basically she was in shock from both her physical injuries and probably the mental trauma as well.  Thankfully, the vet was unable to find anything broken, and the blanket had likely saved Star from quite a few bites and kicks.  But assessing the damage was difficult because Star would not leave the stall she was in.  I think she was completely terrified.  Time will only tell whether she will fully recover, but luckily she has an 8-year-old girl who adores her to help with grooming, putting ointment on wounds, and hand walking her until the vet gives further instructions.

Star seems happy with her new snazzy blanket!

Recently, going to this particular tack store has been kind of sad.  It has always been my favorite and until the past year, it has been stacked to the roof with horse and riding products of every kind.  But the pandemic has made it hard to keep a healthy inventory.  So the back room, which is normally full of saddle pads, blankets, halters, pony equipment, boots, and lunging stuff, was empty-looking.  I basically had two choices for a blanket.  Normally, I would have had probably at least five.  I could have ordered online, of course, but I wasn't sure that the blanket would come before the snow, and we've been borrowing one from another boarder.  Star's owner was planning to get one too, but she has been dealing with a lot of other things in her life, and I wanted to take this task off her plate.  And Gemma loves going shopping for horse stuff, so it was a fun Saturday activity.

What was not fun was going to my least favorite feed store to get straw for the ducks' bedding.  I prefer to get it from a different store, but my husband had taken my truck in for an oil change, and I was left with his tiny car.  So I had to go to the feed store that carries the compressed straw bales wrapped in plastic so the straw would not escape the bales and embed itself in the car's carpeting.  (Apparently, my husband does not find it endearing to find clumps of straw in his car - confusing, I know...)

I'm pretty sure every single person in town was at the feed store.  Again, buying what exactly?  If you are wondering, it was things like 200 pounds of dog food (just in case we can't dig ourselves out of the snow until July, I guess?), the last pair of winter gloves (I guess some people didn't know it was winter, what with the below freezing temperatures and frequent bouts of freezing rain we've been having for the last two months...), and egg incubators (because it's a good idea to hatch chickens in February).  Anyway, we survived the trip to the feed store and emerged successfully with two bales of straw so my ducks could be comfortable no matter what the weather brought.

On Sunday morning, we woke up to a good 2 -3 inches of snow on the ground already.  Gemma was delighted, as was our dog, Hera, who has been living for this day her whole life.  Hera is 12 years old now and definitely slowing down, but she managed the stairs like she was a puppy when she realized what was outside!

The ducks were less excited about all the white stuff, and spent much of the morning wandering around looking confused.  I've got to give them credit, though.  They stuck it out all day before finally conceding at night to go back into their straw-filled pen.  Today, though, Clancy, our drake, tested the snow and found it seriously wanting.  He assured the ducks that they did not want to venture out today, and they believed him.  It was probably a good call.  The bits of ice falling from the sky have created a crust of slick ice on top of the snow and even walking is risky.  

The ducks are baffled by their change in surroundings!

I headed out to the barn in the afternoon to check on Donut.  The roads were really in good shape at that point, and I definitely didn't need the four-wheel drive setting that I had proactively engaged.  I could have easily made it to the barn in my husband's car.  There was definitely an inch or two more of snow out there than at our house, though.

As is typical, despite the barn owner putting hay out near the run-in shed so the horses would not have to venture far into the snow for food, all of the horses in Donut's field were at the farthest point of the field, scrounging for bits of leftover hay.  Donut wasn't even that happy to see me.  Usually, she loves coming in for dinner, and I figured with the constant snow, she would be excited to come inside for a bit.  But her approach was much more of the meandering, "I'll get there when I get there" type.

 

I brought her in despite her lack of enthusiasm, mostly just so I could reassure myself that she was really doing fine without a blanket.  Hopefully I don't start World War III by bringing up blanketing...

