Hi Folks,
This is part three concerning the omnibus bill. Part one, as many of you have discerned, was our optimistic New Year's message hinting at good things ahead, and part two was the announcement of the defunding language in the omnibus budget and how it got there.
These developments have led to the question of how long this will stop slaughter houses from returning to the US. I will attempt to explain the answer to that question. Like most things in Washington, the answer is a bit convoluted. However, I think it is safe to say it will stop their return for at least two years and here is why.
Budgets are, as we all know, a one-year affair that begins October 1st. The process is supposed to start with the President's budget, which is broken into 12 separate budgets (such as the Agriculture Budget), which in turn go to the various appropriations committees to be amended.
These budgets are then supposed to go to the floor of their respective houses for a vote. Following their passage in the Senate and House, the resulting budgets are supposed to go to a conference committee to hammer out differences, and then back to the House and Senate for a final vote.
But if there is one consistent theme in Congress, it is that they almost never do things the way they are supposed to. According to the Congressional Research Service, Congress has passed a full budget only three times in the past 26 years! Most years they pass a CR for all or most individual budgets.
Last year, the agriculture budgets got through the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, but neither reached their respective floors for a vote. Both budgets had defunding language, as did the President's budget. The budget for other departments didn't even get that far.
A CR, or Continuing Resolution, is merely a way of keeping spending at the same level (or at some multiple of the current level) for an additional period. The duration can be from a day to as much as the remainder of the current budget year.
An omnibus budget is yet another way for Congress to shortcut its budgeting process. This fiscal year, we got a series of short CRs, followed by an omnibus budget.
Since the omnibus was based on the bipartisan budget "framework" agreement reached a month earlier, and since that agreement was for two years, we can be sure that the 2015 budget will be a one-year CR.
Now it gets kind of ironic. The late Sue Wallis, Dave Duquette and even Charlie Stenholm had speculated publicly, and no doubt prayed, that there would be a CR for 2014. That would have continued the funding for inspections from the previous 2012 and 2013 budgets.
However there is something call an "anomaly" that can be added to a CR to place a restriction on certain funds. Since nobody was sure the omnibus would pass, a CR was indeed prepared and tucked away to keep the government funded the rest of the year if the omnibus blew up.
That CR contained an anomaly that prohibited any funds from being used for horse slaughter inspections. So had they been forced to use the CR, it would have had the same outcome (defunding). We knew this well before the budget deal was struck, and actually expected that is the way things would go.
And why is this important going forward? It is important because it was none other than Secretary Vilsack who signed off on the anomaly. That explains why Victoria wanted to thank him. It also means that it will be virtually impossible for the pro-slaughter camp to accomplish a removal of the defunding language for the 2015 budget CR.
So the plants are locked out for two years and probably more. And that is the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would have said.
2/1/14
1/29/14
"Slaughterhouse" Sue Wallis Dead
By John Holland ~ President of the Equine Welfare Alliance
Hi, my name is John Holland, and I am a data-holic. I usually spend my day furtively downloading statistics and information; analyzing it, graphing it, correlating it and trying to glean insights into the true workings of the horse world.
But today is different. Today, I was inspired to opine by a thing of great rarity in our struggle; a well researched article. It appeared in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch titled Horse slaughterhouse plans stalled in Missouri and it convinced me we are winning this struggle, at least for the moment.
No, the article did not contain a new revelation about the outcome of a court case, or the result of a vote. It contained something even more telling: It documented Sue Wallis slipping beyond the gravitational pull of reality and into an alternate universe of anti-logic, where up is down and dark is light.
Sue begins the interview with her now familiar claim that she chose Missouri because, “If you draw a 500-mile circle from western Missouri you encapsulate 30 percent of the horse herd in the U.S.” After musing over the concept of the US horse population constituting a single “herd”, I began wondered where she got this statistic.
