Natural Horse World

Ruby recovered from her horrific leg wounds with the aid of honey.

Both back legs had severed tendons and even after 10 days the bone showed through and proud flesh was rapidly developing following conventional treatment.

After treatment with honey and salt water, they were much improved.

A few months later the scars are almost healed and proud flesh reduced.

Now her legs are healed and sound even though there is still some unsightly scars.

A Biting Problem
Question: I have had my horse for three months now and I can pretty much do all of the level one tasks without too much of a problem. The only problem is his biting, he was an avid biter before the last owner had him and she has apparently done a lot to stop him from doing it most of the time. I'm just not sure what the best method is, I have read all of Pat's answers and other peoples suggestions -I guess I am just after conformation that it will stop in the future. Heres my thoughts - 1) I need to get more Savvy - understood and will take some time obviously 2) Keep
doing the blocks with the elbow or hand etc - his problem if he runs into it 3) don't hit - easy 4) Disrespect - will hopefully improve over time, more time and more games etc. Is it something I really need to work on or will it
just disappear when we start to have more of a partnership etc? Pat also suggests giving the mouth plenty of attention - that's pretty hard when he is interested in biting, does this confuse them? Most of his general biting has improved significantly eg. when I am just patting him, brushing etc, it just seems to be the more disrespectful biting eg. lateral
flexion (bites my foot), cranky with porcupine games etc. He also chews my 12 foot line and the carrot stick. Any ideas?

Answer: From what you've said, it sounds to me like your horse has learnt to use biting as a way of stopping something occuring - maybe because he perceived that something such as an unpleasant experience eg. girthing too quickly, brushing with a stiff brush on sensitive skin etc.
The problem will go away so long as you are consistant ie: provide negative reinforcement or activity for it EVERY time he does it. He's had that program for a long time so it will take time to re-program him too.
Keep using the blocks with whatever part of your body he's biting - eg. move your foot rhythmically to block him from biting with lateral flexion.
As you get better at challenging him with the games he will have less time to think about biting so try to make everything you do with him have a purpose.
Playing with his mouth has a purpose - to desensitise him to your fingers, the bit, worm paste tube, having his teeth done etc. You can use the carrot stick to start with so he doesn't have the chance to get his teeth onto you - the main thing here is to keep going with active, rhythmic rubbing all around and in his mouth until he stops trying to bite. If he manages to latch onto your stick or rope just ignore it and play a game that gets his attention like the yo-yo, circling or squeeze game. He will find it hard to hold onto something while his feet are moving.
If you make a big deal of him biting he will continue to do it to take your attention off what you wanted to do, so just keep asking for what you wanted - use your phases and focus and he will eventually stop trying to distract you from your original task in mind.
Your thoughts are correct and I’m sure as you get more savvy and can play in more interesting ways, he will stop trying to play with you!

JACKO'S STORY
by Paul & Karen Lockwood
We were first introduced to Pat Coleby’s book "Natural Horse Care" by a neighbour back in about ’96. We thought it sounded pretty good & started to base our supplemental feeding on her ideas. The ponies we had did just fine on this feed with the grazing they had & the addition of hay in winter.
Then we got Jacko, a severely undernourished 3 year old first cross quarter horse.

So we started the task of putting some weight on him, wow could he eat. It didn’t seem to matter how much we fed him, he didn’t put on weight. After six months he started to get greasy heal on 1 of his 3 white feet so we treated it topically with iodine which at first appeared to work. Then the greasy heal started to appear on his 2 other white legs as well, treatment with iodine did not seem to work at all, the scabs started to grow in size & number & spreading up his white socks. Mud Fever? Over the following 6 months we tried every topical remedy that anyone told us about, Vaseline, White Healer, engine oil & Quit itch (iodine). They all seemed to do something at first, then the mud fever would come back even worse. What a nightmare, he started to become lame with the condition. Then we remembered Pat Coleby had remedies in her book! Jacko was copper deficient! The answer was on our shelf all the time - why hadn’t we used it? A copper sulfate wash for his legs and feed him copper sulfate to address his deficiency. Oh that's right we looked at the packet of copper sulfate at the hardware store, saw the poison label, did the human thing & asked around about copper sulfate & feeding it to horses & came to the conclusion that it might kill him. He should be getting enough copper from the seaweed. Wrong. Well we didn’t seem to have any other choice & to make matters worse 1 of our other horses started to get greasy heal, so we purchased the copper sulfate & just washed their legs with it. Hmm! Didn’t seem to be doing much after a week or so, looked like we had to feed the copper sulfate. Jacko was the guinea pig, we started with a ¼ teaspoon daily in his feed. He didn’t seem to mind it at all & so increased it to ½ teaspoon. Within 1 week the mud fever had started to recede, yippee!!! After 2 weeks it had halved & 1 month later completely cleared. In the meantime we decided to feed ¼ teaspoon copper sulfate to the other horse, he didn’t like it at all. What now? He would not eat a feed with copper sulfate in it till we reduced the amount to 2 tiny grains!! That's not enough. We then doubled the amount on a daily basis until we reached a ¼ teaspoon. After a week or so of the ¼ teaspoon his greasy heal had gone. So not only did it not kill them, it cured them. Phew!! Over the next year or so Jacko changed color from washed out orange to a shiny copper chestnut.

We became more aware of what Pat Coleby was saying in her book. We even wrote to her to tell her the story. She wrote back suggesting her new version of the book would be interesting reading. We purchased that & another of her books Natural Farming & Land Care. Both well worth getting, the amounts of copper sulfate & sulfur had been increased from the early version. When we increased the sulfur to 1 tablespoon for Jacko he started to absorb his feed properly & finally started to put on weight to the stage where we reduced his feed to less than half what we had previously fed. We also had a soil test done which confirmed our pasture was in fact low in Calcium, magnesium, sulfur, copper, zinc & boron. Surprise, surprise!! We have top dressed our paddocks as recommended by the soil lab over the past 2 ½ years and decided that we could stop the feed supplementing of minerals as we had them available in an ad lib form, as described in Pat Coleby’s books, as well as ad lib seaweed and ad lib rock salt.
After 2 weeks, in January this year, of not supplementing their feed the greasy heal returned, 2 years after we thought we would never see it again, even though we had observed them using the ad lib minerals, & seaweed, they did not take enough. We returned to supplementing on a daily basis, 1 tablespoon Dolomite, 1 tablespoon powdered sulfur, ½ teaspoon copper sulfate for Jacko (¼ for Spike) & 1 teaspoon of seaweed meal as our maintenance ration, they still take more from the ad lib options as well. The Greasy heal cleared in 2 weeks. Looks like our horses need copper more than we think?
We thoroughly recommend you at least read one of these books before using the information, to get a better understanding of the importance of minerals in your horses diet and the soil your feed is grown on, so that you can tailor your supplement to suit your individual horses needs. You will also find in both these books a list of common conditions & which mineral deficiency is the underlying cause.