Tag Archives: Equus Plus

horses grazing

Nutritional Variety is the Spice of Life for Horses

Guest Post by Mattie Cowherd

If you have read any literature on feeding horses, you have probably come across the idea of “forage first.” Forage for horses is grass. This includes varieties of grass including Timothy, Orchard, Bermuda, and Oat.

The concept of feeding forage first is that your horse should be eating at least 1 – 2% of its body weight a day in grass either in the pasture or in the form of hay. Ideally, this should be offered throughout the day so your horse can have small meals and move between mouthfuls.

Wild horses have access to lots of plants and grasses in a single day. Domestic horses, on the other hand, are usually only served up the basic “meat and potatoes.” We rarely give them variety in their hay or pasture intake, and we usually feed a dense, high-calorie additive in the form of grain. Sometimes we give them the rest of their dietary needs through powders and pelleted minerals.

Can you imagine eating just one type of food every day? Or eating only plain salad with protein powder to supplement your other dietary needs? What if all you ever ate was chocolate cake (yum… maybe for the first few days anyway!) or just lived on apples… As you can imagine, you would only be excited about your meals for a day or two before even the tastiest foods would look dull. Not to mention how unbalanced your diet would be to only have one source of sustenance!

Horses GrazingHorses are very much like us. They love having variety in their meals. I like to offer my horses a selection of foods. This allows them to balance their dietary needs and also makes mealtime more interesting. If I have a horse that is a picky eater, this is often a sign of a major mineral imbalance in their diet. If I adjust his diet, I often see the picky eater become more interested in other food options.

A major way to offer your horse variety is to have free choice minerals available in their living area. I always offer salt in both white and trace mineral forms. My horses do well on the blocks designed for cattle, but some horses prefer loose salt. Offer both to your horse for a few weeks and see which he prefers.

I also offer a trace mineral feed called izmine, which offers over sixty trace minerals in one supplement. In addition, I offer two ratios of calcium and phosphorus. One is 1:1 and the other is 2:1 calcium to phosphorus. This allows my horses to nibble on either ratio to reach their preferred 1.5:1 ratio depending on the levels they are eating through their forage. Usually offering these four mineral supplements is enough to help my horses to balance their daily forage intake and also allows them to self-adjust for any change in their diets.

Horses that are missing nutrients in their diet crave particular minerals or herbs and eat huge amounts of them until they finally reach saturation. Offer the free choice mineral in adequate supply each day to help the horse get what it needs. Then after the horse stops gobbling it down, offer a smaller amount–just in case they still need it.

Free choice minerals do need to be kept out of the weather, so put the feeders inside a covered run or other shelters.

Many horses love exploring new tastes, textures, and flavors.If you are a fan of treating your horse, why not offer variety in the treating process? If you can offer different hays (even just a bale or two), switch out some of the offerings in the grain bucket. You can also give several different forms of treats to your horse as a reward or a gift. You will see that your horse will be much more interested in what is being served.

Using food to enhance your relationship with your horse or horses can be a fun and interesting. Test your imagination. Have you ever tried any of these treats with your horses before: bananas (and peels), oranges, mangoes, watermelon, carrots, apples, oats, alfalfa or grass pellets, flax seed cookies, peaches, pears, radishes, beet tops, carrot tops, peppermint candies, sugar cubes, molasses cookies, etc.?

There are many safe and nutritional foods you can try with your horse – just use moderation with treats, and check with your vet if your horse has special dietary needs.

Have fun exploring what your horses like!

*Excerpts from my book

Want to learn more about free choice minerals? Visit www.dynamitespecialty.mvoffice.com/mattiecowherd

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Dale Evans and Roy Rodgers

Little Known Facts about Well Known Cowgirl Dale Evans

She had four different names.

Born Lucille Wood Smith,  her parents soon changed her name to Frances Octavia Smith. When she started her radio career, she took the name, Marion Lee. In 1930 she changed her name to Dale Evans.

Dale Evans
(Auntie Fashion Files)

She was way ahead of her time—in more ways than you think.

Evans started her singing career at seven years of age singing gospel solos at church. Bright and more advanced than her classmates, she skipped several grades. She fell in love with Thomas Frederick Fox and married him at 14 years of age. The couple had a child, Thomas Fox, Jr. when she was 15, and she divorced Fox when she was 16.

She raised her son as her “younger brother.”

Back in the day, it wouldn’t do for a woman’s career, especially one is show business to be a mother, much less a young mother. In 1945, after her marriage to R. Dale Butts, Evans acknowledged Thomas as her son.

She appeared in a movie with John Wayne, Old Oklahoma.