You see, Sue and I share different forms of compulsion. I am a compulsive fact checker while Sue is a compulsive fact creator. So I ran the numbers and the result I got was 23.6% of the US horse population being within 500 miles (as the crow flies) of western Missouri.
This means Sue’s exaggeration coefficient for this statement is 27%[i]. This modest exaggeration would prove to be her perigee with reality before she would slingshot past it and off into the abyss of deep space.
After describing the law suit that had resulted in the Cole County judge’s directive to the Department of Natural Resources to hold off on issuing Rains the discharge permit, the story returned to the interview with Sue.
“The horse industry has been decimated,” Wallis said. “We have worthless horses being turned out and abandoned.”
As I read this, I again felt compelled to calibrate Wallis’ definition of decimation. The original term came from quaint custom of the Roman army by which they would execute every tenth soldier of a disgraced unit so as to improve morale. Was every tenth horse in America being abandoned?
The only state I could find that keeps abandonment data is New Mexico. During my research, they provided me with a very detailed list of all the estray horses they had picked up since 2006. Last year they picked up exactly 124 horses.
Given the estimated 147,181 horses in New Mexico, this means that the abandonment rate is 0.06% or one horse in every 1,186. Since decimation would be one in ten (10%), Sue’s exaggeration coefficient had suddenly rocketed from 27% to 16,666%.
Parroting the discredited 2011 GAO report, Wallis went on to say “People take care of animals that have value. It’s when they don’t that they neglect them.”
This was the conjecture used to excuse why the GAO studied horse prices instead of actually studying neglect as it had been assigned to do. It is, of course, utter nonsense. Few household pets have any monetary value, yet most people take good care of them.
It gets better. “Every breed registry is down 70 percent since 2007. Fewer colts are being born,” Wallis said.
Apparently Wallis has data I have not seen; data showing among other things that only the birth rate of colts is in decline. Is there some strange gender asymmetry going on here? Or is it possible that the Executive Director of the International Equine Business Association, the expert of CNN interviews and countless articles does not know that colts are males and the proper term would have been foals?
As for “every breed registry being off 70% since 2007”, Sue’s exaggeration coefficient is pretty substantial. According to the Jockey Club, thoroughbred foal registrations are off 34.5%, not 70%. Some breeds appear to have been almost unaffected, but the AQHA’s annual report does show about a 49% reduction in foal registrations from its peak in 2007.
The pattern with Quarter Horses is a familiar one for those of us who have been around the horse world for a few decades. Breeds come into favor, resulting in indiscriminate breeding spurred on by the greed of their breed registry. Then the bubble bursts. Just before the decline began, the then executive vice president of the AQHA, Bill Brewer, gave an impassioned speech at their annual convention urging more breeding so there would be “enough good horses in the future”.
A great breed has been degraded in the process. Quarter Horses now commonly suffer from a wide range of maladies such as GBED, HERDA, HYPP, and Navicular. The most common complaint of owners is that they “bred the feet off them.” This could explain why AQHA membership is down 18.6% since 2007. I wondered to myself, would Sue suggest killing off a bunch of their remaining members as a solution to the decline?
Sue continues, “That’s 70 percent less feed being sold, 70 percent fewer jobs, 70 percent fewer veterinarians.”
Apparently Sue believes that a short term drop in foal (excuse me colt) births means that the whole horse population suddenly drops by the same percentage. Despite Sue’s best efforts, horses do often live well into their 20s and beyond, meaning that recent foal crops would represent only a few percent of the population.
With a nearly 50% decrease in foals, the population of registered quarter horses dropped from 3,218,113 in 2007 to 2,978,776 in 2012 according to the AQHA annual reports, a decline of just 7.4%. Here Sue gets an exaggeration coefficient of 945%.
But at this point her thinking turns to what I will call anti-logic, because if it came into contact with rational thought the two would annihilate each other with a thunderous clap, probably decapitating their host. She is proclaiming that all of this devastation is because we have too few horses as a direct result of not killing enough of them! This would be laughable if 2012 had not seen more US horses slaughtered than any year since 1994!
