Donut and the Not-So-Evil-As-It-Used-To-Be Water

Shortly after I brought Donut home, I was surprised to discover how she felt about water coming out of a hose.  As a horse who lived outside 24/7 and drank from a creek and used trees for shelter, I expected her to be pretty blase about being hosed off.  As it turned out, she was the opposite.  She reacted to any water that wasn't from nature as if she was a vampire being sprayed by Holy Water.  Whether it was coming out of a spray bottle, a hose, or even a damp sponge, she would try to run away or kick at the water.  I discovered she has incredible accuracy with her hind feet as she kicked the spray bottle I was holding many times.  (although she never kicked me)

I tried several approaches, ranging from desensitization techniques to something closer to CAT-H.  I tried different locations.  I incorporated food.  I even forced her to stand once because I really, really needed to treat a wound.

She is still uncomfortable with me putting wet things like ointment on her legs, although she is doing better about her body.  I am still plugging away on that particular issue.

We have had some good progress with the hose, though.  I had initially been trying to work with her in the indoor wash stall, but I realized that she may be quite sensitive to sound.  And between the water splattering on the floor and walls, the sound of the water coming out of the nozzle, and the echo created by a large barn with a concrete floor, I thought it could be that was too much for her brain to handle.  

So I moved her outside to the parking area and used the long barn hose to reach out there.  I worked with her using a technique I'd seen Warwick Schiller use on a horse that he was trying to get used to being hosed off.  I had a little success with that.  I was basically letting her walk around as she needed to and following with the hose that had a small trickle of water coming out.  If she stopped, I turned off the water.  Then, once she was stopping, I would wait for her to look at me before I turned off the water.

But that particular location was problematic. It got a lot of traffic from people coming in and out of the barn and then I found myself interrupted or having to explain what I was doing.  And I was making a wet mess on the bluestone.  Then winter set in, and I didn't really feel like hosing Donut with cold water was very fair.

So I waited for a few months until nice weather started periodically showing up.  And I got the idea to use the outdoor wash area instead.  The outdoor area is a concrete pad surrounded by grass and it is a little more out of the way.  Plus, it has a long hose that I could use so Donut could move around if she felt like she needed to.

I started out by letting her graze while spraying her legs.  If she moved around, I kept the water on her legs.  If she stopped, I took the water off.  I didn't have a nozzle on the hose to reduce the amount of noise she was hearing and that seemed to help too.  It only took a couple of sessions before she would stand to have her front legs hosed off.  It took another couple of sessions before she would allow water on her hind legs.  Then I started asking her to stand on the grass without eating while I hosed her legs off.  Finally, I introduced her to the concrete pad and asked her to stand there while I used the hose.

After what is probably about 8 sessions of just 2-3 minutes over the course of several weeks, she can walk on the concrete pad and stand while I hose off all four legs.  She isn't perfectly still yet, and she does still pick up her hind feet at first.  But she is so much quieter about the process, and I can, in fact, run water over all four legs pretty thoroughly.

In terms of next steps, I am hoping to improve her confidence and get her to the point where having her legs hosed off is really no big deal.  Then I will probably try adding a sprayer nozzle to the hose to see how she tolerates that.  If that works OK after a few sessions, I plan to try putting shampoo on one leg and see if I can start working on getting it clean.  Once she tolerates washing and rinsing of one leg, I'll gradually add additional legs until all four legs can be thoroughly cleaned.  Then I'll move on to other body parts.

If you are interested in seeing how I work with Donut, I've got a 3-minute video of our most recent session from last Friday.  It was very much unplanned, so I'm not wearing appropriate barn clothes or shoes and my 8-year-old daughter is the one taking the video, so it's not the best quality.  But at least you can see how I handle it when she moves around or reacts to having water on her hind legs.  You'll see that if she lifts her leg up, I keep the water on the leg until she puts it down and then I take the water away for a few seconds to let her know that was what I was looking for.  Then I come back to the leg again to test her response.  I hose her hind legs off several times to help her understand the process.

She does move around a little more than she has been the last couple of sessions.  But it was windy that day and the barn has been building a new manure dumping area.  Given that there were lots of new things right around the wash area, including plastic that was blowing, I thought Donut did pretty well.

This area is next to the wash area in the video.  As you can see, it is full of Objects That Are Scary.