I discovered over the course of Nimo's life that he absolutely did not need a blanket in even the worst winter had to offer unless he was clipped.  And honestly, as a boarder, blanketing is one of those things that seems to cause more trouble than it is worth.  No matter how detailed your instructions are, one or more of the staff will always overthink things and somehow manage to put the wrong blanket on.  Or they just assume that you are an idiot, and even though you wrote that your horse doesn't need a blanket until it gets to be under 20 degrees, they will put your heavyweight on at 50 degrees.  Then there is the constant filthiness of the blankets as they accumulate what seems like a year's worth of grime in one day because your horse rolled in a mud pit.  And the most common precipitation is rain here in northern Virginia, so then it's a game of managing sopping wet blankets dripping on every available surface while trying to figure out if the spare sheet you have is really waterproof because there is more rain on the way and your current sheet is never going to dry in the 40 degree, humid air.

So for all those reasons and because Donut spent the first year of her life with only trees for shelter, a creek to drink out of, and definitely no blanket, I have opted not to blanket Donut.  I don't even have one to put on her so as to avoid the temptation.  (But she does have a stall to stay in if the weather gets really bad or she needs a place to dry out or warm up.)  I've left her out in freezing rain and snow and sleet, and so far, she has shown no indication that she is bothered by the elements.  Unlike Nimo, who had a fairly short winter coat with incredibly dense, thick, wiry hair that even shampoo couldn't penetrate (I know because I tried once), Donut has a long coat that is quite fluffy.  And interestingly, her white hairs are different than her black hairs.  I can't get a good picture of it, but you can actually see the difference when you look at her coat.  The hairs lay differently too.  Her black hair is finer and softer, I think.  But regardless of its texture, it seems to keep the water out and the warmth in, so for now, she is open to the elements.  Once she is full-grown, I will have a set of sheets and blankets for her, just in case, but she literally grew two blanket sizes in three months, so I can't justify the expense of having blankets for her right now unless she really needs them.

The snow has added a little wrinkle to my training plan, though.  You may remember that in my last post, I was using grazing as a way to see if I could mitigate Donut's objections to anything that resembled training.  Regrettably, we've gotten several inches of snow so far and the forecast indicates more is likely on the way, along with colder temperatures that will prohibit much melting.  So, the grass is really not an option for the short-term.  I did try to convince Donut that she could dig in the snow to eat the grass, but I could tell that with each meager bite, she was getting more and more irritated by the situation.  So much so that she was not really on her best behavior as I led her back to her field.  Normally, she really is pretty easy to lead to and from her field, but yesterday she threw one thing after another at me.  First there were airs above the ground.  Then there was trying to chew on my hand.  Finally she decided she had to rub her head on my hand and it was like trying to unstick Velcro with one hand to move her away.  It's a behavior I have not seen before, so it caught me off guard.  I'm still not quite sure how to deal with it.  I think I'm going to try insisting that she stay about three feet away while I'm leading her.  Usually I like her close to me because I can feel her energy shift when she is feeling rambunctious and it's good information.  But I think we'll take this as an opportunity to practice staying out of the handler's personal space.

I also may experiment a bit with the TRT Method.  It was developed by Tristan Tucker (who goes by the alter ego Brett Kidding for some of his videos).  You may know of him through a video that went viral awhile ago.  It's a comedic performance that pokes fun at FEI-level dressage riders, and it entertains me every time I watch it.  Here is the link to watch it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3CgnSrWMJ8.  He's got another funny one on trailer loading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yfvocbWteQ.  Anyway, I had been intrigued by the method and ended up buying the course last fall.  But after watching some of the videos, I decided it really wasn't for me and Donut at that time, and I kind of set it aside.  But last night, I was procrastinating about doing anything that required me to get up from the recliner and the heating pad, so I went back to watching some of the course videos.  And I wondered if the method might be worth trying now while I wait for a spring thaw.

The main thing that turned me off of the method early on was the introductory leading technique.  It involves walking quite a distance in front of the horse and teaching them to leave space between you.  It must be the old 4-H Showmanship class training, but the idea of walking in front of a horse seemed both wrong and vaguely terrifying.  How would I know what the horse was doing if it was six or ten feet behind me?  What if the horse ran over me because it spooked?  How would I work on things like backing up and stepping over?  And then, the technique involved teaching the horse a pattern that of course used disengaging the hind legs (a phrase that is starting to irritate me), along with some work on the front end too.  But I happened to watch a case study video of Tucker using the method on a very tense and high strung mare.  She was young - I think four years old - and she clearly knew what she was supposed to do, but she was so stressed that she was having trouble listening and being quiet.  I happen to know a certain yearling who occasionally has problems like that too.  While Donut isn't in a constant state of tension like the mare in the video, she does sometimes get reactive and have trouble figuring out how to regulate herself back into a more calm state.

