Tag: Leeloo

Best Laid Plans

It should surprise no one that my original paddock track system layout has been modified significantly from its first iteration however, before I go into more details a brief public service announcement.

There is a saying in the horse world, “two horse people, three opinions.” It is not unusual for people who are passionate about something to also have strong opinions about that thing, but for horse people, particularly those living near a metropolitan area it sometimes seems more pronounced. I think it has to do with the increasing cost of having a horse close to an urban area. Anyone willing to put so many other wants, and occasionally needs aside – I still have one pair of pants I can wear to work, that’s enough, right? – to afford a horse and/or has that much money to begin with comes with a certain amount of crazy passion. 

 

Please note the complete and utter lack of sources or any information about my data collection methods – that’s how you can tell this graph is legit.

I mention this because if you, person reading this, have horses yourself you might have some opinions on some of things I’m going to talk about in this, and future, posts; and they might be different from the opinions I have and the decisions I made. I am happy to have a conversation about our differences in opinion, either in the comments here or on Facebook, I ask only that they not be in the form of “What you are doing is stupid and wrong. Let me tell you why…” 

On to the original plans. As I mentioned in a previous post, the layout of Leeloo’s new home is based on the work by Jaime Jackson and his Paddock Paradise book/website/Facebook group. The ultimate goal is to get my horses moving as much as possible and living in a way that more closely resembles the way their wild/feral relatives live so they can be healthier happier horses. There obviously have to be some concessions, but I am trying hard to keep that primary goal in mind.  Below are the first few drafts I had put together.

I spread out the big three needs (water, hay, shelter), so that the horses have to travel to get from one to the other. Ideally the paddock track makes one big continuous loop so that no horse can ever get trapped in a dead-end by another horse being a jerk; however it is not unreasonable to have offshoots as long as the end of an offshoot allows a horse to get away from said jerk. Leeloo has been described by the barn manager of our current barn as being the most dominant horse on the property who is tough, but fair, “Leeloo will only kick someone’s ass if they deserve it.” That being said, minimizing any damage a tough but fair Leeloo can do is still a goal. One of the constant tensions anyone with horses has to deal with is the desire to keep our animals safe with the need to allow them to be horses, and horses have hierarchies that are determined through physical means, some which can cause injury – which sucks.

You can also see there was a question about water. Because this is all temporary until we can get the actual barn built, we aren’t doing things like digging new water lines so the water for the horses needs to come from the spigots by the house. And because we live in Minnesota the water also has to be close enough to an electrical outlet that we can get a tank water heater in it. We have two spigots and exterior outlets on our house, a set in front and another in back. Originally, I had a convoluted plan to run the hose and the extension cord up and around our garage door, but then remembered that we have that other set on the front of the house – so the water moved there.

There is only one large flat area that isn’t too close to the septic system and isn’t currently corn field so that is where the shelters landed. From there it was a matter of going around some trees, the septic system, and the house.

Obviously I can’t just show Leeloo the drawing and ask her to please keep to the designated areas, so we need some fence. Several years ago I had reached out to some of the people I know who have their own barns or horses at home and asked for one thing they would absolutely do again, one thing they would absolutely change if they were starting from scratch, and any recommendations for various horse related products, companies, etc. One of those recommendations was for Monica and Bluebird Fencing. Monica is amazing and has been super helpful through this whole process. We talked on the phone for a solid hour that first time while I explained what we wanted to do (track system); what my priorities were (1st – safety, 2nd – cost, 3rd – ability to move the whole thing in the future); what animals we were hoping to have (full sized horses, donkey? pony? goats?) and landed on Electrobraid as our fencing material and the Common Sense Fence system by Geotek as the corner and in-line post system (more on how that has been going soon). She then asked me to send her my plans so she could price it out and give me a quote. I sent her the plans above and she got back very quickly to say I may want to rethink them. As originally drawn I was looking at a VERY expensive plan because every change of direction was about 20 times more expensive than a straight in-line post, and every corner was 30 times more expensive than a straight in-line post and there were a LOT of corners and direction changes in those early plans. With that in mind I sat back down with the goal of minimizing corners but still getting Leeloo to all the places I wanted and keeping her off all the places she couldn’t be on. And here was the new plan that we are in the process of putting up:

 

We got it down to thirteen corners and three gates, which at the time seemed very reasonable. Ignorance, what bliss.

Where Will She Go?

Coming home from that uplifting appointment I tell Nate that I want to try to bring Leeloo home this summer and though supportive, he was understandably skeptical. We had already agreed to, and taken payment from, a local farmer to farm most of our land for this year, so where exactly was I going to put Leeloo? Also the whole point of bringing Leeloo home was to get her to move more – how exactly was I going to do that?

 

 

In the course of our lameness issues, we have worked with at least six different vets, six different farriers, four different chiropractors, a massage therapist, acupuncturist, and osteopath. The one thing they all agreed on was that Leeloo needs to move more, and move in terms of low intensity activity, i.e. walking. So how do you get a couch potato of a horse to move more? I’ve been pondering this for years now, and a while back when discussing this issue with a friend I shared my ingenious (laughable) idea for a hay feeder that would force my horse to move. The general outline was creating a long rectangular box which you would put a perforated barrel, filled with hay, into and Leeloo would have to roll the barrel up and down the track to get the hay out. There are obviously lots of flaws to that idea, but my friend was very kind and just listened and when I was done, asked if I had heard about paddock track systems. I had not.