Here is the video of the full session:

As the weather gets warmer, I'm planning to work on hosing Donut's legs a little more frequently.  So (cross fingers) hopefully it won't be too long before I can start tackling all the dirt that has been building up for almost two years!  But, I'm also mindful of the foundation I am laying.  I'm expecting to have Donut for her whole life, which will probably be another 25+ years.  Even if it takes me another year to convince her to stand quietly while getting a bath, I still get another 25 years to enjoy the results of that effort.  On the other hand, if I rush her now, I get to spend 25 years wishing that she would stand more quietly or that bathing wasn't such a chore.  So the time and effort seems worth it to me.

Wolf Teeth

When Donut had her first dentist appointment last fall, the dentist recommended that she have her wolf teeth removed before she turned two.  He said the procedure was generally easier on the horse and resulted in fewer complications when the horse was younger.  Apparently, the roots for the teeth are typically shallow at that age, so they are more easily extracted.

I have to admit that the idea of extracting teeth, even vestigial ones, really bothered me.  I did some Google searching to see if there were any other options.  But aside from finding a few anecdotal stories of horses that did still have wolf teeth, but weren't experiencing any problems, there wasn't much aside from the standard advice for removing them.

I even toyed with the idea of committing to riding Donut bitless, just to avoid the issue of the wolf teeth causing a problem with the bit, until I read that they can sometimes even cause problems with nose bands.  And I was reluctant to take away the option of riding with a bit, just in case Donut's preference becomes a bit over a hackamore.  Riding without a bit would have also caused some issues with my Science of Motion work.  SOM practitioners are very pro-double bridle and very anti-bitless bridles.  I don't have the same feelings, but if I want to preserve my ability to continue working with SOM instructors, I have to be prepared to use at least one bit.

All in all, it has been a bit frustrating for these past few months, because I felt like I was constantly running up against one constraint or another with respect to the wolf teeth.  In the end, I finally decided to go through with the appointment for Donut, and she had her wolf teeth extracted last Thursday.

The dentist, who normally prefers to work without sedating horses (as long as the horses are amenable), did strongly encourage me to have Donut sedated for the procedure.  So I set up an appointment with my vet to be there to sedate Donut.  It used to be that I could get the sedative from the vet and do it myself, but vets now insist on having to be present for the sedation.  In Donut's case, it made a lot of sense to have the vet there because Donut had never been sedated before, and it would be good to have someone with medical training there in case there were complications.  However, once the correct dosage has been established, it makes no sense to me that a vet would need to administer it.  Horse owners administer all kinds of drugs without supervision, so the only reason for the insistence on being present for sedation for dental procedures is to discourage horse owners from using equine dentists over veterinarians for dental work.  

I'm not sure about other states and countries, but Virginia has definitely had controversy over the years about allowing people who are not veterinarians to be equine dentists.  All I have to say about it is that I have learned the hard way that just because someone is a veterinarian does not mean they know anything about performing proper dental care and just because someone isn't a veterinarian doesn't mean that they can't perform proper dental care.  In the case of the dentist I use, he has demonstrated repeatedly over the past 20 years on my horses and on friends' horses that the care he provides is good quality.  Once he retires, I will likely explore using a dentist with a different type of training, but I will never use a general veterinarian for my horse's dental work.  Just like I would never expect my general doctor to work on my teeth.

Anyway, I fretted a bit the day of the appointment about how the logistics would work.  I had an appointment with the dentist and the veterinarian, but an emergency or traffic accident could easily send my plans to the trash bin if one or the other couldn't get there on time.  As it happened, both the dentist and the vet arrived promptly, and the vet conservatively sedated Donut with a quarter of the dose she would normally use for an average horse.  I had just had a wellness check up for Donut a couple of weeks ago, and based on her girth size and appearance, the vet had estimated her weight to be between 800 and 900 pounds, which I thought sounded reasonable.  

Well, either that estimate was really off or Donut is very sensitive to sedation.  Because that quarter dose almost brought her to her knees.  She needed the support of a wall and a person for the entire procedure because she had so much trouble standing.  And while it sucked to be her, it was really good to find that information out so I'll know for the future that if she requires sedation, she needs a much lighter dose than normal.  The same thing actually happened when I first had Nimo sedated for his castration.  He was hit pretty hard by the drugs and took quite a while to recover.  It is invaluable information to have.

