Horses sleep lying down. Tonk’s stall is clean when he goes in at night, but, horses poop, and Tonka always seems to find a pile of manure for a pillow for his (white!) quarters. During the day, he has a favorite sandy spot in the paddock to roll in.

 

Some horses are one-side rollers, but Tonka rolls on both.

 

Like all of us, horses have dead skin and dandruff, and being fur-bearing animals, they shed. These are all reasons enough to give your horse a grooming everyday. But, getting your horse clean is not the most important reason to get out the brushes. I spend hours a week grooming my horse because this is a way to bond with him.

Horses are herd animals, who (when managed properly with space, resources, forage, etc.) get along in a companionable manner, mostly walking around and eating, and at times dozing in the sun. Within that group there are tight friendships – usually bonded pairs. Those horses stand tail to head, swishing flies for each other; sometimes they scratch each other’s withers with their teeth. Touch and mutual grooming are essential to horse friendship.

In a boarding situation, you try to put friends together, but it’s not always possible. Tonka spends the day in a paddock with Maggie. They get along okay – there’s no drama, but they’re not best friends. You can’t force friendship. My horse doesn’t have another horse to scratch his withers, but he has me. Lucky for him, I love grooming. I learned my technique at a riding school in England, where there were daily inspections. No teatime if there was a rough spot on your horse! A thorough grooming takes time – which I think is a wonderful excuse to get in tune with a horse.

Most grooming sessions start with a

. This one is flexible rubber.

 

When I first got Tonka, he pinned his ears and fidgeted when I groomed him. As always, my mantra is to pay attention. The horse will tell you what he likes and what he doesn’t. Your horse will know if you are listening to him. Horses communicate to each other with superbly subtle body language – a flick of an ear, a shift of weight – all has meaning. How frustrating it must be to horses to have to interact with us dull humans who don’t listen! Responding to your horse’s body language while grooming him is the first and most basic step to gaining trust and it will carry over to when you are on his back. Something as simple as changing how you brush him because of what he tells you reaps rewards far beyond having a horse politely stand still. So, I respected what Tonka had to say and I put away the curry. Instead I got a

. (The one I have is an inexpensive model, but you could splurge and get .)

As you can see, it does a great job of loosening dirt and hair.

 

Tonka particularly likes having me use it on the insides of his legs where he can’t reach. How do I know? He politely shifts his bum and leans in.

 

Here is Tonka, tipping his head so that I can scritch his ears and poll with the mitt.

 

This is a happy horse.

 

Next, I use a

 to flick the loosened hair and dirt off of him.

 

As I groom, my free hand is as important as the one holding the brush. It feels for rough spots, lumps and anything else that I might not see.

 

The

 comes next. This gets the fine dirt off, and brings up oils and creates shine. I love seeing a gleaming coat.

 

I do have a use for that curry – I use it to keep the brushes clean.

 

At this point, some people stop brushing. I don’t. I pull out a finish brush. When I first got Tonka, before I even touched a brush to his face, he let me know that he didn’t like it. He’d swing his head away from me when I held a brush at the height of his head. So, I got a smaller, super-soft

. I used clicker training to teach him to touch his head to the brush (I didn’t reach to him, he came to me.) When I finally brushed his face I could see him realize, this feels GOOD. Now I use this brush on his entire body. (I don’t use the clicker for grooming anymore – it was for that specific situation that needed to be changed. I like grooming to be peaceful and undemanding. Tonka can relax and not worry about doing a behavior for a reward.)

 

If I have the time, I go over him with a sheepskin

. That gets the last bit of dust and dander off, and he likes it. (By the way, I’m not holding him down by the halter, I’m moving it out of the way to get his whole face.)

 

We’re still not done. There are shavings in his tail to comb out and knots to untangle. I start from the bottom and use a

 so as to pull out as few hairs as possible.

 

Then, I pick out his hooves.

 

Lastly, I sweep up.

 

All of that work is worth it.

 

And it makes us both happy.

I teach others how to groom their horses so that it is a mutually beneficial time for both horse and rider. Here’s a quote from one of my clients:

Ever since I switched to your style of grooming Salti has stopped stepping away. In fact he leans into the cactus cloth on his neck.

Salti was a horse that I had dubbed “Mr. Grumpypants” because of his ear pinning and general annoyed expression. It turns out that Salti is a both a sensitive soul and a horse with very sensitive skin. With a few adjustments in care, he’s become affectionate and more outgoing.

I’m willing to travel. If you want to learn how to have a dialog with your horse while grooming, email me. I’ll listen to both of you.

Supermarket eggs come from hens that are the same age (young!) and the same breed. Still, there are variations, but you never see them because they’re sorted out before packaging. Any egg with spots, inside or out, are diverted to processed products. Because of this, consumers believe that eggs must be uniform, or they’re not good.

