Rocking T Ranch

Many important life lessons

The babies having a fun time (one's 2.5 days old, the other's 5.5 weeks old) yesterday. Notice one of the cows wanting to be in the shot!

Please note! They are just resting. They will move on in a day or two.

While it would be great to have enough room to turn our horses out 24/7, some of us just don't have that advantage. We (humans) can only do our best to keep these beasts happy and content.

This is great advice!

If you hope to give your horse clear requests with your leg aids, there is no wiggling out of some basic work on your seat. Before you can apply leg aids correc...tly, you must be able to follow the motion of the horse's gaits with your seat, using strong core muscles to hold and release you in balance so that your lower body can relax and move in rhythm with the horse. It can take months, more likely years, of riding to achieve this. All of your body parts are connected. Tension held anywhere from your jaw to your toes interferes with your ability to communicate clearly with your horse. Grippy thighs or stiff ankles bounce you out of the saddle. Clamping calves or feet braced against the stirrups make it impossible for your legs to move on and off the horse's sides in rhythm with the gait. These muscles must be relaxed so you can apply leg aids with many degrees of pressure. It is hard to 'see' the degrees of leg pressures. So let's go to a visual of a whip, an easily observed artificial aid. Novice riders apply their whip only two waysa light tap or a hard tap. Seasoned riders have at least ten whip pressures available in the vocabulary they are developing with their horse. The first pressure is simply carrying the whip. The second is laying it against the horse's side. The third is just a very light on/off touch with the whip. The fourth is a quicker, crisper touch. The fifth is that light tap most people start with. The sixth is a firmer tap, the seventh is a medium tap and so on up until you get to ten. Ten is a shout, maybe even a bellow. Most riders should never need to use an eight through ten. But understanding the range of pressures available helps you use your whip aid in a way that is clear to the horse. Horses naturally understand that pressure escalates when a request is ignored because they do it all the time among themselves. If you watch a group of horses in pasture, you will see them constantly exchanging subtle, small signals like a wrinkled nose or pinned ear or a cocked hind leg to convey a message. If the other horse ignores the initial message, the signals become more noticeable. It is not until the other horse continues to ignore the message that a mare may charge with bared teeth or turn and let loose with both barrels. Similarly, you want to use the least amount of aid pressure, and the least reinforcement of the pressure, that will get a response from the horse. But if the horse does not respond, you need to escalate and reinforce, then release the pressure when you achieve the desired result. The degree of leg aid pressure the horse responds to will vary from day to day, even minute to minute. Many factors come into play. Does the horse live in a stall or out in a pasture, when was the last time he had turnout, did he work yesterday or was his last work session four days ago, is it 90 degrees or 20 degrees? How consistently you applied your leg aids the last time you rode can also affect the horse's response during today's ride. Let's assume that when you last you rode your horse, you bumped with your legs to ask him to move on a little faster and nothing happened. You did not get the response you wanted but you just let things go along. A few strides farther along the arena wall, you applied your leg aids again and, once again, the horse paid no attention to them. Maybe about the fourth time you squeezed harder with your legs and you added a little tap to reinforce your leg aid. The horse finally realized that your leg bumps meant 'more energetically, please' and responded to your aids. If you apply and reinforce your leg aids inconsistently, your aids will not have any consistent meaning to your horse. So, when you apply those same leg bumps at your next schooling session, the horse will still not understand if you are asking him for something specific or just banging your legs against his sides randomly. If you consistently apply a pressure and immediately reinforce it if the horse does not respond, the horse quickly makes the association between the aid and its meaning in terms of a shape or direction you want him to take. Whether your reinforcement is a stronger application of the aid or a touch with the whip, the timing of any reinforcement of an aid is critical. Unless the correction follows the aid request within a split second, the horse cannot make the connection between the two events. Laying a supportive leg against their side as a suggestion to move forward is all the encouragement they can be trained to need. Your legs are 'on' but not squeezing. Although it is hard to convince some riders that a very light, constant leg pressure will calm their reactive horses, a constant pressure does not chase or increase the energy level of a horse the way an active on-off pressure does. A constant pressure, like the pressure of the girth, gradually goes away after the horse first notices it. So, a very soft, steady leg pressure against their sides can be a comfort zone for horses. The application of driving leg pressures that ask the horse to go forward also varies from gait to gait. At the walk, leg pressures alternate from side to side in motion with the swing of the horse's hips. At the rising trot, both legs squeeze simultaneously in the sitting phase and release on the rising phase (if you reverse this, you will be out of rhythm). When rising, you can only drive with your leg aids every other stride. The sitting trot becomes more aerobic because you can now drive at every stride with the swing of your hips matching the swing of the horse's hips. In the canter, you squeeze with both legs as the horse's back reaches its 'up' phase. As you feel your hips lift, your calves 'lift' the horse then release as the back flattens out at the beginning of the next canter cycle. This lift/release, lift/release leg pressure in rhythm with the horse's motion is often easier for many riders than the trot leg aids. Again, unless you have developed a feel for the horse's motion and an ability to follow it with your seat, you will not be able to develop the correct feel for applying your legs aids under different circumstances or for understanding whether the horse's response to the aids was correct. Use your horse's feedback and keep experimenting with degrees of pressure and reinforcement to figure out what works for that horse, that day. Your goal is a calm, attentive horse that responds quietly to your aids as soon as you apply them.

