Sunday comes calling

I slept hard last night.........tired after a long day......I drove to the barn with dread. Grace layed down a lot on Saturday.......not sure if she was tired from "regular" food or if she was giving up.
The pictures do not really portray how awful she looks.........and even my words on this blog cannot give an adequate description.
I thought she might be dead this morning.......I really did......but she was not. She hung in there another day. She is eating the best she can.......she has horrible teeth and cannot effectively chew hay. She has scarring on her knees and her hock on the same side......I am sure she was once tangled in a fence.........She has terrible foot pain due to a massive quarter crack and is extremely itchy all over due to lice. The lice have almost eaten her alive. She has no hair on her belly.....zero.......just a mass of scabs and wrinkled skin. I dusted her for lice again, rubbed oil on her sores and fly sprayed her naked parts to keep the mosquitos and biting flies off. I am feeding her hay pellets, senior grain, rice bran and beet pulp. She is eager to eat, but tires quickly and must lay down to rest. I cannot bute her due to her poor condition........and I cannot de-worm her and I cannot get her teeth floated until I can get her stable. It is a fine line we walk. You want to fix everything at once......but you really cannot.
She is in isolation to keep the lice off the other horses......but she frets terribly when she cannot see them......when I feed at night they all go into stalls and she frets and calls........Church lifts his head from his grain and walks out of his stall and down the fence line..........he looks at her and gives a soft nicker....and then he stands there a while and she settles down.

I had someone ask me today why I do this........sometimes I don't have a good answer....but I guess the answer is that I always hope I can bring them back.......but I also know that if I can't......I saved them from starving to death in a pasture in the backwoods of nowhere.....where no one could see them.... and I let them know that someone, a complete stranger like me, had the decency to love them and give them some dignity.

I honestly don't know that we will save this mare......she is almost too far gone....too many injuries....but we will give her a length of time to not be hungry, to have good company.......to know soft voices and kind hands.......and then we will let her go if need be.

I worked around the farm today by myself....the weather was grand, the company of the horses was good.......I cleaned and planted some more plants, watered, and then worked on my mom's yard........then I drove down to the hospital to see my mom, grocery shopped , went to the feed store, worked in my own yard and then back to the barn to feed dinner. I drove down to see Yukon.......he looks fabulous, but okay he is fat.......but he is so happy and so healthy looking......I should have taken a picture...Good work Doreen and Liz and Cherry. and THANK YOU.

I put fly traps up today...........oh boy. I put them up , the pony takes them down.......I pick them up and get the fly attractant stink on my hands..........GROSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.......I wash my hands in soap and hot water..they still have a faint stink on them........wash them again......and again.......and hang the darn fly traps in another location that is out of the pony's reach......we have a jillion flies all of a sudden.

The weekend is over just like that.....and back to work at my regular job tomorrow.
It is supposed to rain all week........gosh, I thought we were over that.

Pony Up fortune for tomorrow.

Your mother was right.........learn your lesson.

.