Late Night Googling and a Pampered Pony

On Wednesday night I had the grand idea that I should google Strategy before going to bed. Of course I found out all sorts of "terrible" things by the all knowing masses on public message boards. Like it's low quality, makes horses hot, is no good because Purina uses unfixed formulas, people would never in a million years feed it to their horses. etc. I couldn't fall asleep because I was all worried that I put my poor boy on some crappy no good feed. It also translated to "the new barn in Birmingham must be no good if they are feeding it, omg what am I going to do!". Late at night it didn't matter that these posts were from 2 or 3 years ago, by people who had who-knows-what kind of horse experience. For all I know they were feeding tons of it to their pasture puff/weekend trail horses and wondering why they had extra energy. It also didn't matter that I know my horse and will be sure to switch him the minute he shows signs of not doing well on it. So I will no longer be looking it up. As of tomorrow morning he is completely switched over. I will be paying close attention to Jay and making sure he continues to look and act and perform as usual.

I also have recently realized that my horse is terrible at being a pasture horse in inclement weather. He loves his turnout, but has been a pampered racehorse then showhorse his whole life. He never had to figure out what to do in bad weather I guess. A few weeks ago, I got to the barn on a windy, rainy, stormy day. My doofus horse was not in his nice, big, dry shed, he was standing at the gate waiting to be brought in. When I got him in he was so cold that his entire body was shaking and he was so soaked to the skin that he was trying his best to itch the water off his body by throwing himself into the walls in his stall. Threw his anti-sweat sheet and his turnout sheet on and he eventually warmed up and calmed down. I'd like to say I realized that he was just wet and cold and was calm and efficient in getting him taken care of. In reality, I had a call in to the vet and was texting and calling B like nobodies business. Felt pretty dumb when the vet called and I told him I had just over reacted.

Tonight, it's chilly and rainy and windy again, and, on my way to Starbucks to get some of the last schoolwork of my career (yay!!) done, G calls. I had already fed Jay earlier in the evening. She tells me that as she was putting one of the other horses back out in the field, Jay was at the gate wanting in and had his tail and haunches all hunkered down. Now Jay will rarely do that once he's been fed, especially since the grass is coming in. Luckily, G remembered my story from a few weeks ago and is very good at noticing when the horses act differently than usual. She called and was nice enough to offer to put his sheet on him for me. So of course I'm sitting in Starbucks hoping he is ok and blogging instead of working on this presentation!

In less stressful news, we had really nice rides on Thursday and Friday which I will write about tomorrow after the morning feeding and hopefully another ride.