Those of use with backyard hens know that eggshells can have bumps and odd colors, and that eggs can be strange shapes, elongated or pointed, and still be healthy to eat and delicious. However, it is true that the older the hen, the poorer the quality of the egg. I’ve found that eggs from hens older than three years of age tend to have a grainy texture and that the whites are thinner. They’re fine for use in baked goods, but they’re not good hard-cooked or poached.

Twiggy’s eggs are another story. She’s three years old. The other hens that age lay beautiful eggs – upright yolks, sturdy whites and thick-enough shells. But, for more than two years, Twiggy hasn’t had a break in her overly-ambitious laying schedule. Her egg shells are dull, not glossy, and they’re thin, too. Inside, I’m seeing some odd things.

 

A fresh egg should have a stringy white bit called the chalazae. This is what centers the yolk in place. (As an egg ages, it disintegrates which is why you seldom see the chalazae in older eggs from the supermarket.) But this? This chalazae is all wrong. It’s a mass.

Cracked into the pan, you can clearly see the difference between Twiggy’s egg and that from Beatrix, who is exactly her age.

 

They have access to the same food, and yet Beatrix’s yolk is a deeper orange. Look at how thin and clear Twiggy’s white is. You usually see that in an egg that has been stored for weeks, not in an egg laid the day before.

Are these eggs edible? Yes. But I feed them to the dogs.

I don’t know how long Twiggy can keep this up. I found one long white feather in the run. A sign that Twiggy is going into the molt and will be taking a break? I hope so!

It’s fall and so the hours of daylight lessen, the leaves and the feathers fall, and the hens stop laying.

All but Twiggy.

 

Yesterday I collected only one egg from the Big Barn – Twiggy’s. She produces a very large white egg, distinct from what the other hens make, and so I am sure that it is hers. But even if I didn’t recognize the egg, I’d know that it was from this White Leghorn. Why? Because she’s the ravenous hen, and in my experience it’s the hungry hen that is the best layer. All healthy chickens should be active foragers and eager eaters, but Twiggy takes that to the extreme. She needs to consume more food than the others in order to lay more eggs than the other girls – a 2 1/2 ounce egg, six days a week.

A hen like that needs a lot of fuel to have the energy and raw materials to make those eggs. Unlike the other hens, she takes advantage of every moment of daylight. She’s the first to the feeder in the morning. It’s a good thing that the coop has big windows and the sun comes in as soon as it’s up. If she were in a darker coop, and slept later, I doubt that Twiggy would be able to eat enough. She’s also the last to grab a few more bites before hopping up on the roost. If I go into the barn at night and turn on the light, while the other hens murmur and blink and hide their heads under the feathers, she jumps down, hurries to the feeder and starts eating. This is a problem for me, because if I turn the light out, she’s stuck there on the floor, unable to see her way to the roost. So I’ll turn off the inside light and leave on the exterior, and wait until she can find her way back to bed.

I don’t know how long she can keep this up. I’ve yet to find white feathers on the ground from the molt. If she doesn’t molt, she won’t get needed rest. She barely took a break last year – just a slight slowing of production and then two weeks off. Her eggs are showing signs of weakness (more on that in another post.)

Has anyone had White Leghorns that went through normal, full molts? Took breaks from laying? This is my first large leghorn. My bantam leghorns (Snowball and her cousins) weren’t great layers, and they all molted. Let me know your White Leghorn experiences in the comments!

Not quite twenty years ago, I had a dog that needed something to do. The sport of agility was beginning to gain popularity, and so I took classes and joined a club. I’d been a horsewoman, but found the change to a dog sport difficult. I wasn’t sitting on the dog and so couldn’t communicate by touch. I couldn’t use a leash or collar (the dog runs naked in the competition.) And in my club, we weren’t allowed to use the word no. It was all about positive reinforcement, and the principles of what we were doing were laid out in a book,

. Over the years, this type of training became more sophisticated and codified, and morphed into what is now known as clicker training. Using a small plastic noise maker, called a , the trainer marks the moment that the animal does the right thing and then immediately gives the animal a reward (often, but not always, food.) Using clicker protocols, the training is efficient, precise and enthusiastically embraced by the learner. Decades of scientific research backs up why this method is so successful.

 

Clicker training has the potential to be very kind. There are no physical aversives – no whips, shock collars or twists to an ear. There are no verbal corrections. There should be (and this is hard to do) no negative body language by the trainer, no time-outs, no upping the criteria until frustration hits. Clicker training promises that you will have a mutually rewarding, generous and gentle relationship with your animal. For horse owners who have been told that they have to hit, yank and restrain their mounts, it can be such a relief to find out that there is another way.