The dentist first floated Donut's teeth and then extracted the wolf teeth.  She had two - one on each side of her upper jaw.  He said horses can have only one wolf tooth in either the upper or lower jaw or they can have as many as four (two on the upper jaw and two on the lower jaw), although I read that in very rare cases, horses can have double wolf teeth in one or more places.  Here is a picture of Donut's wolf tooth on the right side of her jaw:

It is hard to see and much smaller than I expected.  It really looked like a barely emerged, tiny tooth.  And then I felt bad all over again about having them extracted.  How could something so small cause a problem?  But what's done is done at this point.

The extraction seemed to go well, and the dentist said it would be unlikely that there would be any complications.  He did suggest syringing saline solution over the extraction sites once a day for a few days, if possible.  But otherwise, I shouldn't need to worry about anything.

I was a bit concerned about Donut because of the sedation, however.  It took her a full two hours to come out of the fog.

I stayed with her until I was certain she was able to chew normally and the brightness had come back to her eyes.  I walked her around for a few minutes too, so that I could check her ability to walk.  Once she seemed mostly back to normal, I turned her out and kept an eye on her for a bit.  The next day, the barn staff said she slept a lot more than usual.  I was glad to hear that because I hoped the extra sleep would help her with her recovery.

Now that several days have passed, she seems to be just fine.  There aren't any signs of pain or sensitivity or swelling in her mouth.  I'll continue to keep an eye on her, of course, but it is likely that if nothing comes up during the next week or so that she should heal completely.

I'm curious about other people's experiences with horses and wolf teeth.  Have you ever owned a horse that had wolf teeth that caused problems?  Or didn't cause problems?  Have you owned a horse that had to have its wolf teeth extracted?  Were there any complications?

The Scent of a Horse

I don't remember quite how old I was - maybe 9? - when my grandma got her first horse.  She had long dreamed of getting her own horse, and you would think that because she lived on a farm, she would have gotten one long ago.  I guess only she could say exactly why she didn't get one, but it was probably a combination of raising five kids, working to keep the farm running, and a husband who thought that having an animal on the farm that didn't produce food in some way was a waste of money.

But after my grandpa passed away and all of her kids were independent and life started to slow down a little, my grandma bought herself a Quarter Horse named Skip.  I was in awe of Skip and if truth be told, a bit jealous of my grandma, because she had her own horse and that was the one thing I wanted most in the world.  (It would be a couple years yet before my parents would eventually decide I could get a horse too.)

Skip was a good-sized chestnut gelding, who had some working experience and cow sense.  He was easy to ride.  So easy that a grandma and a young kid could ride him out in the wilderness by himself without a problem.

I used to spend a month every summer at my grandma's farm.  It was heaven for me for any number of reasons.  I loved being on the farm and exploring the huge yard full of a maze of trees and shrubs and flowers.  My grandma had planted rows of bushes with little nooks full of flowers and wishing wells and other fun yard ornaments.  And there was a huge swing set way out back that was so isolated, it was the perfect place for me to swing and imagine all sorts of worlds in my head.

And of course, there were the chickens and the barn cats that always seemed to have just had a litter of kittens, a delightful dog named Boris, a goat named Annie, a herd of cows, and usually some kind of recently rescued bird.  (I remember once my grandma fished a young sparrow out of a five gallon bucket of water and it lived in the house for a bit.  One day, as it got bigger, it shot a piece of poop out that must have gone 6 feet across the kitchen.  Normal people probably would have been traumatized by that, but my grandma thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen and she would tell everybody about it, barely able to restrain her laughter.)

I would spend the month hanging out with my grandma.  She made me toast every morning that was buttered and had homemade strawberry jam on it.  It was the best toast in the world.  And I would often catch her up early in the mornings tuning into the PBS channel so she could watch reruns of a British comedy show called "Faulty Towers."  We would go to rummage sales (also called garage sales in other parts of the country) and visit my great grandmother and go to the local cafe and have visits with my grandma's friends.

But when my grandma got a horse, a whole new dimension was added on to the experience.  For a month, I could pretend that Skip was mine and I finally got to live the life I'd always dreamed of.  I think I probably rode that poor horse twice a day.  Once in the early morning before it got hot and then again at night, in the couple of hours before it got dark.  I roamed all over the countryside with him, and I would come across old, old buildings that hadn't been used for decades and imagine all sorts of interesting scenarios.

