This Farm Friday is brought to you by puppies! Nellie went to her new home yesterday and the puppies began their trip to their new homes in Maine! We loved having them with us for the 6 weeks and 5 days we had them! But I’d be lying if I said I was going to miss picking up poop for 7 puppies.
From the day she set foot at our house, Quila has been the perfect dog. She behaves well. She never has accidents. She is good with other dogs. She’s a bit protective of me. She is the BEST puppy dog aunt on the planet! She does as good as any mama dog at teaching puppies what behavior is OK and what isn’t. We adore our Quila girl.
Quila and her fan club.
Samson the pony is really good at Civil Inattention. Meaning, you can be in the same room as him and he will pretend you aren’t there. He mastered that skill even more with the puppies!
Christian was going to show Samson who was the boss! Samson couldn’t get away from that small furry thing quickly enough.
Before embarking on their journey the puppies had to visit the vet for vaccinations and health certificates. At first they were scared. Then they played. And finally, they passed out.
Marcus finds vet visits to be tiresome.
On their last night with us we let them play to their hearts’ content. We knew they had 4 days of being in a car ahead so wanted them to use up some of that puppy energy. Well, Kately spent about 15 minutes in Jaguar’s stall playing in his feed pan while I mucked stalls. Silly puppy!
Feed pans are for playing.
As I write this post the puppies are making their way across Tennessee. I’m grateful that the rescue is keeping me included in the communication with the transporters. They all seem to be eating, sleeping, pooping, drinking and tinkling well! Safe travels little cuties!
Any horse person will tell you that most horse people are game to try many different kinds of therapeutic treatments for their horses. I’ve posted here before about chiropractic treatment. I’ve also explored acupuncture. Most recently I had Coco treated with PEMF, which is short for Pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy. I’m not going to go into great detail about what it is and how it works, but generally it uses energy waves (pulsed) to treat damaged cells. The barn I show with uses it extensively and has had great luck using PEMF therapy. I live four hours away from my show barn, so to get my horses regular treatment I needed to find someone closer to me.
I finally found someone who works out of the Canton area and comes to my region somewhat regularly. Heather is fantastic to work with! She is extremely knowledgeable and is patient and calm with the horses.
I’ve posted on here myriad times about Coco’s various symptoms and ailments, none of which are debilitating, but I’ve always felt like she has something internal that just isn’t quite right. Horses are hard because they can’t tell us where something hurts or how much with words, only with body language. Coco is much better under saddle the past couple months, but she still seems agitated when I brush her barrel on her left side and still sometimes shows signs of discomfort when I first start riding.
Heather did a full examination of her prior to treatment and we agreed that a full-body therapy would be best. She was somewhat reactive to testing for signs of ulcers and for her female anatomy. She’s been treated for ulcers twice, and to be honest I never thought her behaviour changed after treatment, which led me to believe she didn’t have ulcers, or at least not bad enough that that was what was causing her reactivity.
Starting with her noggin, the flexible tubes emit a pulse. The pulse can be set to be really aggressive or very slight. We, of course, started very slightly on her poll and around her head. You can tell that she relaxed into it pretty well.
A horse’s poll (the area behind their ears) is more or less connected to their whole body, so anything out of whack here affects myriad other parts of their body. Her poll was somewhat reactive to the pulse, but not bad. So her body was telling us that she was a bit out of sorts here, but not to an extent that was worrisome.
This is another part of the horse’s anatomy that connects to many other parts. It is near the entrance to the thoracic cavity.
Coco mostly nonplussed at the therapy to the front half of her body. Her body showed a little reactivity at the poll and near the entrance to the thoracic cavity (which is also where ulcer pain would be manifested). She was mostly relaxed and Heather was able to turn up the pulsing a bit for these parts.
The back part of her anatomy was a bit of a different story. In this video you can hear the clicking sound the pulsing makes and see her body’s reaction to the pulse. This was where her body had the strongest reaction to the PEMF. There are any number of reasons her body was reactionary at this location. Perhaps due to trauma from her fetotomy. Her internal conformation may be causing some discomfort. She may have some intestinal parasites that don’t show up on fecal exams and are causing her discomfort. Heather did some additional examination that led us to believe the parasite issue might have some veracity as well as trauma from the fetotomy.
The part that seems to be the most distressed.
Based on her therapy and the examination done by Heather I have opted to treat Coco with a Panacur PowerPac followed by a short worming regimen to hopefully get rid of any internal parasites that might be making her uncomfortable. After that we will try to get some more regular PEMF therapy and see what we have. All in all Coco has been doing really well lately. Our rides are good. She seems happy and mostly comfortable. Definitely better than she seemed to be last fall!