But, horses are different than dogs. They are large and dangerous. A scared horse can swing into you and break a bone before you have a chance to react. The risk to all needs to be minimized by sensible and thoughtful handling and management. There are, of course, other differences between the species – from what motivates them to what they find frustrating. (A topic for an entire blog post – or several!) That said, bringing clicker training into your horse training works. Just like clicker training can be used to teach a tiger to offer her tail through a fence for a blood draw, an elephant to lift a foot for a pedicure, and a border collie to do a course of fifteen obstacles accurately at lighting speed, so can clicker training work to get a recalcitrant horse into a trailer, a young horse to willingly accept the saddle, or a dressage horse do a flying change.

But, before you pick up a clicker, learn the science behind it. (This

 is the place to start.) Using the clicker takes some coordination and observational skills. Before applying it to your horse, train your dog, your guinea pig, your cat (oh, yes, it works!) Play the training game with your children. Embrace the perspective that it is the reward, not the correction, that drives behavior. Have fun.

Finally, before picking up the clicker, evaluate your relationship with your horse, and also your horse’s lifestyle. Most horses are kept at boarding barns, where other people do the feeding and handling, and so even if you switch to all positive reinforcement, that’s not your horse’s entire world. What the rest of his day is like will impact on how receptive he is to the time that you work with him. Is he hungry or able to graze 24/7? Does he have friends or is he kept in a separate paddock and so has no one (other than you) for mutual grooming? Is he bored? How much exercise does he get? What is he fearful of and why?

For most of us, our time with our horses is limited. Unlike our dogs, our horses don’t sit on our laps when we watch tv or climb into bed with us. Our relationship is reduced to an hour or so a day when we can get to the boarding stable. We don’t have the on-going and casual communication that happens when you live with your pet. Some horses get attention only when tacked up and ridden. Even if you clicker train, your time with your horse can be all about getting and training behavior. Sometimes we are so into the training that we lose sight of how demanding it is. Horses are cooperative animals who thrive on friendship. Given their druthers, they would spend hours a day, companionably grazing next to a friend. We can’t do that. I can’t do that. But I can carve out an extra half-hour to hand-graze my horse, not asking anything of him.

 

Then we can get to work.

Warning: This post contains graphic images.

One day your chicken is happily scratching in the pen and laying eggs. The next day you find her on the floor, head tucked into a corner, dead. Industrial-scaled farmers expect mortality. They don’t like it – it affects profitability – but they know it will happen. Backyard chicken keepers, especially those who recently got into it, not only mourn the loss of each hen, but each death comes as a surprise. What isn’t said by all of the keeping backyard hens is so easy! boosters is that there will be losses, and they’ll be sooner than you think.

After twenty years of having a flock in my backyard, I’m no longer shocked to find a dead chicken in the yard. This happened yesterday. Nancy Drew had tucked herself into a corner of the coop, where I found her dead, though still warm, at 7:30 am when I arrived to take care of the animals.

She had shown no sign of illness.

 

Her comb was full and red. Unlike some of the other hens, she hadn’t yet gone into the molt. She was still laying a sturdy brown egg about every other day. Her appetite and activity level had been normal. A sudden death, although not uncommon, is cause for concern. It’s rarely contagious, but with avian flu now in the US, could it be that? Could it be something else that could have been prevented if only I’d known?

To find out, I did a necropsy. Her reproductive tract was in beautiful condition. In fact, there was a perfectly-formed egg on the way down out of shell gland. Her digestive tract looked great, too, with normal manure in it, and no parasites at all (I’m always pleased to see this – it’s a sign both of the health of the flock and of good manure management.) The gizzard had food, grit and oyster shell in it, all indicators of a hen with a healthy appetite.

But, there was something glaringly wrong. Her abdomen was filled with yellow fat.

 

This is a sign of liver disease.

When handled, the fat crumbled apart. I have no idea how long it takes for a hen to produce this fat, but Nancy Drew must have been living with this condition for awhile. Further investigation showed a seriously diseased liver. The left lobe had hemorrhaged, and there were lesions on it. When I tried to remove it to examine it further, the whole thing fell apart. The term used in the medical books is friable. Before I could photograph it, the liver had disintegrated into a puddle.

There are a number of diseases that cause such symptoms, the main one being fatty liver disease. There are also viruses and bacteria that cause lesions. But, my knowledge is limited. I haven’t found any research done on older hens. Although diet can be a cause of liver disease, I think that something else is going on with the aged birds. I’m sure that genetics plays a role. The large hatcheries are breeding for feather and egg color, and hatch success. Perhaps some traits, like vigor and health are going by the wayside?

But for now, in this case, there are lessons to be learned about how to care for the hens that we currently have. If your hen dies suddenly, there was likely something very, very wrong inside of her. You couldn’t have done anything to save her. If your hen stops eating and loses all vigor try the Spa Treatment. That might work. I heard from someone today who had a lackluster hen that revived from that protocol. But if your hen doesn’t perk up, there’s likely something very, very wrong inside of her.

I know that I’ve written about this before, and I’m sorry if this blogpost isn’t cheery, but we need to do right by the animals in our care. Sometimes it means that we have to accept that we can’t fix everything. Sometimes we have to let them go.