well it looks like Belladonna has gone feral again

[magical thyme]

8. I've concluded they were 2 distinct messages

I cleaned out Luna's ears yesterday. His are usually immaculate, but this time one had several chunks of goopy ear wax in it. He was telling me his ears itch in a way I couldn't miss, lol.

Dahli would never tell me outright, but I was still overfeeding her. Not in her opinion, of course, but in reality. I thought back to what we fed our 1st horse, some 50 years ago, and based on that and reviewing my one of my oldest backyard horse-keeping books written by a feed company, not to mention her behavior, concluded I needed to cut her further back. 4 days later, she has lost the hay belly and the attitude, but her ribs, backbone and hips remain covered with a good layer of fat. She is still a learning experience and apparently I am a slow learner.

It is very difficult in New England, and I think I've lived here too long. I remember when I first moved up here over 35 years ago, noticing how fat -- as in obese -- the horses are compared to the rest of the country. Now my eye has gotten used to it, plus I'm constantly walking a tightrope. On the one hand, I've watched numerous overfed arabians of low-energy type put down from metabolic founder caused by overfeeding. I've also read numerous horror stories up here of arabians totally losing it during training, put down with broken bones. A couple times I've heard of them trying to climb or jump out of round pens when they were exposed to something frightening -- the most recent I remember was a cow being walked by. Again, I suspect overfed, in those cases the high-energy types. So arabs in New England have a bad reputation due to the culture of overfeeding.

On the other hand, I know of numerous cases of people literally having horses stolen from them for supposed neglect. If people want your horse, they will turn you in to the state for any reason they can come up with. I've witnessed specific incidents where it was clearly theft. In one Mass case, a new state animal control officer trying to make her mark illegally took $250K worth of show horses while the owner/trainer was at her husband's funeral! Instead of taking them to the state facility, she illegally brought in a group of volunteers who trucked them to their private farms and hid them from the owner. She also illegally refused to allow the owner's own vet examine them. This was shortly before I moved to Maine. The woman was too shell-shocked from her husband's fight with and death from cancer to put up much of a fight. They claimed she was not feeding them, when in fact they were fine. It had all started with a new neighbor from the city who didn't want horses next door (so maybe he shouldn't have bought a rural property next to a farm, but this is Mass and everybody likes to throw their weight around.) Anyway, she had a new horse shipped in across country and it arrived underweight. Not uncommon from a cross-country trip and not a new owner's fault, as she had no control over the horse until he arrived at home. So next door neighbor filed a complaint complaining she was starving the horse, which brought out the state inspector. They saw all the other horses in fine condition, all conditions fine, horse just arrived, etc. But they also saw what she had, and apparently decided they wanted it, so started monitoring her. When her husband's condition spiraled down, she took the horses out of training and put them on straight hay -- normal process -- while caring for her husband. And they deliberately plotted and waited until her husband's funeral to strike. Vile, vile, vile.

So I live in fear of neighbors, veterinarians, horse dentists, etc. My current vet is fine, thank goodness. I don't trust either dentist now, so am walking a tightrope there. I'm going to check next year and see if the vet floats teeth...I meant to this year and totally forgot.

Twice people have tried to turn Algiers and Dahli loose by the side of the road, plus I think the vet that I fired for refusing to treat when he was sick Algiers had her eye on Dahli. She was involved in a case a few years ago where somebody had their eye on a friend's horse and she refused to treat his horses when a sickness ran through his barn, then testified against him at trial. Until Algiers got sick, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. No more.