 Evans got her start in radio as a young woman. Her voice and movie star looks led to Hollywood where she signed a contract with 20th Century pictures. Evans then went on to sign with Republic pictures where she appeared in more movies including The Cowboy and The Senorita. Dale met her fourth and final husband Roy Rogers on the set of that movie.

She never liked being typecast in Westerns.

Evans wanted to appear in musicals. She somewhat got her wish; she appeared in a multitude of musical Westerns.

She didn’t learn to ride until she was 30 years of age.

Evans and Buttermilk
Evans and Buttermilk
(Photo found on Pinterest)

People assumed because she was from Texas, she knew how to handle and ride horses. She did not until she met Rogers and he taught her to ride on the set of their first movie together. Later in their television show, her favorite side-kick, besides Roy, was her faithful horse–a buckskin quarterhorse named Buttermilk.

She was passionate about children and children’s causes.

Dale and Roy had one child together, Robin Elizabeth, who died from Downs Syndrome before the age of two. Besides her son Thomas, Evans and Roy had four more children but adopted them. She and Roy spent endless hours and much of their fortune in devotion to children, especially those “at risk.” They also developed the Happy Trails Children’s Foundation.

She experienced extreme joy and extreme heartache regarding her children.

A devoted Christian and loving person, Evans opened her heart and her home to four adopted children. Having lost her first child to Downs Syndrome, the heartache continued when Debbie, her adopted Korean daughter died at age 12 in a bus accident, and her adopted son, Sandy, died while serving in the army in Germany.

She was incredibly creative and prolific.

With Roy Rogers alone she appeared in 28 feature films. She and Roy produced over 100 episodes of their television show. A devout Christian, Evans wrote and published over 20 inspirational books. And, a talented songwriter, Evans wrote many songs including the theme of their television show, “Happy Trails.”

 

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Velma Bronn Johnston, aka “Wild Horse Annie”

Wild Horse Annie (http://www.themustangnation.org/history.html)
(http://www.themustangnation.org/history)

Velma Bronn Johnston knew pain and suffering. Born to Joseph Bronn and Gertrude Clay in 1912, Velma, at eleven years of age contracted polio and was confined to a cast and hospitalization for several months. The disease left her physically disfigured, and the subject of ridiculing and cruelty by her schoolmates. Velma consoled herself with writing and drawing and taking care of the many animals on her parents’ ranch, the Double Lazy Heart Ranch in Reno, Nevada.

Velma had a particular love of horses, as did her father, who, as an infant came to the West with his parents in a covered wagon. It is said that during the during the arduous journey across the desert, his mother, for whatever reason, could not provide milk for him, so resorted to feeding him the milk of a Mustang mare–an act that saved his life. Later in life, Joseph Bronn, to help support his growing family and keep his ranch in operation, ran a freighting service. Many of the horses he used to pull the wagons were Mustangs.

While many of her peers made fun of Velma for her disfigurement, Charlie Johnston, a neighbor, became smitten with her. The two married and eventually took over Velma’s father’s ranch. To make extra money, Velma took a job as a secretary to insurance executive Gordon Harris and worked for him for the next forty years. Unable to have children of their own, Velma and Charlie also opened their home and ranch to many of Nevada’s youth, where they taught them how to ranch and care for animals.

One day, in 1950 while driving either to or from work (accounts vary,) Velma was following a stock trailer and noticed blood oozing from the bottom of the doors. She followed the truck and found out that the wild horses inside were on their way to a slaughterhouse. The blood came from a young foal who was being trampled to death by the frightened older horses.

During that time period, wild horses, many of them Mustangs, were captured and slaughtered for pet food. Their capture consisted of rounding them up with airplanes, and then once they were in a more cohesive group, trucks would chase them and the men hanging out of the windows or in the bed of the truck would lasso them to the ground. Horses who were more difficult to rope, were sometimes “hamstringed,” or shot in the back of the legs, rendering them unable to run. Then, the perpetrators crammed the frightened animals into stock trailers and took them to the slaughterhouse.

Velma’s witnessing of the gruesome scene as she traveled to or from work instigated her lifelong pursuit to stop the cruelty toward Nevada’s wild horses.

Wild Horse Annie with her dog and horse
Wild Horse Annie with her dog and horse. (Wikipedia)

She began in the early 1950’s and succeeded with the 1955 bill in the Nevada State Legislature that banned aircraft and land vehicles from capturing wild animals on state lands. It was then she earned her nickname, “Wild Horse Annie.” But, Velma had a long way to go. She became a passionate speaker and made it her mission to save wild horses and burros throughout the nation. In 1971, the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act was signed into law.