The basic idea is that you spread out the horse necessities (food, water, shelter) in different locations that require the horse to walk between them. Intrigued I searched the internet when I got home and discovered Jaime Jackson and Paddock Paradise. I acquired his book of the same name, devoured it, and knew that this was my answer. This was how I was going to get my horse to move! One of the many beauties of the Paddock Paradise system is that you don’t need a lot of land to make it work. So, I pulled up an overhead view of our land (thanks ever present observation satellites, your existence isn’t creepy at all) and thought yes – I can get a paddock paradise track set up around our existing yard and house.

We can do this!

Why Now?

So why now? What happened to make me nudge that eyelash and come at my goal of bringing Leeloo home in a different way?

Leeloo has lameness issues, and no, I don’t mean she thinks fanny packs are cool, though apparently fanny packs are cool again? Lame as in not sound enough to ride. I’ve been attempting to get to the bottom of her ongoing lameness issues for years and have spent a lot of time, money, energy, and hope – all followed by heartache – and gotten nowhere. Last summer, when I was adjusting to the fact that the cost of my barn had apparently gone from x to 3x and silly me I had only saved up x (if you are asking yourself, wait, didn’t you say it was 5x – you’re thinking of the price quote I got this year; 3x was the quote I got last year – isn’t our current economic state fun?), I decided that the barn dream was clearly being postponed so I would instead focus on getting Leeloo sound in her current living situation. This led to yet another very expensive vet visit, which I’ll detail further in a future post in case anyone wants to nerd out about equine lameness checks, but the end result of that visit was a decision to inject her right hock. Did the injections help? Who knows! We spent the next several months going through round after round of hoof abscesses – which are just as much fun as they sound. One hoof after the other, round and round, for months. I would maybe get two or three weeks of soundness before the next round began. But then very early spring this year she was lame again and it wasn’t an abscess. The vet was back out and we tried another set of injections (they wear off between 6 months and a year and we were at 9 months). And what did they do this time? You guessed it, nothing. Right around this time my farrier was out for our regular trim, and I was expressing my frustration as he was looking at her back feet and asked “How much does she move? On a scale of 0 to” – ZERO. She moves not at all. The way her current situation is configured the round bale (giant bale of hay) is under the shelter and right next to the water. Leeloo also happens to be the most dominant horse on the entire property, so nobody moves her. She can camp her butt at the round bale, pivot to get a drink of water and then pivot right back to shove her face in food. All day, every day. When the weather cooperates the horses do have a pasture they all go out on, but there is only one pasture so the barn owner is very protective of it and that means once the spring thaw starts the horses don’t go out at all until the ground is firm and the grass is established for the year. I mentioned to the farrier that I come out to the barn regularly to exercise her and his response was – “It doesn’t matter, you could work her every day, what she needs is constant low level movement – lots and lots of walking and even with that there is no guarantee she’ll be sound, but it’s just not going to happen in her current situation.” After that fun pep-talk I was leaving the barn and sitting at the top of their driveway staring at my own house (I live very close to where Leeloo is currently being boarded) I saw my own patch of yard around our house, surrounded by a tilled field and thought… maybe, just maybe, I could figure out how to bring her home now.

 

Eyelash Wishing

Did you ever do that thing when you find a loose eyelash and you blow it off your finger and make a wish? I have no idea where I got that habit from, but I’ve been doing it as long as I can remember. For years now when I would blow that eyelash off my finger my wish was some variation on “I want my barn” and for a really high number of tries the eyelash wouldn’t float away, it just sat there, no matter how hard I blew – this is very bad luck. So, I would give it a small nudge – I would NOT push it off my finger myself, that would be terrible luck – but I would just shift it a bit and try again. Sometimes it took a few shifts before it would blow away. Anytime I had to do this I would tell myself I am not doomed to failure, it’s just that sometimes you need to make some adjustments to reach your goals. – Well friends that is what is happening. We’re making some adjustments to reach my goal of bringing Leeloo (our horse) home. Plan A – part 1 (the dream) involved a large indoor riding arena with a “barn” on one end with stalls, tack-room, bathroom, hay storage above. This would be centered behind our house. Then there would be pastures and a paddock paradise track system to our east and a hay field to our west. Plan A – part 2 also involved another outbuilding for a tractor and hay making equipment and more hay storage. That is still my dream but with the current state of the economy, inflation, prices, etc. it is still a very distant dream and meanwhile I am getting older, my horse is getting older, and every new election is a chance that my zoning could change and bringing my horse home would no longer be an option. So this spring, after much discussion, Nate and I have decided to make some adjustments to the stages of that dream – we’re nudging the eyelash a bit – so we can bring Leeloo home this summer! You can follow along on this process here.

What have I gotten us into?!