In the afternoon, though, I would brave the sometimes extreme heat (North Dakota summers are typically quite dry, but temperatures can soar into the mid-90s and even over 100) to go visit Skip in the pasture.  I'm not sure how big the pasture was - maybe 100 acres?  It was big enough that if the cows needed to be brought up to the barn, my grandma would use the truck to drive out there, and I remember it wasn't always that easy to figure out where they were.  But that didn't stop me from walking out there every afternoon to find Skip and visit with him for a few minutes.

After I found him, I would walk up to him and simply stand with him.  I'd lean on his shoulder and put my nose next to his skin and breath in the scent of horse.  It was the best smell I'd ever smelled.  To this day, I've never smelled a horse that smelled quite as good as Skip did.  I have no idea how to even describe it.  It was simply Horse.  A horse who lived outside much of the year, with little shelter except in the winter, when the cattle came to live in and next to the barn, so it was easier to take care of them during the extreme weather that is common during North Dakota winters.  He ate grass with the cows and roamed the pasture.  He drank from a big pond and stood in the rain and the wind and the beating sun.  He lived as his ancestors had lived and he seemed completely comfortable in his own skin.

I was reminded of my experience with Skip a few days ago when I saw Gemma sitting out in the round pen, sketching Star.  She had brought some of her art supplies with her and headed out to the round pen, which was where Star was spending her days at the time.  (She couldn't go back out with her old herd because of the risk of her getting attacked again.)  And Gemma stayed out there for quite a while.  So long, that I went out to look for her when I was done taking care of Donut.  And I found her and Star just hanging out.

 

It made me think about how little time I spend just hanging out with Donut.  I spend time with her every day, but there tends to be a purpose.  Grooming, trimming her feet, practicing tying or leading or some other skill.  Maybe it's time that I remembered the wisdom of young children and took some time to simply be in the moment and breath in the scent of a horse.

Doing the Right Thing

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to an opinion article.  The title of the article was pretty provocative, and I admit to some curiosity.  So I took the time to read the information.  You can read it too, if you are so inclined: We Hate You Now.  It is, of course, about COVID-19 and people's behavior and reactions to it.  I normally try to steer well clear of the pandemic in this blog for three reasons.  First, I have no expertise related to pandemics or diseases.  Second, everyone is probably bombarded with information about the pandemic already, so they certainly don't need to read about it here.  And finally, I can't think of any other current issue that has caused so much controversy and destroyed so many relationships.  I'm not interested in dealing with that level of responsibility on this blog.  But in this case, I think the article raises a concept that connects to the way I want to work with my horse.

My sense after reading the opinion is that the author is very angry.  Like deeply, in-his-soul angry at people that he believes have not been "doing the right thing."  The kind of anger that eats at a person and destroys relationships and permanently alters a world view.  That is a big deal, especially if lots of other people feel the same way.  Which apparently they do, judging from other comments on Facebook.

I don't know if you feel this way or something similar or very different.  I do know that everyone I know personally has reacted to the pandemic in different ways, and I don't like the idea of invalidating anyone's feelings, because we feel what we feel.  But this level of anger and hatred concerns me more than a little.  It concerns me because it really limits our ability to heal from what has become a worldwide crisis.  It concerns me because it is clearly destroying relationships now and will continue to do so in the future.  It concerns me because people who feel this intensity of negative emotion give off an aura to those around them, and it can create a vicious cycle.  And it concerns me because when there is this much anger and hatred in your soul, what positive emotions are left for the animals around you?

I recently listened to a podcast by Warrick Schiller with Mark Rashid, and one of my takeaways from Mark Rashid is that you can't change the way you work with horses without changing yourself and the way you do everything.  You cannot have softness with your horse if you don't practice softness with your kids, or your spouse, or even the way you pick up a coffee cup.  Being mentally balanced with horses requires being mentally balanced within yourself.  I don't think the kind of anger and hate in an article entitled, "We Hate You Now," has any place in a mentally balanced person.  

Another thing that Mark and Warwick talked a lot about in the podcast was getting rid of judgment, for horses and for people.  Warwick did another podcast - I can't remember which one - where he went into detail about a technique his therapist recommended that involved putting some tiny stones in his pocket and moving them to his other pocket whenever he had a judgmental thought.  He joked that he thought maybe he would have about three judgmental thoughts during the day, but it turned out he had something like 22 before breakfast.  His point was that we don't even realize how often we are judging ourselves, other people, and our horses.  And to get to the point where we can work well with our horses, we have to work on getting rid of those judgmental thoughts - in all forms.

