The Ramblings of an Artistic Equestrian

If you don't like hearing about views on guns and gun violence scroll past and don't click the cut.

I admit it felt more two weeks ago when the thoughts first started rolling around, but here it is.
( Gun Rant )

It all makes me angry, sad, still shocked, even after all these years and events. I don't know why the USA is so stupid about this. It's like the abortion "debate." The legislators are too worried about their pockets and reelection that we get crap legislation that helps no one.

The insufferable anti-mask moron struck again. I was leading Sherman over to the property yesterday while I was pulling the false shafts (he did awesome, by the way), and the guy stopped at the stop sign, rolled down the window, and flipped me off.

"What the heck, man?"

"Your f'n mask!"

"Air quality!" I hollered back as he drove away.

I was so pissed off. Had I not had my hands full I would have tried to get his lisence plate number and there was a strong urge to call out his pansy, coward self in his little, crappy dark grey sedan.

Moron. Some skinny, white, insecure knucklehead who is so offended by my existence he has to lash out from the safety of his little four-banger. Really, I'm more offended by the fact he would do it to ANYONE. I'm not angry that he yelled and cursed at me, I'm pissed off that his entitled, self-righteous pig-headed self would curse at someone just because they're wearing a mask for whatever reason they deem necessary.

These are the people calling others dumb sheep for wearing a mask and yet they're the ones lashing out in irrational stupidity.

This is not the rant I intended. That one is still brewing.

Since when were Gypsy Vanners considered a Baroque breed? Is this the Gypsy people being all "our horses are so special because they have feather, hair, and color?"

It's like how they've convinced the Pinto horse registry to accept Vanners and Drums while COMPLETELY IGNORING all other pinto horses of draft type.

If a Gypsy is the same as a Friesian, Andalusian, Lipizaner, or Lusitano then my Fjord is baroque and my Haflinger is and hey, half the people assume Charm-N is a Friesian, so my husband's chunky, grade Percheron mare is Baroque too!

I'd rant more, but I have a lesson to teach.

That was the approximate reaction I had to an article in the AQHA publication "AMERICA'S HQRSE."

Some of you might already know that I do not hold the AQHA in particularly high regard. I respect their insane ability to promote the breed, but I do not agree with the fact that their studbook is not closed and they will register a horse that is, by all accounts 3/4 Thoroughbred (or more!) as a full-blooded Quarter Horse.

The article was about Dressage (one of the three Equestrian disciplines that is in the Olympics) and the author mentioned AQHA recently joining with the USDF (Unites States Dressage Federation) in allowing QHs that compete in USDF events to earn AQHA points. Pretty cool, right? Yet another place for the QH to compete and, hopefully, do well.

Now the kicker was at the end of the article, resulting in the gut-tying wail of despair and frustration as the author said in cheery, hopeful tones something along the lines of "Maybe the AQHA will consider registering Warmblood crosses!"

ARRRGGGGGGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!!!!

This isn't to say that a QH and a Warmblood would not make a good cross, it's saying that people have to RESPECT what it is that a breed is rather than trying to make it something it is not! Part of this respect includes working within existing bloodlines, especially when you have over one million registered horses and your registry isn't even 60 years old! There's probably close to 500,000 living QH individuals out there, no lie. Do you think that it is impossible to find a good match for what you are looking for within the breed with that much choice?

This is part of what drives me nuts about the Appendix Quarter Horses. Appendix horses are part Thoroughbred, usually half. Appendix horses are registered in the "appendix" of the registry, however if said horse earns enough points in the show pen or money on the track they can earn their "white papers" (or were they yellow?) and essentially be magically made a full-blooded QH by the registry. If these horses are bred back to TBs, their babies go into the Appendix registry and, again, can earn full-blooded status if they win/earn enough.

This produces, tall, leggy, lean, long-faced, small-hipped horses that do not look like Quarter Horses. What do they look like? Thoroughbreds. Why? Because that is, essentially, what they are!

Quarter horses are short, stocky, have a relatively short head, heavy jaw, and massive hip. Sunny, who to my knowledge is 100% foundation bred, fits all of these except for the short part, but there's always some variance, but 15.3 hh is a lot closer than the 16 hh or so that are often produced with Appendix horses compared to the 15hh average of the breed.

Part of me says that if someone really loves their breed so much why the heck are you trying so hard to change it?! If you like horses that are tall, leggy, and fast over long distances get a Thoroughbred! If you want something short, stocky and cowy, have a QH. If you want something tall, lean, and flashy to ride saddleseat please get yourself a Saddlebred, that's what they were bred for. Don't breed a Morgan to Saddlebreds to "improve" the wonderful compact little horse that was supposed to be able to plow the field as well as look good under saddle or pulling the family carriage. If you love stocky draft horses FOR THE LOVE OF ALL FEATHERED EQUINES don't breed them so that their legs are 3/4 of their height!

