She may be completely blind, but Lena knows there's hay on the utility vehicle — and when I drive up into her paddock, she comes slowly trotting after it. No, she's not going to run into it — she can tell exactly where she is, relative to the vehicle, by the sound. And Lena's a…

I took this photo with my phone yesterday morning when I was taking hay and water out to the horses. That's blind Cash inspecting the RTV utility vehicle. Cash has always been a very inquisitive character, and because he's blind, he uses his muzzle to explore things in his environment. He's always fascinated when I…

Our farrier, Steve Sandvil, was here the other day to put horseshoes on the two Belgians, Bill and Bob. We don't typically put shoes on the blind horses, with the exception of Rosie, who occasionally needs "corrective" shoes to deal with a hoof flaring issue on her front feet. But because of the kind of…

— Before I begin this post, I wanted to say that Alayne and I are very grateful for all the heartfelt comments and condolences we received in the past couple of days about losing Avery. He was a special one, and it was wonderful knowing how many people were touched by his story. Thank you…

It's not just the grass that's greener on the other side of the fence; the apple over there is better, too. That's blind Cash reaching through the fence to munch on a fresh apple on a recent morning. Every day when we put them out to graze in their paddocks, they make a mad dash…

Yesterday we had to let Bo, one of our blind Appaloosas, go to the big green pastures in the sky. In the past two months he had suddenly started losing weight dramatically, and blood work showed his kidney and liver values were screwed up. A follow-up urinalysis revealed ketones, meaning he was now using up…

Today we put the horses out to graze for the first time this season, and were they ever a happy bunch. It's been a long, long winter here — unusually so, everyone tells us — so we were a few weeks behind on grass growth. But finally the grass was tall enough, and thick enough,…

No, it wasn't Friday afternoon when we had to call our equine vet, Dr. Steve Levine. It was worse — Saturday afternoon. I was out feeding the horses and noticed blind Bo's right eye was closed shut and tears were streaming down his face. I struggled to get his eyelid open, but when I did,…

Here's a fellow you haven't seen before … this is our terrific farrier, Steve Sandvil, who was here on Tuesday.  He's been coming out to work on our horses since last summer, but for some reason I've never gotten him on the blog.  Alayne (a.k.a. "Potato Lady") came outside from kitchen duty briefly to hold…

Late on Friday afternoon we had one of those typical horsey disasters.  I say "typical" because they usually a) involve fences and b) occur at bad times, i.e., late on a Friday, at night, on a holiday, or any time on a weekend.  Never, ever, on Tuesdays at 10 in the morning. Kate was driving…