A Plan Comes Together

I love it when a plan comes together. This one has taken a long time to get it done but I think it will be worth it in the end. When I started having the problems with the yearlings getting through the fence (electrified) in the enclosure attached to the barn and getting i to the neighbors gardens, I decided that I had to make this area secure for the stallions and any babies and for Gee who is a thoroughbred who boards with us. My biggest fear is a horse running through a wire fence because it cant see it, similar to what happened to Taxes when he was 4 months old.


So I planned this wooden fence which everyone thought I was crazy to do, had to go with cheaper lumber and landscape posts were cheap at that time so that is the direction I went. Then to protect the wood from chewing , white electric tape fence to add security. That way I knew it was secure, could be seen and was unlikely to have escapees. Gee (racing name Geared)was my main motivation.

Her owner has not been able to find a trainer to take her on, he has been messed around by trainers for the last 2.5 years so G has spent most of that time with us. Her only free time out of her stable has been in the roundpen where I was terrified she would put a foot through a rail while she rushed around madly because she had so much energy, or in the bottom half of the barn before I had to make it into stables for the winter again.

The day Gee arrived I fell in love with her, she is now a 17 hand 5 year old mare and has one of the nicest minds I have come across in a thoroughbred, she is amazing and I would love to ride her but dont have anywhere here where that would be safe. Yesterday for the first time I relented and put her out. It is very muddy at the doorway to the barn and generally the horses dont like the mud and will avoid going out rather than run through it. She is also now very stall bound from spending so much time in the same place and surroundings and her insecurity kept her close to the barn which was a blessing.

At first she ran a round like a mad thing, but the fence was perfectly clear to her and she knew exactly where the boundaries were which is exactly what I wanted to achieve. She stayed close to the barn and when I went out into the area she walked around with me. There is absolutely no grass here at the moment, just mud and dried lumps from the hoof ruts which hurt their soles inside the hooves to walk on.

Within 2 minutes she was puffing like a steam engine and sweating like mad but this is just the type of exercise that this poor mare needs, a few weeks of regularly being turned out for a few hours and she will be far easier to handle and probably ride. So hopefully when this becomes a regular exercise she will stop wanting to hang around a the barn door and learn to move around a bit more out there, I am going to start feeding her out there which will settle her too.

The pictures are ones I took late yesterday afternoon while she was doing her thing LOL. I love this mare and only hope that if he decides to get rid of her that he will give me the option of having her even if I have to pay her off.

That's it for today, it has been another long day, we started with an earthquake this morning at quarter til 6am. There is a fault line that runs from southwest Illinois in a north easterly direction up through Indiana and affects us when it moves which I dont think happens very often.

So that is the excitement for the day LOL. I have been running i mad circles all day trying to get things done, am finding a bit more energy and motivation but there is so much to do. It was 9.30pm when I sat down here to look at my computer eventually. ((((*Hugs))))) have a great weekend everyone.

Lori
xx