The Braid Fairy

#343

With Blanket season approaching again this reminder is all too important!

All snaps on blankets on the chest and the leg straps need to face in towards the horse.

The last thing you want is for your horse to get stuck and panic causing themselves injury!

Sweet Charles 🥰

Congratulations Natalie Weisbruch and Blue Water! Posted • What a good boy!!🥰 Charles won 3 out of 5 younger adult classes as well as the combined classic earning us champion of the division and for Zone 7! I am so incredibly lucky to get to ride and show this amazing horse!!

Yes!!!!!

Just a heads up with blanketing season upon us 🍁❄️ Always face snaps IN.

(Not my horse, I’ve always fed on the floor)

This is why you don’t unbraid a horse in the stall. Even a little piece of yarn can get stuck in a bend of a horse’s intestines and cause an enterolith to form. I had a personal experience with a thoroughbred jumper that had a 3 pound enterolith removed after it caused a painful bout of colic. When they cut the stone open it looked like a jawbreaker with a tiny piece of orange baling twine at the center.

This is a picture of an enterolith discovered during colic surgery in the colon of a horse. These masses are usually composed of ammonium magnesium phosphate (struvite). They almost always form around a foreign body a horse ingests, such as a nail, piece of wood or a piece of rope. We occasionally find these during colic surgeries in Kentucky, although they more commonly found in horses in California. Arabians, Morgans, American Saddlebreds and donkeys are the breeds we most commonly find these in. Surgery is usually required to remove large enteroliths that occlude the colon causing the horse abdominal pain. You can see in the picture that this enterolith is round. If you find an enterolith with a flat side (not round) you must be suspicious during surgery that there is more than one enterolith. The prognosis for horses with enteroliths is considered good and our patient is doing well in the immediate post-operative period.

The horse show world is home to many, many braiders. They work the nightshift, quietly and invisibly going about their jobs. The nights are long, they are often miserably hot, and just as often terribly cold. Most horses are cooperative, but of course, some are not. Traveling all year, and doing a night job while the rest of the world lives in the daytime. Sore backs and even sorer hands.
While braiding all night, they are part braiders, part security, part night watch. When I was grooming, many of my dearest friends were braiders, and I have the same respect for them that I have for grooms.

Just sayin....

A successful wrap to the Queenie Productions winter series for one of my barns! Thanks Kee and all the customers and wonderful horses!