This isn't to say that I'm totally against any and all crosses. Heck, we bred Panda to a Friesian and she is a Pinto Draft. Granted I do admit that Pinto/Spotted drafts are more of a color than a breed anyway, but that's beside the point! The point is I'm not trying to produce a pinto Friesian because I love Friesians so much, but just wish they had white! No, I'm hoping to produce a nice horse that has the good qualities of both parents irregardless of breed, but keeping towards a stocky draft build (and Hedzer is a more stocky Friesian of the classic Baroque type).

Take, I believe, the Oldenburg registry for an example. They've allowed some crosses, but the horses they allow into the studbook have to be approved first. They go through both conformation and movement evaluations to ensure that they are enhancing and improving the qualities that the Oldenburg already has, not trying to turn the breed into something else, or adding a feature that wasn't there before because you love the breed so much you can't bear to part with it as you venture into a discipline it can't do. Because of this practice Oldenburg horses still look like Oldenburg horses despite the infusion of fresh blood.

I don't expect a QH to jump 4'+, I don't expect a Friesian to be able to work a cow, I don't expect an Arab to sprint a quarter mile, I don't expect a Thoroughbred to plow a field, I don't expect a draft horse to run a mile or more.

I just don't get why people can't respect what a breed was bred to do and not try to make it something it is not by completely destroying the bloodlines and features that made it what it is!

Want to improve a breed? First look within and see if there are some shining individuals, breed those. Still have some major conformation flaws that prevent it from doing what it is supposed to do? Be selective in the crosses that will remedy these and enhance the features that the breed is supposed to have!

*Flails arms about.* Arrrrgggggglllleeee!

I want to beat our neighbors. They're not our direct neighbors, they're North and West of us at the end of the small drive that runs along the Ramos' property.

The last three weeks on Tuesday they've been setting off fireworks. Now fireworks are illegal in Arizona. Have been for a long time because y'know, things burn out here quite easily. I don't really care that they're setting off fireworks, really, but the first week it started around eight o'clock, not bad, but it continued sporatically until 10 o'clock and then stopped. Last week it started a little before 10 o'clock and Chris put a call in at the Sheriff's office. Last night it didn't start until nearly 11 o'clock and went on until midnight or later. Chris finally put in a call around 11.30 and I don't think either of us got any sleep until after midnight. I'm pretty sure Chris got hardly any sleep at all and he had to get up shortly after four to get to work.

It wouldn't be so bad if it were Friday or Saturday night when they did this, evenings where we get to sleep in the next morning. But they are doing this late at night during the work week when people have to get up and drive places and being sleep depribed is not good.

We don't think there are any "adults" living in the house right now. Well, it's a trailer, but I haven't seen anybody there that looks much over twenty for quite a while. It was for sale a couple of months before they took it off the market. The people I have seen seem to be in their late teens or early twenties and, by the sounds of it, don't have a lot of consideration for their neighbors' sleep patterns.

My question is: WHY ON TUESDAY!

I know they're probably just a little younger than I am and I sound like an old lady complaining about it, but I am afraid for my husband's safety driving to work this morning because he got hardly any sleep last night and he doesn't have the luxury of dozing on the bus like I do. Fortunately he doesn't have to go very far to work, but that's not the point. There is a reason that the city (state?) has an ordinance of no excessive noise after 10 o'clock, particularly during the week when people need to get to work and school safely without falling asleep at the wheel.

Nrph ... beat some sort of sense into them. Perhaps the Sheriff came out last night and dragged them off and booked them on disturbing the peace. One can hope.

There are few topics that get me seriously riled. Horse slaughter happens to be one of them.

I am not one who could be considered "deeply involved" in the horse industry. I own a handful of horses and teach horse lessons to mostly beginners and, at that, none of them own their own horses (yet). I did go through two years of classes and managed to make out with an Associates degree in Equine Science, and I'd like to think I know at least a little bit about horses and somewhat concerning the horse industry at large.

Now the fact that some people happen to like the taste of horse flesh really doesn't bother me. So long as the horses are killed humanely I don't really care about what happens to the body afterwards. What does bother me is people who are in no ways connected to the horse industry and who do not even interact with these animals, nor own any, crying about it being an injustice to the species to allow them to be eaten.

I know that roughly 70,000 horses have gone to slaughter each year (Equus). Now that all three slaughter houses that had processed horses for human consumption are closed do you know where all of those horses will go?