One survival strategy of prey animals is to synchronize their birthing so as to overwhelm their predators. Sue has adopted this strategy with her spontaneously created facts. She spews so many at one time that at least a few have a good chance to get past us unchallenged.
At this point in the interview, Sue seems to sense her interviewer is not buying her nonsense. So she throws her hyperbole engine into warp drive, saying “This has wrecked communities — all because of the elitist snooty arrogance of this bunch of people telling us what’s culturally acceptable to eat.”
The community of Boggy Bottom, the neighborhood behind the Dallas Crown slaughter house, was truly devastated by the pollution, stench and crime caused by the plant. I witnessed it firsthand. But where is Sue’s example of a community devastated by a lack of slaughter? Apparently with anti-logic you automatically get an anti-logic twin to Boggy Bottom, at least in the brain of Sue Wallis.
It is impossible for me to calculate the exaggeration factor for this statement because, since there is no truth at all to be exaggerated, it would require dividing by zero. I think I now fully understand Einstein’s quote about only the universe and human stupidity being infinite.
Yet the second half of the outburst is the most interesting of all.
Sue had apparently learned that the influential Busch brothers (former owners of Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch) had thrown their considerable weight into the battle on the side of the horses. Victoria McCullough had sent them a link to our report How the GAO deceived Congress, and Victoria said she thinks the outrage at this government deceit had caused them to weigh in.
Lately there has been an avalanche of high profile support for ending horse slaughter completely. In the government sector; President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary Vilsack have all come out against horse slaughter. At the state level, New Mexico’s Governor Susana Martinez, former governor Bill Richardson, Attorney General Gary King and others have spoken up for the horses. Celebrities such as the incredibly influential Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg have also taken a stand.
But most aggravating of all for Sue are the “snooty, arrogant billionaires”. This is because Sue knows that the money from big agriculture was the only advantage she had in this battle. Internationally known equestrian Victoria McCullough and her “snooty arrogant” friends, are serving to balance the scales by using their resources to multiply the impact of the tireless grass roots work of thousands of horse lovers and animal welfare organizations. This combination may well bring Slaughterhouse Sue crashing back to reality.
“Sue is a compulsive fact creator…”
 |
| “Slaughterhouse” $ue Wallis |
But today is different. Today, I was inspired to opine by a thing of great rarity in our struggle; a well researched article. It appeared in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch titled Horse slaughterhouse plans stalled in Missouri and it convinced me we are winning this struggle, at least for the moment.
No, the article did not contain a new revelation about the outcome of a court case, or the result of a vote. It contained something even more telling: It documented Sue Wallis slipping beyond the gravitational pull of reality and into an alternate universe of anti-logic, where up is down and dark is light.
Sue begins the interview with her now familiar claim that she chose Missouri because, “If you draw a 500-mile circle from western Missouri you encapsulate 30 percent of the horse herd in the U.S.” After musing over the concept of the US horse population constituting a single “herd”, I began wondered where she got this statistic.
You see, Sue and I share different forms of compulsion. I am a compulsive fact checker while Sue is a compulsive fact creator. So I ran the numbers and the result I got was 23.6% of the US horse population being within 500 miles (as the crow flies) of western Missouri.
This means Sue’s exaggeration coefficient for this statement is 27%[i]. This modest exaggeration would prove to be her perigee with reality before she would slingshot past it and off into the abyss of deep space.
After describing the law suit that had resulted in the Cole County judge’s directive to the Department of Natural Resources to hold off on issuing Rains the discharge permit, the story returned to the interview with Sue.
 |
The only state I could find that keeps abandonment data is New Mexico. During my research, they provided me with a very detailed list of all the estray horses they had picked up since 2006. Last year they picked up exactly 124 horses.
Given the estimated 147,181 horses in New Mexico, this means that the abandonment rate is 0.06% or one horse in every 1,186. Since decimation would be one in ten (10%), Sue’s exaggeration coefficient had suddenly rocketed from 27% to 16,666%.