Once I saw the technique used in its entirety on the mare in the video, I started understanding the value of the technique a little better.  One thing in particular that I found interesting was that Tucker didn't worry about staying below the horse's threshold of reactivity.  In part, that was probably because he couldn't.  Even just touching the mare caused her extreme stress.  But I also remembered something that Mark Rashid wrote.  I can't remember which book or the exact quote, but it was something along the lines of seeing a lot of horses come to his clinics where their handlers had spent a lot of time learning natural horsemanship techniques that required them to stay below the horse's threshold of reactivity.  And when those horses got into a situation where the the stimulant couldn't be controlled, neither the horse nor the handler had any way of resolving the tension or stress, so the horse basically lost its sh*^ and spent a long time in a state of panic.  

That certainly happens with Donut sometimes.  I can't necessarily predict what is going to happen when and whether or not it is going to be upsetting to her.  For example, there was one day where I was grazing her outside and someone was flying a drone fairly close to the ground.  You could easily hear the buzzing, and I was concerned that Donut would not want to go past the area where the drone was.  As it happened, she couldn't have cared less, and we actually stopped to chat for a minute while the drone buzzed around overhead.  On the other hand, when a couple of the dogs that live on the farm run around and do zoomies, she gets very concerned and it is hard for her to settle once she has gotten excited about the dogs.  It would be nice to have a technique to use in situations like that so that she could learn how to calm herself down quickly.

The TRT Method looks like it has the possibility to do that, as long as it doesn't cross the line into flooding.  I'm not a big fan of using flooding to desensitize horses, because I think that it teaches them that they have no control over their lives, so they might as well resign themselves to being in near death situations all the time.  A lot of mustangs appear to be trained that way, and I think it is a bomb waiting to go off.  What Tucker claims his method does is to provide horses with a way to learn that the instincts they come with, particularly the flight response, don't work very well in a world of human invention.  Running away from anything that looks like it could have the vague potential to be mildly threatening is a great way for a wild horse to survive, but it is at best inconvenient and at worst life threatening for both horse and handler/rider.

After having a horse for 17 years that was certainly prone to anxiety and that I spent a lot of time working with on an assortment of issues related to anxiety, I am certainly willing to listen to someone who offers a technique other than the one I used, which was basically a form of gradual desensitization involving exposing the horse to the situation in small or less-threatening doses until after weeks, months, or even years, he came to accept the situation.  The reality is that sometimes there aren't weeks, months, or years to accept a situation.  If it is a dog running from out of nowhere on the trail or a car is driving too fast next to the horse crossing on a road or hot air balloon is gracefully floating overhead, there isn't any time to adjust to the situation and there isn't necessarily a way to predict those things ahead of time or work with a horse on them.  While Nimo eventually did become quite trustworthy out on the trail and handled a variety of situations that could have ended badly, I wonder if it needed to take as long as it did for him to develop those skills?  What if I don't have to go through Donut's baby years and her first few years under saddle constantly worrying that she will spook or spin and bolt or buck me off in the middle of nowhere?

That is sort of a heady thought, and I feel like it won't cause any harm to try the TRT Method out on her.  Plus her newfound habits of chewing on things and rubbing on things and not being as aware of her handler's personal space as she should be have caused me to reconsider how I feel about leading a horse that is a certain distance away from me.  If she isn't close to me, then I don't have to worry about how I will react to the chewing or rubbing, because she simply won't have the opportunity to do it.  And over time, I suspect those habits will disappear on their own if they aren't encouraged.  I think it is fairly common for young horses to explore the world with their mouths, but I also think they usually grow out of it as they learn their environment.  So it is possible that if I find a way to interact with her that doesn't give her many opportunities to stick things in her mouth, it won't become a big issue and will resolve on its own with time.

I'll keep you posted on how my experiment goes.  If it isn't like walking on an ice slick at the barn today, I will probably start the process of teaching her to leave space between me and her while I lead her, and we'll go from there.