Have you done PEMF for you or your horse? Any other therapeutic/non-traditional treatments? I’m curious to hear about your experiences!
Good Friday morning y’all! I cannot believe we are into the double digits dates of August! Soon school will be starting around here and traffic will be bad and the weather will start cooling off and all that comes with the change of seasons.
I’m trying to let myself enjoy the cooler temps we are having right now, but I’m having a hard time not being bitter about the lack of rain. We have been surrounded by rain clouds for a couple days and seen a lot of lightening and even some rainbows. But no rain.
When it gets warm, Tuffy gets in the water trough to cool off. This always cracks me up and it makes him SO happy!
Quila is a saint about letting the puppies climb on her. Some of the tan ones look a lot like her, so she’s extra cute with her doppelgangers!
This is Jackie, she is our newest foster. She had been in the Joshua shelter since about April. They had gotten to the point that where going to have to euthanize dogs to make room for all the new ones coming in the door, so we offered to foster her. She is a DELIGHTFUL little dog! Only about 27lb with lots of love and energy. We are smitten.
PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY PLAY ……………………………….. pass out. That is the theme of Dickens. He adores playing with Jackie!
Simon is lame right now with an apparent stifle injury (WTF, Simon!) and since Sterling is gone Coco is getting ALL the love! And it appears to make her very sleepy.
And speaking of Sterling, things seem to be going OK with his kid. Do you see his happy eyes? I think he REALLY loves his kid! I’m the proudest horse Mom this side of the Mississippi!
I’ll be spending the weekend wishing, hoping, praying, begging, and doing whatever else I can try to encourage the rain to fall!
Nine times out of ten when I tell someone I’m going to my family reunion (which happens every four years) they want to commiserate about how they have to go to their family reunion at some park in some po-dunk Texas town every summer. Everyone argues, no one has fun, and most people go out of a sense of obligation to Aunt Betty Mae, or some such thing. My family reunions are NOTHING like that.
Each reunion more or less has one family branch who is the host and does the majority of organizing. They pick a location by visiting various options and choosing the one that best fits our needs (there are usually 150 of us and we like to do stuff and eat together). They coordinate what events will be options, plan family meals and provide information and hospitality during the actual reunion.
This year was about 45 years since the first reunion, which was held near Banff in Canada. We don’t go to shabby locations for our reunions, which also makes them very special. We’ve been to Jackson Hole, WY; Estes Park, CO; Deadwood, SD; Bend, OR and other equally lovely locations.
This year we went to Suncadia, Washington!
The weather for the reunion this year was FABULOUS! It has been unseasonably warm in the Seattle area, but to a Texan unseasonably warm in Washington is always going to be nicer than seasonably warm in North Texas. We did all sorts of fun things together including picnics, tubing down the Yakima River, family history sessions with some of the genealogy experts in the family, a friendly game of family feud, and many wonderful meals shared.
My Mom and her cousins getting ready for their photo op.
This reunion celebrates my Mom’s side of the family and she has 50 first cousins so you can imagine why there are so many people at our reunions! The reunion this year had quite a few less people than normal, but it made it a lot easier to actually get to spend time talking to people. You see, my family is FULL of fascinating people. From a cousin who pretty much saved a Frank Lloyd Wright home from being demolished, to multiple auctioneers, to urban design architects, to owners of a kids’ theater on the beach in California, to teachers, to pot farmers, to ranchers. There are city dwellers, world travelers, and rural Americans. You can talk about politics, religion, education and people are respectful and genuinely interested in the viewpoints of other people. If you want your faith restored in humanity, then you should marry into my family and go to one of our reunions!
My Schnellfie!
I’m grateful and blessed that I know SO many of my extended family members and through social media and reunions I get to keep up with most of them. We often joke that we could drive from California to Maine and never have to stay in a hotel once!
The puppies are now just over four weeks old and they are on the MOVE! They are definitely bigger than the muppies were at the same age, but the verdict is still out on what breed mix they are. Any guesses?
The boys are all named for German show jumping riders and the girls are named for a couple crazy women in history from a Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast I listened to recently.
In the meantime, enjoy your puppy fix! We will have them for just a couple more weeks before they head north to their new homes!
Tilly in the middle flanked by brothers Christian and Marco.
Cute little poser! This is Ludger.
Puppy pile! Sister Tilly looking at the camera. She is lying on brother Marcus next to Ludger and Marco.
They are slowly getting brave enough to leave their tack room. I think this is Kately.