Parroting the discredited 2011 GAO report, Wallis went on to say “People take care of animals that have value. It’s when they don’t that they neglect them.”
This was the conjecture used to excuse why the GAO studied horse prices instead of actually studying neglect as it had been assigned to do. It is, of course, utter nonsense. Few household pets have any monetary value, yet most people take good care of them.
It gets better. “Every breed registry is down 70 percent since 2007. Fewer colts are being born,” Wallis said.
Apparently Wallis has data I have not seen; data showing among other things that only the birth rate of colts is in decline. Is there some strange gender asymmetry going on here? Or is it possible that the Executive Director of the International Equine Business Association, the expert of CNN interviews and countless articles does not know that colts are males and the proper term would have been foals?
As for “every breed registry being off 70% since 2007”, Sue’s exaggeration coefficient is pretty substantial. According to the Jockey Club, thoroughbred foal registrations are off 34.5%, not 70%. Some breeds appear to have been almost unaffected, but the AQHA’s annual report does show about a 49% reduction in foal registrations from its peak in 2007.
 | |||||
| “Slaughterhouse” $ue Wallis ~ Horse guts and blood are what drives this political nut-job |
Sue continues, “That’s 70 percent less feed being sold, 70 percent fewer jobs, 70 percent fewer veterinarians.”
Apparently Sue believes that a short term drop in foal (excuse me colt) births means that the whole horse population suddenly drops by the same percentage. Despite Sue’s best efforts, horses do often live well into their 20s and beyond, meaning that recent foal crops would represent only a few percent of the population.
With a nearly 50% decrease in foals, the population of registered quarter horses dropped from 3,218,113 in 2007 to 2,978,776 in 2012 according to the AQHA annual reports, a decline of just 7.4%. Here Sue gets an exaggeration coefficient of 945%.
But at this point her thinking turns to what I will call anti-logic, because if it came into contact with rational thought the two would annihilate each other with a thunderous clap, probably decapitating their host. She is proclaiming that all of this devastation is because we have too few horses as a direct result of not killing enough of them! This would be laughable if 2012 had not seen more US horses slaughtered than any year since 1994!
One survival strategy of prey animals is to synchronize their birthing so as to overwhelm their predators. Sue has adopted this strategy with her spontaneously created facts. She spews so many at one time that at least a few have a good chance to get past us unchallenged.
At this point in the interview, Sue seems to sense her interviewer is not buying her nonsense. So she throws her hyperbole engine into warp drive, saying “This has wrecked communities — all because of the elitist snooty arrogance of this bunch of people telling us what’s culturally acceptable to eat.”
The community of Boggy Bottom, the neighborhood behind the Dallas Crown slaughter house, was truly devastated by the pollution, stench and crime caused by the plant. I witnessed it firsthand. But where is Sue’s example of a community devastated by a lack of slaughter? Apparently with anti-logic you automatically get an anti-logic twin to Boggy Bottom, at least in the brain of Sue Wallis.
It is impossible for me to calculate the exaggeration factor for this statement because, since there is no truth at all to be exaggerated, it would require dividing by zero. I think I now fully understand Einstein’s quote about only the universe and human stupidity being infinite.
Yet the second half of the outburst is the most interesting of all.
Sue had apparently learned that the influential Busch brothers (former owners of Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch) had thrown their considerable weight into the battle on the side of the horses. Victoria McCullough had sent them a link to our report How the GAO deceived Congress, and Victoria said she thinks the outrage at this government deceit had caused them to weigh in.
Lately there has been an avalanche of high profile support for ending horse slaughter completely. In the government sector; President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary Vilsack have all come out against horse slaughter. At the state level, New Mexico’s Governor Susana Martinez, former governor Bill Richardson, Attorney General Gary King and others have spoken up for the horses. Celebrities such as the incredibly influential Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg have also taken a stand.
