Rain, rain GO AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the words of Scarlett O'Hara, "As God is my witness, my next place WILL have an indoor arena!!"

So the blog has once again gone dormant. Really I am so sick of rain. A friend of mine told me the farmers around here have to get corn in before Memorial Day or they can forget it. One things for sure, they'll have a real nice wheat crop this year!

I'm at the point now, that when the weather is good Dino must work. As of this writing, we have just over 4-weeks until our first show. I was really hoping to go Training Level, so that we can canter, but our canter needs a ton of work. I don't know, I guess if I really want to show we'll have to do Intro. Not like there aren't other shows happening this summer, pretty much every weekend until early October there's a show somewhere. What's so important here, this show is being held where my trainer is based. Its familiar territory and I believe a good experience for Dino.

All in all, Dino is good. Great in fact. His grouchiness has faded for the most part and he's a fairly agreeably fellow. I'm really not sure what the deal is...I have added a bit of alfalfa to his diet, so maybe that helps with his tummy. I have noticed when he's in work, his stall walking is not as bad and he doesn't touch his manure. Hopefully when this bit of rain passes, we'll have good enough weather again to start back to work.

A sad bit of news, as my last entry had to do with her, I had the vet out last week to pull a coggins on Dino and check Angel. What is typical in a lot of older horses, they sometimes don't handle winter very well, especially the hard keepers. Unfortunately for us, we had an unusually long and hard winter. It was very cold and we got a ton of snow. Back in October, I changed Angel's grain to a grain with a low starch and sugar concentrate, foolishly thinking her metabolism had slowed down enough that she could maintain weight and receive enough nutrients on hay and this grain alone. I was feeding her the recommended amount and supplementing it with oats, she started to loose weight. Then she started to go off her hay, she would eat what she wanted and scatter the rest in her stall. We got to the point of letting Angel go through the hay and whatever bale she started eating was the one we'd feed her. We had a 80% success rate. So then we called my old hay guy who deals strictly with alfalfa hay and got a few bales. She ate and ate all of it! When we mixed in the alfalfa with the timothy, she not so neatly sorted it and ate the alfalfa, so clearly there was something about the old hay she didn't like. But she still wasn't gaining weight, so I switched her back to her old grain and added a fat supplement to her feed. She started to gain weight, but not enough and seemed to hit a plateau.

This has been going on long enough and I needed some answers, but I didn't want the answer I was about to get. My vet has diagnosed Angel with a heart condition, specifically aortic regurgitation and he has assured me that Angel is NOT in any pain. There are no signs of immediate cardiac failure, but we don't have a time frame. As for my options, I really don't have many options outside of blood work & a possible echo. I have to be realistic, she's an older horse with soundness issues. It breaks my heart that I have to look at this from a financial standpoint, I love this girl so much, but I have to do what is right by her and still consider my other two horses. Currently she's developing edema's on the bottom of her belly, she's not maintaining weight, with any exercise she does cough, but (good news) there is NO fever. Right now we are taking it one day at a time.

Dino and Angel, September 14, 2010.