Of course, let us consider how a horse ends up on the auction block and being sold to a "killer buyer." Horses are expensive. They can be somewhat reasonable to maintain, but the cost of euthanasia plus the cost of having someone haul the carcass away is not cheap. If you can't afford to feed your horse anymore, you can't afford to put it down. So why not just sell the horse to someone else who will love and care for it for the rest of its natural days? Unfortunately most people looking to buy a horse are looking for ones that are serviceable. They're looking for horses who will do what they need and preferably have no vices or expensive physical ailments. Some horses have either 1) not been trained or 2) have been trained so poorly or abused in that they have behavioral "issues" that would require either expensive training or an intense amount of time put into them by the person who purchased it (and hopefully knows what he/she was doing).

The way I see it, for a dangerous horse, one who would otherwise end up neglected and starving in someone's backyard, one that a person would "set free" to fend for itself, or one whose age and physical handicaps prevent it from being useful and the owner can not afford to put it down, slaughter is, truthfully, the only sad option that many of them have.

Rescue operations can only take in so much, and even then, they're meant as a halfway house before finding a new home where they can finish their days.

Of course, now with the slaughter houses in the US being closed the horses that would have gone there and received a captive bolt to the head (a fairly humane death as I understand it) are being shipped to Mexico and Canada. Now Canada does have standards for humanely killing animals for food. Mexico, however, is sorely lacking. I've heard of one method being trying to sever the horse's spinal chord via a knife to the back/neck. Not pretty and much less humane than a single shot in the head or even slitting the throat.

I would personally prefer to see the US plants re-open and become more REGULATED (from auction block to the slaughter house specifically) than to have them simply closed down.

I do not believe that the current horse market is capable of absorbing 70,000 horses a year. While there is some good news in that the cost of buying a horse will come down, the cost of maintaining them is only going up. Hay prices are well above $10 a bale right now, and some places are predicting $15 by mid-winter. While prices do go up over the winter time, they usually don't get that high and there used to be some relief during the summer months, perhaps down to $6 a bale, which we did NOT see this year.

I don't know, the whole horse slaughter debate really makes me sick. My horses will most likely have a home for life barring anything devastating happening, but that's only four horses.

I think what really bothers me is that the people that were pushing the most to have the plants closed down are people who are in no way connected to the horse industry. People who aren't even around horses are affecting their fate. People who fail to realize that there ARE excess horses in the United States and instead of finding ways to deal with the problem, they're closing down one of the options that people had to help with it and compounding the problem of starved, neglected horses that no one wants to take care of.

I know I'm not offering any solutions here myself, but perhaps I'll take some time to sit down and postulate a bit. Of course, one thing that could be done would be tightening up registration requirements and, heaven forbid, restricting stud books like so many of the European associations do. Requiring stallions to pass certain tests and exams before they can be bred and allow for their offspring to be registered.

Now what would that do to the American Quarter Horse Association or the American Paint Horse Association which register more than 20,000 new horses each year?

The PMU program, standing for "Pregnant Mare Urine," is a way in which people get horomones for women's horomone replacement therapy. Most often used during Menopause to prevent some of the unpleasant side effects that come with transitioning into the next stage of life. I believe one of the drugs that results from this is called "premerine," but I am not certain.

Kachina was a PMU mare. She was initially from Canada and has a freeze brand on her left hip. If I remember right her number is 109, but I'm not positive. She was approximately 11 years old when we picked her up and she was in Canada until she was 9 or 10, which means that she might have been in the program 5 or 7 years.

Now collecting urine from pregnant mares isn't an easy thing, so they use cathiders and keep the mares in small stalls so they can't move around much. As if being crammed in a stall for some eleven months wasn't enough, we were informed of something else that the program entails.

Apparently they allow the mare to have her first one or two foals, carrying them to full term. Now since they have to have all the mares pregnant all the time, they don't want to have a hundred or more grade foals that they have to try to sell or give away. Thus, they stop the pregnancies at 10 months. The mare carries the foal and is forced to abort it a mere month before the foal would be due.

Absolutely disgusting.

This, we believe, is part of the reason that Kachina needed progesterone to help her carry the foal a little longer. This is also possibly the reason for her bladder infection when she was around eight months along as she was used to the cathider during previous pregnancies so as things became more compacted, it was harder for her to properly pass urine.

Not only has her time in the program caused her physical issues (though we can't directly link it), we believe that it's also part of the reason for her unsure, untrusting nature. She is better than she was, but still has a long, long way to go.

I don't think the benefit that humans recieve, outweighs what people put these horses through to get the horomones. Of course, now they find that artificual horomones aren't exactly good for women in the long run.

I could rant and gnash about how horrible the whole thing is, but I think the simple notations are enough.