But what about when it comes to "doing the right thing."  I mean, is it OK to judge people and then take that judgment into anger and even hate when you know that those people are not doing the right thing?  I can't answer that question for you.  But I can answer that question for me.  It isn't.  It isn't OK for me to be so angry that I hate people that are my friends, my family, and even strangers because they are reacting differently to a situation than I am.  And the reason has significantly less to do with their behavior than it does with mine.  I can't be the person I need to be for Donut if I hate people and discard my friendships because my friends don't think and act like me.  (If I required my friends to feel the same way I do about all the things that are important to me, I would literally have zero friends.)

I want more than anything to form a connection with Donut that is just as fulfilling as the one I had with Nimo.  And I can't do that if my mind is full of anger and hate.  So I'm going to be spending the rest of my life working on that.  Working on letting go of the judgment of myself and my horse and other people.  I don't think this is something I can just flip a switch and accomplish.  Instead, much like horsemanship, it is a lifelong commitment to being more mindful and more aware of my thoughts and my emotions and my body.  

To me, a connection with my horse is worth more than any satisfaction I might get from judging someone else's behavior.  My whole life is full of being surrounded by people that don't do the right thing.  They slack off at work.  They don't follow traffic laws.  They have 23 items in the express lane.  They don't take feed their dog like I do.  They parent differently than I do.  They value different things than I do.  And if there are too many differences between me and another person or those differences make me uncomfortable, I can choose to minimize or even completely exclude that person from my life.  

But I don't want to make that exclusion based on hate.  I want it to be based on a thoughtful awareness of the value the person adds to my life in terms of helping me be the person I want to be.  I know for many people, the pandemic has overwhelmed their existence and fundamentally changed their lives in ways that may not seem that positive right now.  There can be no question that so much damage has occurred to people's lives and businesses and that damage is likely to continue for awhile.  But good things have happened too.  Nature finds a way to balance everything, and it occurs to me that there is probably a pretty good reason for that. 

So I'm going to focus less on whether or not I think someone else is doing the right thing, and focus more on whether I am doing the right thing for myself and my horse.

The tail wrap

You would think that after owning a Friesian for 17 years, I would be well-versed in top-notch grooming techniques.  But you would be wrong.  It's not that I didn't groom Nimo, but I admit that I mostly stuck to the basics - curry combing, mud brushing, rinsing dirt and sweat with water, and the very occasional intensive bathing endeavor (because giving a full bath to a large horse with a lot of hair is an event that lasts many hours and brought neither of us joy).  

Benign neglect was probably the technique I used most with his overflowing mane and tail.  And it worked just fine.  Nimo didn't have the crazy really long, really thick mane that some Friesians do, but that was OK because that kind of mane would not have been practical for our frequent riding out on the trails or for my limited time.  And his tail sort of took care of itself, although I think I did purchase a tail wrap for him a long time ago.  I used it once before I realized that it was just going to spend all of its time being muddy and create another laundry item for me.  No thank you.

However, Donut is a whole other horse.  She has a mane that is already unbelievably long for her age.  Thankfully, it isn't very thick, so keeping it detangled is not a full-time job, but I do give it far more attention than I ever had to give to Nimo's mane.  Her tail is also growing pretty well on its own.  But for whatever reason, it is always so coated in filth that the hairs could literally walk on their own.  Normally, I'm happy to let horses be horses, but the tail situation was reaching critical levels as each day over the last several months has brought more mud.  I don't think the ground has been dry since maybe October.  That isn't unusual for this area - a better name for winter might actually be Mud Season.  As an example of how winters work here, we got five inches of snow one morning a couple of weeks ago, and it was all melted by evening.  And then it rained and sleeted and snowed and rained and rained and rained some more.  And somehow, Donut had coated her tail with every bit of mud she could find and created layer upon layer of stiff mud.

As luck would have it, I purchased another tail wrap a couple of months ago.  I happened across it during my periodic browsing of the horse tack websites I like.  (I consider it my responsibility as a good horse owner to be aware of the current offerings for horse tack and supplies.  After all, who knows when I might need something?)  As I was browsing, I happened across a tail wrap that spoke to me.  Despite having almost no experience with tail wraps, I have an impressively strong preference for the wraps over the bags.  The wraps have three tubes for inserting the hair and then braiding it while the bags are one tube that goes over the tail after it has been braided.  I feel like the wrap has a greater likelihood of staying on, but I have zero proof, anecdotal or otherwise to justify that belief.