But most aggravating of all for Sue are the “snooty, arrogant billionaires”. This is because Sue knows that the money from big agriculture was the only advantage she had in this battle. Internationally known equestrian Victoria McCullough and her “snooty arrogant” friends, are serving to balance the scales by using their resources to multiply the impact of the tireless grass roots work of thousands of horse lovers and animal welfare organizations. This combination may well bring Slaughterhouse Sue crashing back to reality.
[i] How does a 6.4% error become an exaggeration factor of 27%?
Use this formula ((30-23.6)*100)/23.6), or ask your friendly local nerd.
Use this formula ((30-23.6)*100)/23.6), or ask your friendly local nerd.
11/25/13
I'm Back! - More Or Less -- And A Storm Report From Indiana
Here I am, typing with both hands again - more or less - and the first thing I want to do is to thank the Sweetest Horse In The World - my Indy - for being so good about posting the updates I asked him to do.
I thought his posts were accurate and he was very careful with my keyboard. Okay, so there were a few carrot bits and a couple of wisps o hay in there, but after all the is a horse. Pretty good typist too, all things considered. I know I couldn't type nearly that well with my upper lip. Thank you, Indy.
Let me tell you, I broken wrist is no fun. Especially since the radius was broken completely in two - closed fracture thank goodness! - and a cast wasn't enough to hold the ends of the bone together properly, so four pins had to be used and I was in a cast for six weeks. Just to make things as difficult as possible, it was my left wrist that was broken, and I am left handed. Some fun, huh?
Even after the pins were removed - which made me a lot more comfortable - I had to wear a brace for three more weeks. At least the brace was a was much more comfortable than the cast and I had better use of my hand. The muscles and tendons in my hand and wrist had gotten stiff during my time in the cast, and of course, they were injured too when I broke the bone.
My wrist is still quite sore if I forget and overdo, and there is still some swelling, but it is getting better day by day, so I really can't complain.
On to the excitement. We were under a severe thunderstorm warning and there were some tornadoes in the mix as well. It turned out that the Weather Service confirmed three F1 tornadoes in the area afterward. We thought we were only hit with straight line winds - which can be just as bad - but when we actually got out and saw the condition of our trees we had to wonder. Amazingly, neither of the horses seemed upset at all considering what had happened.
This is the first thing we saw out the front door. This was an English Walnut tree that we were very fond of. It was just completely uprooted. Plus debris was everywhere. Very depressing.
Until we looked back at the barn.
This is the first downed pine tree we saw. There was an entire row of very large pines just west of the house and barn that had always kept the worst of the west winds and snow off of us. That line now has some big gaps in it because three of those magnificent trees went down in that storm.
I know these pictures aren't the greatest, but Mike was taking them in poor weather and low light. You can see the size of this tree though. The upper branches actually tore big gashes in the steel roof which you can't see in this picture.
This is what the gashes looked like from the inside. Fortunately, the horses' stalls are on the other side of the barn, but these gashes allowed some hay to get slightly wet and a little water also got into the tack room.
Again, fortunately, after I broke my wrist in October, I went ahead and moved my saddle and bridle inside the house for the winter. I don't ride a lot in the winter because we don't have any place to really get out of the wind, and my hands and feet freeze. As little as I ride in the colder months, it's easier just to carry my tack back and forth. I can't leave them in that tack room all winter because the humidity is just too high here, and before you know it, they get covered in mold. Yuk!
This was the real kicker though.
This is an even bigger pine that also came down on the barn - this time right in the middle of the west side. If it hadn't been caught by the even bigger oak tree just outside the window, I hate to think of the damage this baby would have done. But the oak kept most of the weight and branches off the barn roof. I knew I loved that tree! I was truly shocked when I saw this sight though. You can see why Mike and I were amazed at how unperturbed Indy and Ami were about the whole thing. The way that steel roof magnifies the sound of anything that hits it, it must have sounded as if the sky was falling inside the barn or even on the "back porch."
