Of Dogs, Knee Surgery, and Large Horses (Part 1)

Well friends, it seems that this month has been a very slow blogging month for me so far, but I think this will make up for it.

Of Dogs, Knee Surgery, and Large Horses (Part 1)

If you’ve explored my blog site you’ll know that I have horses. I look after some of them myself and others are with a trainer. The horses I have on this farm are broodmares and occasionally a horse that is recovering from injuries and just needs light work or stall rest. I could write stories about them every day of the week, but this story is more about me than about them.

A few months ago I was working with a huge gray mare that had lameness issues but was finally trotting out sound, so I started bringing her into the stall in the daytime and putting her out at night. This was convenient because I could bring her in and feed her–some trickery here–so she loved coming in, then ride her a little later after her breakfast settled.

I tried cleaning her stall with her in it, but invariably I got hit across the face like a whiplash by her long gray tail. So, rather than taking a chance on losing an eye, the program was changed and in the late afternoon/early evening Olivia would get her pellets first then I would make the rounds of the outside horses, doling out feed along the way and checking them all for booboos, lameness and swellings. By the time I was finished with that chore, Olivia was waiting at the stall door for her walk to the paddock and it was time to clean her stall.

Rally, my totally deaf and mostly blind dog, would follow along, sniffing her way from here to there, and generally be underfoot until I was finished and ready to go in. She is the kindest, gentlest old soul you would ever find, and normally stays pretty close to me; sometimes so close that I trip over her when I turn around.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had horses or cleaned stalls, but the amount of manure produced is in direct proportion to the amount of feed the horses eat x their size. Since Olivia is 18 hands, which is almost a foot taller than the average horse, she produces a lot of manure.

One afternoon in the late spring there was a group of other boarders standing around talking when I pushed the overloaded and awkward one-wheel wheelbarrow out of Olivia’s stall so, being the incredibly social person and brilliant conversatonalist that I am, I parkd the wheelbarrow and stopped to chat with them. Meanwhile, Rally decided to take a nap in the shade.

A few minutes later I turned back to the wheelbarrow, rolled it about 6 inches and heard a yelp from Rally. Fearing that I had crushed my poor dog with 1000 pounds of horse manure, I attempted the impossible act of reversing the momentum of all that weight, got the whole thing overbalanced, and the wheelbarrow, as if possesed by a demon, tipped over with me between the handles hitting my left knee and flipping me to the ground….right into the pile of manure. This would have been one of those incredibly hilarious slap-stick moments if it wasn’t for the pain in my knee at the time. Even so, I have to smile now at the mental picture of me flipping into a pile of manure and shavings…..yuck!

Fortunately there were a few people still round so in short order, and amid the usual bathroom jokes, I was helped up, Rally was checked (just startled), the manure was shoveled back into the wheelbarrow, and since I was having a hard time standing up, one of the other boarders took the wheelbarrow to the manure pile for me.

I was almost finished for the night anyway so, rather than filling water buckets and putting out hay. I hobbled back into the apartment to nurse my dignity, feed Rally and myself, take a shower, and watch my knee swell.

To Be Continued…..