So in my ongoing quest to make this all work......I will be picking up a hay bag on the way home today and then tying Foxy for a bit this evening, in the shed, so I can get her legs and feet cleaned up and pull her blanket, groom, etc.
Some pissy ass person posted a comment on the last post (which I deleted...because I can! Ha!) about how horrible it was (among other things) to fence her out of her "comfortable" place. And also how horrible it was to have her in mud and manure and how her frogs are going to rot out, etc etc.
Okay, so......if there is a good chunk of my property that is not muddy.....but Foxy is not comfortable there. Which is worse? To lock Foxy in a dry area that she doesn't want to be in? Or to allow her to be in her favorite spot which is muddy and gross? Can't have it both ways!
And so I often talk to people from the West coast (since I lived there and she came from there) who deal with huge amounts of rain on a regular basis. We get rain out here, but not like this. My neighbor across the street has a large pasture that is about half a lake right now. I'm thinking the water is about 1-2 feet deep in the worst parts....even worse than mine, although it is so large that there are plenty of less flooded/muddy spots. I can only imagine anyone that does not have a barn to lock their animals up in right now is going to have some serious mud. What else do you have when you get 1-2 inches of rain per day, for multiple days, followed by consistant rain daily for a week or more? Nastiness is what you get! So how do you deal with this?
I know some people in Washington will mud-proof their paddocks to some extent....but there was also flooding to where people were evacuating horses recently as well, even in the well managed areas. So what happens when you get an excess of rain in a short period of time? Just live with the mud? Does nobody ever find a temporary barn to board in? If I knew other horse people I would totally be begging a place in their barn, but I don't know any horse people out here.
Because of my situation I will never truly "flood". I am at the top of a hill...not a huge hill but while it may have some serious mud and inches of standing water that is the most that will happen before it just runs downhill....it would take feet and feet and feet of flooding to get dangerously underwater here. It's just the mud that is making it a disaster. My neighbors roofs would be underwater before I would be. We actually had flood warnings last week because of the ridiculous rain but I never worry as I am not in danger of that. The worst for me would be to have roads flooded to where I could not get home.
So anyways...mud management? I have heard all the talk of gravel, etc. I assume for the future I need a small paddock with gravel for rainy times. Perhaps when we renovate (if we still do) the back 1/2 acre paddock, we will make a portion of it gravel. We have gravel in front of the shelter and gravel under mats inside of it...but Foxy won't go in there so it is kind of a waste. All my good planning down the drain!
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3 comments:
I know Chattanooga is almost an hour from you but contact Angie @ Mountain Creek Horse 527 Reads Lake Rd Chattanooga, TN 37415
Phone: (423) 875-4800 She may be able to help you. Angie is a wonderful sweet person. Tell Her Alisa from Paducah sent you.
I am from upstate NY, so I can understand what you are going through. We have three seasons: winter, mud season and july, so there are several ways to deal with it. Many people around here do use a crusher run or shale (dont' recommend shale, I've seen too many abcesses result). For our own horses, they were stalled for atleast a few hours each day to dry them out, in which we legs were hosed clean, thrush preventative on hooves and a good brushing. We never actually have had a horse develop thrush by doing this, and heels don't crack then either. If they do, vaseline will help with that. Also about her not going in the shed: if you dont have time, space or money for a companion, sometimes something as simple as a radio can make them feel more comfortable and less vulnerable.
Horses do not get thrush from standing in mud for a week during a rare burst of bad weather. Horses get thrush from standing in it for months and months in a typical Washington winter.
Sometimes people get WAY too overprotective about horses. I'd let her stand where she's happy.
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