Especially after this big limb landed right on top of the back porch! Of course, they are always free to leave the barn whenever they wish, but I was watching and I never saw either one of them out during the entire storm. Amazing.
There was some damage to the peak of the roof, but nothing like what would have happened if that oak had not been there.
Here is some debris that landed clear on the far side of the back porch. These were not tiny little branches either.
As you can see, the near side of the back porch was covered in broken pine branches. Really sad.
The destruction of these magnificent trees was heartbreaking.
When this pine came down, it took an apple tree with it.
Fortunately, both the pine and the apple tree just missed my horse trailer.
You can see the big gaps in what was a solid line of huge pines. It sickens me to lose beautiful, healthy trees, but it still could have been worse - a lot worse. It was a lot worse in Illinois.
I thought his posts were accurate and he was very careful with my keyboard. Okay, so there were a few carrot bits and a couple of wisps o hay in there, but after all the is a horse. Pretty good typist too, all things considered. I know I couldn't type nearly that well with my upper lip. Thank you, Indy.
Let me tell you, I broken wrist is no fun. Especially since the radius was broken completely in two - closed fracture thank goodness! - and a cast wasn't enough to hold the ends of the bone together properly, so four pins had to be used and I was in a cast for six weeks. Just to make things as difficult as possible, it was my left wrist that was broken, and I am left handed. Some fun, huh?
Even after the pins were removed - which made me a lot more comfortable - I had to wear a brace for three more weeks. At least the brace was a was much more comfortable than the cast and I had better use of my hand. The muscles and tendons in my hand and wrist had gotten stiff during my time in the cast, and of course, they were injured too when I broke the bone.
My wrist is still quite sore if I forget and overdo, and there is still some swelling, but it is getting better day by day, so I really can't complain.
On to the excitement. We were under a severe thunderstorm warning and there were some tornadoes in the mix as well. It turned out that the Weather Service confirmed three F1 tornadoes in the area afterward. We thought we were only hit with straight line winds - which can be just as bad - but when we actually got out and saw the condition of our trees we had to wonder. Amazingly, neither of the horses seemed upset at all considering what had happened.
This is the first thing we saw out the front door. This was an English Walnut tree that we were very fond of. It was just completely uprooted. Plus debris was everywhere. Very depressing.
Until we looked back at the barn.
I know these pictures aren't the greatest, but Mike was taking them in poor weather and low light. You can see the size of this tree though. The upper branches actually tore big gashes in the steel roof which you can't see in this picture.
Again, fortunately, after I broke my wrist in October, I went ahead and moved my saddle and bridle inside the house for the winter. I don't ride a lot in the winter because we don't have any place to really get out of the wind, and my hands and feet freeze. As little as I ride in the colder months, it's easier just to carry my tack back and forth. I can't leave them in that tack room all winter because the humidity is just too high here, and before you know it, they get covered in mold. Yuk!
This was the real kicker though.
11/19/13
One More Reason NOT to Eat Horse Meat - Researchers Find Toxoplasma gondii in Horsemeat | TheHorse.com
 |
Although the disease can be dangerous in
humans, few horses are affected. Toxoplasmosis rarely causes clinical signs in horses, but can cause neurologic problems such as ataxia and blindness in young or immune-deficient horses.
Photo: Photos.com
|
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Nov 17, 2013
Topics: Slaughter
After all the publicized concern about the presence of phenylbutazone (Bute) in horsemeat, researchers now fear the meat could also carry the organism that causes toxoplasmosis—a potentially deadly human disease. Recent study results suggest that up to 15% of horses in Brazilian slaughterhouses and 30.5% of those in southwest China could be infected with Toxoplasma gondii.
Toxoplasmosis in adult humans—especially the elderly and immune-deficient—can cause fever, pneumonia, heart disorders, muscular difficulties, lymphadenopathy, and death. Frequently, infection goes unnoticed in healthy adults. But the disease is of particular concern in pregnant women, as infected fetuses can develop eye, ear, skin, and nervous system disorders.