It's not just about show horses. Vacation and trail horses are subject too.

BENADRYL FOR SNAKE BITES Today I stopped in the vet to pickup an item and we started to discuss the nice weather and hiking. The tech mentioned to make sure t...o have benadryl on hand for snake bites. I had never heard of that before so I looked it up and found this article written by a veterinarian on the United Waterfowlers Forum. "First, let me say that I have been a vet for 23 years in N Florida. We treat probably an average of 15 snake bites a year. that would translate to over 300 snake bite cases I have treated, or been involved in. So my opinions are not based on what happened to one dog, or my neighbor's dog or even the 2 dogs that have been bitten that I personally owned. So not only have I treated a lot, but since I do treat so many, I stay current with current treatment options and what works best (based on data, not stories). So, here goes with some absolutes about snakes. The things that follow are facts that I have either observed or read or both. -There is no magic time for how long until treatment. get them there as soon as you safely can. I have saved dogs that were bitten 24 hours prior and had patients die that I saw within 30 minutes. The exception is if there is a bite to the tongue or inside of mouth that may cause breathing issues. I have never seen a bite to the nose cause life threatening breathing issues. -you do not need to make any effort whatsover to "get the snake" to take it to the vet. If it is poisonous and causes swelling, we know what to do. The only other poisonous snake in FL is the coral and it does not cause swelling. Unless it is some released species and we will not have antivenin anyways. -antivenin (antivenom) is NOT an antidote (meaning it cures). I rarely give it anymore. There are situations where I think it is best to give it. but I have found very little prediction of survival based on antivenin administration. There are some cases that are so bad, you had better use everything you have (bites to the trunk (body) of small dogs or cats). -Benadryl (Diphenhydramine) is NEVER wrong to give and almost always, if not always, will help the patient. The liquid is nearly as fast as an injection. 1mg per pound of body weight. -treatment by a veterinarian will ALWAYS result in less disease for the patient, in spite of what eorlando says. Absolutely, many patients will survive without veterinary treatment. But snake venom is a huge protein and huge proteins are deposited on the basement membrane of the kidneys when filtered. This leads to immune related injury to the kidneys from snake bites that may not be clinically relevant, but could lead to permanent kidney damage that could affect them later in life. Intravenous fluids reduces this risk as well as keeps the patient well hydrated to get rid of the venom and reduce the toxins built up from necrotic (dead) tissue resulting from snake bites. Simply put, if you want to increase the dogs chances of survival and less long term disease, take them to the vet. If the dog is not worth that much to you, then take your chances, plenty of dogs survive with no treatment. But that means nothing for what will happen with YOUR dog (there are so many factors to consider) -Moccasins are the least toxic, copperheads next (we have tons of them around here) and rattlesnakes are the worst. Moccasins may have more tissue toxicity-damage local tissue and pain-but they are the least toxic of the snakes. But they can still kill a dog. -a lot of factors play a role in the odds for the dog: *Location of bite-nose, face, head, legs, trunk of body (best to worst) *time of year-fall snakes have been actively feeding and have less stored venom, spring snakes have more likelihood of having stored venom from less recent feeding *amount of injection - a miss or an oblique bite that does not get full injection *species of snake *size of snake (more venom = more serious) *prior history of bites improves patients odds (more immune response to the venom) *vaccination (just don't know enough to know if this helps or not, not sure anyone can yet answer that question with anything other than a story) *electroshock-worthless or less-may actually harm tissue, no one is really doing this anymore, but I still get asked this occassionally -anyone, vet or otherwise, can NOT predict which dog will live and which will survive by looking at them, or even by running tests. there are just so many variables. I can often tell someone that the odds are bad or that the odds are good, but sometimes I am wrong. I still get surprised. If you have a 99% chance of survival-that means 1 in 100 die of the disease. good odds unless you are the 1. My opinions are that antivenom is overused (easier to defend yourself in court-I gave the dog antivenin, so I did everything-but it is expensive and we probably grossly underdose it-a 12 year old human near me treated by people vets (:laughing6) was given 110 vials -at around $3000 per vial in humans-in dogs it is between 700-1000 each and we typically give one-they probably need many many more-I am NOT saying don't give it, I am just saying it should be decided on a case by case basis). IV fluids are the single most important factor that we can control in helping a snake bite victim recover with the minimal amount of disease, with benadryl being second. Some patients are going to die, no matter if they were in a veterinary University Teaching Hospital at the time of the bite and there is NOTHING that could have been done to save them. I have had patients die with 30 minutes of the bite (one was a Jack Russel bit in the side of the chest, the other was an American Bulldog bit between 5-10 times all over the body). If you ask me, "What can I do to make the odds the best in my dog's favor that it will not die from a snake bite?", I would say; a) Get your dog Snake proofed (or better yet, Snake Trained)-a defanged snake is released and the dog is taken near them and an Ecollar is used to make them want to stay the H away from snakes. It needs to be done more than once to make sure the dog is a believer. there are plenty of folks around the state that do this and it is relatively inexpensive and is well worth the effort. Should probably be repeated yearly to every other year. b)keep benadryl in your dog first aid kit-Children's Liquid, generic is fine. Give them 1 tsp for every 12.5 pounds of body weight if they are bitten. c)get your dog to a vet if they are bitten as soon as reasonably possible-do not be overdramatic and get in a car accident to get there, but do not stop at the dry cleaners on the way either. Proceed with due haste."

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