Our beautiful blind mare Lena has, um, a bit of a weight problem. Or, it might be more appropriate to say: she has to work harder at maintaining her figure than the average mare. (I think that sounds better.) What this means is that Lena is always on a diet, which is easy to manage during the winter when we’re feeding hay. It’s another thing altogether when she’s out on pasture having free-choice green grass.
Because Lena has raised the blind foals that come to the ranch and they become part of her little herd, she goes out to pasture with them. (That’s Cash on the left and Nikki behind Lena in the photo I took this afternoon.) Since they’re young and growing, they can benefit from all the green grass they can eat … but Lena would end up looking like an equine-shaped balloon. So this has always been a delicate balancing act, trying to make sure the youngsters get enough time on grass but not enough that their Aunt Lena becomes f-a-t or worse, founders. They get upset if we leave Lena behind at the barn or take her out of the pasture early and leave them by themselves.
So when our grazing season started this past weekend and we began taking the horses out to pasture, we were ready with a new way to manage Lena’s diet — it’s called a grazing muzzle. It’s designed to let a limited amount of grass come through holes in the basket of the muzzle, and has a break-away halter to prevent a horse from getting caught up on a fence with it. This grazing muzzle allows horses like Lena to spend time on pasture with other horses but avoid the health problems from too much eating.
Lena hated it.
She thought it was a bad, bad idea.
Yesterday I tried it on her for a couple of hours for the first time. She walked around the pasture, head up, trying to figure out why we would attach a basket to her face and then leave her with it. She didn’t even try to graze with it and just paced across the field. The blind youngsters followed after her, wondering why their Aunt Lena wasn’t grazing. This was most unlike Aunt Lena, who always has her head down in the grass. After watching this woe-is-me performance, we felt … well, guilty. Alayne finally walked out to take the muzzle off Lena. She glowered at Alayne. Not even a "thanks-for-taking-it-off, that-was-really-annoying" expression of gratitude. Just a pouty, sullen look.
Today, Day Two, went better. We let Lena graze all morning in the rich spring grass, and then in early afternoon we put the muzzle on. She still spent quite a bit of time walking around — exercise is a good thing for a plump horse! — but occasionally she would put her head down and swish the muzzle around in the grass. So I think she’s getting the hang of it.
When we went out this evening to bring them in from pasture, I took the muzzle off Lena for the walk back to the barn. Still feeling guilty, I let Lena stop a couple of times along the way and put her face into some thick stands of lush brome grass and grab big mouthfuls of it.
It kind of felt like stopping at McDonald’s on the way home from the gym. But at least she was a happier girl at the end of the day. And that makes for a happier me.
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