Cob Jockey

I'm getting closer to blogging regularly again guys, I really am. My personal life is going to be in a bit of a state of upheaval through most of the summer, but I'm taking steps toward normalcy every day.

How about some photos today? First up - some of Disco having a good time playing earlier this week.

Okay but FOR REAL NOW is he ever going to get awkward? Isn't this when I'm supposed to be hiding him behind the barn? He still looks like a baby from some angles, but from others he knocks me over with how freaking gorgeous he is.

We've had the ball for several months now and he didn't really go after it much at first, but as he's gotten older and more rambunctious it's become one of his favorite things.

Pounce!

Because our pastures mostly don't have run-in sheds, our horses have to stay in when there's a chance of storms overnight when they're on night turnout, which is about one night out of every week or two during the summer. I've decided to only let him play with the ball in the indoor, so that it gives him a lot of mental stimulation when he's stuck inside for 23 hours a day.

He is beauty, he is grace, lol

Don't think the ball is his only toy though! Everything is a toy right now. Folding chairs, tarps, whatever else he finds over in our jump storage corner.

Desensitizing himself

He's just so bold, and I love it. It's hard to scare him. Between that and his incredible body awareness (compared to Connor who has...not a lot, lol), I can't help but wonder if he may want to event someday. Fingers crossed. I'd love to get back to that.

I mean...he read the distance to that first pole a mile away and then fixed the related distance by getting right up to the base of the second "jump." A girl can dream, right?!

He even has a new stall toy, which I'll review at some point. He kept popping stall bars out between him and his neighbors when he was bored, so I bought him a Hay Pillow so that even his meals could be playtime.

Hay feeder that he can fling around his stall with abandon = success

Disco, living the good life!

It took Disco longer than I thought it would to figure out how haynets work.

"I prefer my meals easily accessed, thanks."

I did all the usual stuff - fluffed the hay up inside so it was easy to grab, pulled hay out of every square. He knew it was there, and he'd nibble at it, but would often leave it mostly untouched in favor of the one flake I threw on the ground.

I was motivated to teach him about haynets because otherwise, omg, he keeps an even neater stall than Connor does, and that's saying something.

Just this week, he started draining the haynet suddenly and completely, which made me happy. I wondered what had changed that quickly though. Suddenly hungrier due to a growth spurt, maybe?

Good baby

And then I started getting funny videos from the boarders a couple of nights in a row.

*Jaws theme plays*

And I realized he'd found his own motivation to learn how haynets work. From his neighbor's alfalfa (Disco just gets grass). "That is such a pony thing to do!" my barnmate said.

While Aeres was at our barn, she had Connor's stall in the center of our 7 stall barn. When Connor came home, he went into the open stall at the end of the barn, across from a big warmblood fellow that Aeres positively hates. Like, she won't eat if he's somewhere she can see him, and she's broken the crossties after he pinned his ears at her. So obviously Aeres can't go into the open stall across from him.

Exhibit A: Aeres, with food in her stall, turned around to the corner facing away from this guy and not eating as long as he was in the crossties. For what it's worth, their only interactions have been in the crossties and he's never done anything to her!

I've left Connor in the open stall since she's been at Purdue, but I've been itching to move him back so I could hang a new hay feeding solution. Tired of the ulcer rollercoaster, I started him on a small hole haynet hung low (he doesn't wear shoes), knowing that when he got into his usual stall I would hang it on the frame I bought for it.

A couple of Friday nights ago though, someone finally hung it too low, and this happened (thankfully while someone was standing right there to free him, so it's okay to laugh at this picture, I know I did):

"Well, okay, this is my life now I guess."

Knowing after that that I needed to get his permanent/safe solution mounted, I superstitiously reasoned that if I moved Connor back into his old stall, maybe Aeres would make a miraculous recovery and come home from Purdue so I'd have to shuffle the ponies all over again. (She's able to eat a tiny bit of food as of Saturday, so maybe??)

So two Saturdays ago, my barnmate stripped Aeres' stall for me (she says she loves stripping stalls and I wasn't going to argue!) and then I proceeded to bleach the entire thing.

We're positive what Aeres has isn't contagious, but also you can never be too careful. And it looked pretty darn good after cleaning. Scrubbing doors and the outsides of waterers are things that don't get done much around here given our sort of co-op, sort of full board model we have going on.

The Nelsons clean up good! The "before" is the backwash from Aeres being unable to swallow food and then trying to drink 😥

Finally, the following day, I hung Connor's new hay feeder in his old/new stall. It's the Freedom Feeder day net on their rolling wall-mounted frame. My hope is that it will be easier on his teeth than the Savvy Feeder was (if he didn't also need a hard plastic muzzle, the SF would be fine, but I'm just anxious about what amounts to probably 18-20 hours a day of plastic against his teeth during the growing season), and this will also allow him to eat in a relatively normal head down position.

Loading position

Full position

So far, so good! The barn staff absolutely loves it and wishes all the horses had one of these - although for the guys with shoes, if they hung them high enough to be out of foot range, I'm worried I'd need a ladder to fill them!

And now my little buddy is back where he belongs, where he can see me coming through the door and nickers at me immediately <3