In 2011, French researcher Christelle Pomares of the Université de Nice–Sophia Antipolis–Inserm, in Nice, reported three cases of toxoplasmosis infection in humans in France, most likely from consuming horsemeat. The cases included the death of a 74-year-old man and abortion in a 21-year-old woman due to severe fetal abnormalities. The horsemeat probably came from Brazil or Canada, according to the strain analysis, Pomares reported.Toxoplasmosis in adult humans—especially the elderly and immune-deficient—can cause fever, pneumonia, heart disorders, muscular difficulties, lymphadenopathy, and death. Frequently, infection goes unnoticed in healthy adults. But the disease is of particular concern in pregnant women, as infected fetuses can develop eye, ear, skin, and nervous system disorders.
 |
| Horse meat scandal dominating the front pages (Photo credit: Gene Hunt) |
 |
| This is an illustration of the life cycle of Toxoplasma gondii, the causal agent of Toxoplasmosis. For a complete description of the life cycle of Toxoplasma gondii, the causal agent of Toxoplasmosis, select the link below the image or paste the following address in your address bar: http://www.dpd.cdc.gov/dpdx/HTML/Toxoplasmosis.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Toxoplasma gondii (Photo credit: AJC1) |
10/27/13
Update From Indy
she got the pins taken out last week and she says shes much more comfortable with them out. one of the pins had made a sore on her hand but now it's gone and the pain it was causing her has gone and the sore healed.
she still has a cast though and cant use her left hand much at all still. since she is left handed this is putting even more stress on her right hand and this is the hand she injured doing so much keyboard input when she was working. its bothering her a lot now.
hopefully she will get the cast removed in another week and things can start getting back to normal. it may take a while though and she may not be supposed to ride me for a while. thats ok i guess cause we don't ride too much in the winter anyway - at least not on the really cold and windy days. humans dont seem to be able to stand the cold like we horses can. i think it's because they dont grow a decent winter coat and have to keep putting on and taking off those things they use instead of hair. very strange.
ok thanks for reading. hope to report continued progress. mom does type better than me.
love
indy
10/11/13
An important Message From Indy
hi everyone. im indy, and i have an important message from my mom. you know her as suzanne or morganlvr. shes letting my type this because she really cant type right now. she usually tels me to stay away from her keyboards cuz she says i get hay and carrot pieces in there.
anyway this is a special case. mom had a very bad fall - not because of me or ami though. she got some pretty bad scrapes and bruises on her face and knees but the worst thin was she broke her left wrist. Yeah real bad and shes left handed besides that.
they took her to the emergency room and xrayed her wrist. she broke the em what did she tell me? radial or radius bone - somethin like that - completely in two just below her wrist joint. kinda like a fetlock I think.
the break wouldnt stay together right with just a cast so a couple of days later they did surgery and put 4 pins in that bone to hold it together so it would heal right. she has a big blue cast on her arm.
last tuesday she went to see how it was doing. doc said xray looked real good, and pins can come out in a couple more weeks. but the cast will have to stay on for more weeks after that. I know that cast is driving her crazy because she has to use her right hand for everything and that's real frustrating for her. her left hand has the cast clear up to her knuckles and around her thumb. then it goes almost to her elbow.
lucky the weather has been great so she can come to the barn every day and groom me. ami doesnt like being groomed much and doesnt always cooperate so well so moms stickin with me. ok by me! i love attention and i try to be very careful of her space.
mom can brush out my forelock and mane with her right hand and give me a light grooming. thats fine with me - we love just hanging out with each other anyway.
she just wanted me to post this for her so youall would know why shes not commenting much and that shes really ok but typing is very hard. I told her Id be happy to post all the comments she wanted but she found some hay sticking out of her keyboard and told me i was sweet to offer but this would be fine. Golly, i dont know where that hay came from.
any way she just wanted to check in. thanks for reading. i hope i got it all typed ok.
love
indy
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