She also established wild horse refuges in the southwest. During the rest of her lifetime, she kept vigilant watch over America’s wild horses and called to task anyone who did not obey the laws she helped put into place. Wild Horse Annie worked hard to promote the idea that wild horses and Burros were “integral to the landscape” and seen as “living symbols of the pioneer spirit of the West.” She came up against many who wanted to silence her, and some even threatened her life, but Velma soldiered on.

After the death of her husband, Annie lived out the rest of her life with her mother. She died at age 65 in 1977 from cancer.

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Little Known Horsewomen of the World – Selika Laszevski

Selika Laszevski is in fact so little known, many historians question her existence at all.

Selika from The Paris Review
The Paris Review

The portrait here was taken by Felix Nadar in 1891, Paris, France. The photo is thought to be of Lasveski, but it is not certain. Some historians speculate that this photograph was taken of an unknown model and Nadar attached a story to her to promote his work.

Whether fictionalized or not, the story goes that Laszevski was a 19th-century equestrian, an écuyère of the Haute école, or equestrian of the high school of dressage. High school meaning of the highest level in classical dressage–the disciplined “equestrian ballet” that has its origins in the military, going as far back as Xenophon’s On Horsemanship, one of the two works of literature on horsemanship by the Greek soldier Xenophone who lived c. 430 – 354 BC.

Although little is know of this equestrian, a short film has made and produced about her by award-winning writer-director Sybil Mair Sybil Mair. The film titled “The Adventures of Salika was released in September of 2017.  It is a coming of age story about an African princess who must forge her own way in the world after being displaced by war. She ends up in France and makes her way to the Haute école.

For more information on the film, click here.

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The Silence Between the Notes – Developing Harmony and Trust with Horses

Guest Post by Mattie Cowherd – Licensed Parelli Professional, 3-Star Instructor

 

woman on horse

For me, there is a certain peace achieved after a day of riding. In that moment, I can drift away from the past, or my distraction of the future. This allows me to simply BE – soothed by the passing of the moments rather than the struggle of my thoughts. I believe that peace and calmness are essential to developing the true art of horsemanship.

I still laugh when I remember my students’ faces as I galloped past them on a fat little cob during a trail clinic in Wales — eating an apple! The concept of peacefulness in full motion didn’t make sense to them. But, if I have true harmony and partnership with my horses, not even galloping at full speed should separate us.

Peacefulness should also extend to teaching your horse something that is scary or new. Pressuring a horse when it is on adrenaline is never a good idea. This natural drug in the horses’s system sets off its flight-or-flight responses. Horses don’t think when they are on adrenaline. Yes, you can force a horse through the experience, but you are likely going to have to repeat this lesson – again and again and again — because the horse is not mentally present. The horse’s brain is shut off, and it is operating strictly on instinct. If you use calmness, clear communication with your body, and patience, your horse will learn that he can make mistakes, and retreat when he is fearful. He will trust you to show him the way through a problem.

I believe that peaceful horsemanship starts with awareness – first of yourself, and then of your horse’s  internal and external states. Are you tight? Are you worried? Is there a good reason for this? Can you foresee any issues during your groundwork session or your riding and if so, can you simply avert it by being passively proactive? And can your horse check in with you and see that things are indeed okay? Can he see that you have been a patient and progressive leader for him? Can he trust that you will not be afraid or offended by what he needs to do?

Perhaps I notice more strongly now what a true partnership feels like because I also know what a false partnership feels like. I can feel the lack of attention and the lack of trust. I feel the discordant communications when a horse is terrified and unable to think.

I can also feel the harmony and the moments of true oneness. I can see my horse reaching across our communication to ask me a question or answer confidently when he understands.

I feel the moments when my horse and I are slightly out of sync, and yet, I can refocus my energy and my intentions to bring us back to harmony in an instant. If I feel my horse and I are out of sync during new lessons or a moment of fear, I can ask my horse to trust me and let me guide him to the right answer.

It’s like a dance. You can’t dance with another person when you are both intent on correcting or defending yourselves.

You need silence between the notes.

Stillness between moments of movement is vitally important to your horse’s understanding. If you do not pause or release completely, your horse does not have a chance to learn.

It is in moments of stress or learning with our horses that our attention to PRESENCE is so important to our communication and relationship with them. Horses are only in the now – adjusting to the present with reference to memories of past experiences. Create your best self when you are with your horses. Strengthen the positive responses with reassurance and attention. Your horses will seek this praise with enthusiasm and will approach future learning opportunities knowing that their partners have their backs.

To learn more about Mattie, go to her website here.

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