I also have a strong preference for color, and the tail wrap that I bought for Nimo oh so many years ago was, of course, black (which really does hide the dirt a lot better!), and even more importantly, had gone missing.  I'm pretty sure that someday I will find it wadded up at the bottom of a container in a state of untold microbial growth.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe Donut's tail was a good candidate for a tail wrap, and when I saw a tail wrap with bright purple and unicorns, I couldn't resist.  (I would give the link, but alas, it does not appear to be available any longer.  Here is a similar wrap, although the listing calls it a bag: Professional's Choice Lycra Tail Bag.)

The wrap sat first in my house for weeks and then in my truck for weeks.  I kept looking for a good day to dedicate to washing Donut's tail, and either the weather or my schedule prevented me from achieving that particular goal.  Finally, we had a gorgeous 70-degree day, and I took advantage of the beautiful day to wash her tail.  I used the same technique I had used in the fall, which she seemed to tolerate well.  I carried five gallon buckets about 3/4 full of water in to the stall and dunked and soaked her tail until the water looked less dirty (about 6 buckets later).  Then I sprayed her tail with Shapley's Easy-Out No Rinse Shampoo, let it sit for a few minutes, and then dunked her tail in bucket after bucket until the water was relatively clear.

My daughter took pity on me when I was nearing the end of my process with the tail.  Because Donut's tail wasn't the only gross thing about her that day.  She had coated her whole body in mud, which is something that she actually doesn't do very often.  I think the warm sunny day inspired her to roll around and probably take some extended naps.  I had been focused on the tail, and neglected grooming the rest of her.  Gemma thought that was horrible, so after she had groomed and worked with Star, she set about currying Donut.

This is Donut after Gemma had already been scraping mud off of her for quite a while.

While Gemma was brushing Donut, I detangled her tail enough so that I could braid it, and inserted it into the tubes of the tail wrap.  The tail wrap was easy to use and Donut didn't mind the process or the wrap at all.  And when I was done, Donut had one bright, shining clean spot on her body:)

Behold, the beauteous tail wrap!

Other boarders jokingly speculated about how long the tail wrap would stay on, and most people thought it wouldn't make it past the next morning.  I was inclined to agree with them - I've seen Donut run around the field, and not much could stay on her through all that.

When I arrived at the barn the next day, I wasn't sure what I would find.  But there she was, standing in the field, completely covered in mud, but with her tail wrap perfectly in place.  It was kind of nice to have one less thing to be horrified about, and I was able to dedicate myself to extracting as much of the caked on mud from her body as I could.

What impressed me the most was how she coated her eyelashes in mud!

Over the next few days, the tail wrap stayed on, although it gradually got more and more filthy until the bright purple and unicorns had all but disappeared behind a wall of dirt.  I did end up taking it off yesterday, less than a week after I put it on, because I could see that it was slipping, and I didn't think it would be too much longer before it unraveled.  In hindsight, I think I could have rebraided the tubes and it would have been OK, but we've been getting so much rain and there was more in the forecast, so I thought it might be good to take it off until the dry spell that local meteorologists swear we are going to get starting tomorrow.  Which would be a good thing, because at this point, the ground is so saturated, I think we probably have enough moisture to get through August.

We are also supposed to have nice, seasonal temperatures in the 50s and maybe even the 60s, so I'm thinking I can dedicate another day to washing her tail this week and put the wrap back on...assuming it survives the washing machine.  Because it is really gross.

Oh, little unicorns, I can still vaguely see you!

The good news is that the tail wrap did seem to do a good job of keeping the tail clean.  I was impressed that Donut looked like she had a normal tail for the first time in forever.

You can see all the mud on her lower legs and yes, the mud in her field is quite literally at least 8 inches deep in most places.  It's an equestrian's horror story out there.

So my conclusion from all this is that I think I will try to incorporate the use of a tail wrap at least some of the time until fly season starts (which will probably be in about 4 - 6 weeks...gaaaa!!!!).  Because I'm not riding, I think I have some extra mental energy to devote to grooming, and Donut seems to need a little more maintenance that Nimo did.  Which is fine.  Every horse has their own stuff, right?  At least she is much smaller, which makes the maintenance a little easier.  (Although I still see a huge difference in the height of her butt and the height of her withers, so at some point, she is probably going to grow a few inches...)

I'd love to hear about your experiences with tail wraps or anything else grooming related.  Do you have a go-to technique or product that really works for your horse?