Wormin' and Walkin'

This weekend all the horses had to be de-wormed. It's a regular health maintenance thing--every two or three months you medicate your horse with a deworming paste to keep any parasites living in their guts in check. Horses inevitably get worms from eating grass, grain, hay and other stuff on the ground. If you're not careful, humans can get worms, too!

We worm the horses on a rotation, meaning we use dewormer with a different active ingredient every so often. Different medicines are better for getting rid pf certain kinds of worms, and switching it up helps prevent any resistance the worms might build up from a particular kind of medication. This month we dewormed the horses with Strongid, which is supposed to be good for killing bot fly larvae. Good, since if you remember, Gobie had some bot fly eggs laid on his legs.

As you might imagine, the horses aren't crazy about getting dewormed. The paste must taste pretty yucky! Most of the horses are very good about taking their medicine.

I dewormed Gobie by myself. First I got an estimate of his weight, since the amount of wormer you give them is based on how fat they are. You measure a horse's weight by holding them in your arms as you stand on a scale, and subtract your own weight from the total. JUST KIDDING. Actually they make a tape measure that you put around a horse's body, at the girth behind their shoulder, which gives you an estimate. Gobie is a bit over 800lbs. The first time I did this, Gobie was a little afraid of the white tape going around him, but since we've been doing so much work together it didn't bother him at all this time. When it was time to deworm him, he did the usual throwing his head around. But we were patient, and when he stopped tossing his head around the wormer went away. Soon I was able to put the wormer against the corner of his mouth without him being ridiculous about it. Then it was just a matter of speedily sneaking the syringe into the corner of his mouth and pushing the plunger. Of course there was a lot of licking and head tossing afterward which got some wormer all over my jacket, but all in all, not too bad!

The other horses were much better at it. Old pros! I held the horses while Bonnie gave them the medicine and I helped hold their head up to swallow. That's a trick Bonnie showed me after I had wormed Gobie. Next time we'll see if that decreases the amount of wormer I get on me!
Between the deworming of Gobie and the other horses I took Gobie for a walk around the property. It's a nice little exercise in ground manners. Walking a horse in hand is something you do all the time--leading them from one place to another. It's important for a horse to be polite and not try to run ahead of you, stubbornly plant his feet, or crash in to you if he sees something scary while he's being lead around. So I took Gobie out of his comfort zone, and we walked around the property in place he's seen but never actually walked around in. He was an extremely good pony. If he saw something scary he just stood still, but for the most part nothing really concerned him. He walked along politely beside me and was very mindful of when I stopped, turned, asked him to back up and so on. Basically he's the perfect pony.

Walking down the drive way. The asphalt under his feet must have felt weird and you could hear the clip-clop of horse hooves on the road. I think he was most nervous about this part--plus we were under the pine trees with all the pine needles laying around. Even so he was good--vigilant but not spooky.

Teasing friends by the fence. Look where I am! It was funny--as we walked by the fence Honey and Boo-Boo ran right up as if to say, "Where are you going? What's it like on the other side of the fence? Don't leave us unsupervised!"

We also walked under the trees in Bonnie's side yard. There were lots of leaves on the ground. He ate a couple, but mostly wanted to nose around in them.

It was a good visit, as usual! I was glad that I could help Bonnie with the other horses, and get some low-key but still important training time with the pony.