Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Taking a back seat

I'm sorry to say that the animals around here have taken a back seat to the kids. I felt like I had enough time and energy for all these pets when I had only one child but when Greta came along there just was no extra time. Don't get me wrong, every mouth is fed daily and all the essentials are taken care of but the time and energy needed to love on the animals is just gone.

So over the past month I've been taking animals here and there for their annual shots and/or vet check ups. First it was Cody because he was too skinny, then the other two dogs went in for their vaccinations and to stock up on heart worm preventative. Then the tapeworm indecent for Cody. On top of that, Desi the miniature horse, started having tender front hooves. Whenever the ground froze, he would walk very delicately as if his feet hurt him. So I loaded him up into the horse trailer last Monday and took him to the horse vet. They checked him over for any signs of lameness and said other than needing a good trim, he was fine. He got his teeth floated while he was there since he's starting to get up in years (he's 13) and they sent him home with me.

Since I'm running low on time I decided to call a farrier out to trim up his hooves. This is something I would normally do myself but with him having tender feet I thought it might be time to turn that duty over to a professional. Now Desi is a fine little horse once he's caught, he just doesn't like to be caught. He has some trust issues with humans from when he was a younger, don't know what happened to him. It's a process to get a halter on him but once haltered he'll go anywhere with you. I didn't want the farrier to drive all the way out here and then me not be able to catch him so I brainstormed all evening last night about what I could do to make him easier to catch. If only we had a small corral to keep him in. Turns out we do:



Yep, that's a miniature horse in a chainlink dog run. Classy eh? Got him in there this morning and he was right there ready to be caught when the farrier arrived. It worked out great and I'll be using it the next time he comes out.

Here's hoping I can somehow gain more energy and time to spend with these attention starved animals.

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