Ro Gets Into the Halloween Spirit

1 November 2010 2 Comments

Consider applesauce.

No, don’t. It makes me all queasy. I can’t stand mashed fruit. It’s a texture thing. It reminds me too much of snot.

Consider, instead, Saturday morning. It was sunny and a lovely, cool 70 degrees. I was at the other barn, getting ready for my lesson. My barn manager called to let me know that Ro wasn’t eating and seemed lethargic. Also, her nose was snotty.

The first part I knew—she’s been picky about her hay for a couple weeks, but we had sorted that out. Yesterday she ignored her alfalfa pellets, but I brought her in Saturday morning before heading to the lesson barn. She’d been diving into them when I left. Perhaps she was full from the ones I fed her and not ready to eat the breakfast ration? Perhaps her snotty nose was just alfalfa pellet mush?

Even so… I made my apologies to my instructor and headed back to my barn.

And there she stood: chomping contentedly at her hay. Nose crusted, but who could say if it was snot or alfalfa mush? Breakfast uneaten. I cleaned her nose, took her temp, and observed. No fresh snot. Normal temp. Chomping contentedly at hay. It was close enough to lunch time that I dumped out her uneaten breakfast, cleaned her feed bucket really well, and dumped in lunch. Which she ate.

You know those people in restaurants who send back perfectly good meals because there are water spots on the knife? It was like that. Princess and I are going to have words if she thinks I’m going to indulge her with sterilized buckets at every meal.

Since she was a little subdued, I hung around to monitor her for a while. She ate hay, I took her temp. Rinse and repeat for several hours. Everything was normal. I put in a call to the vet to have him stop by Monday just to check up on Miss Finicky Appetite, but I wasn’t too worried.

I went home, and less than two hours later received a call from a friend who told me Ro’s nose was running yellow snot and she was lethargic.

Back to the barn I went—and, indeed, now she was all snotty. And now her temp was up to 102. And now she was tucked up. And yet—eating hay.

I called the vet back, talked to him, gave banamine, and waited until he could get out. Ro ate hay and snotted all over everything.

End result: for Halloween my pony has decided to dress up as the Mucinex mascot. He’s thinking she picked up a virus that’s running around and got a bacterial infection on top of it, which is causing the snotty nose. He’s running cultures to verify, and in the meantime I have a bucket of antibiotics.

This is where pharmaceutical companies just don’t get it.

My picky, princess mare is off her feed as it is. Just how am I supposed to convince her to eat huge scoops of antibiotics?

Re-enter applesauce. All horses like applesauce, right?

Yeah, no. I let Ro taste it, and she licked it off my hands with all the uncertainty of a kid experimenting with fire: Ohhh… smells good. Let me taste. Ew! Poison! But it smells good… was I wrong? Let me taste it again… Yuck! Poison! But it can’t be poison, it smells so good… let me taste it one more time…

So then my hands were covered in snot and applesauce and, let me tell you, that did nothing to improve my opinion of mashed fruit. Disgusting stuff. I was right—it is like snot.

I decided to take the plunge and mix her antibiotics in the applesauce and see if she’d eat it. She sniffed it and gave me the most offended look ever. She was not eating that, thank you very much.

Since I had nothing to lose, I threw her dinner on top of it, mixed it up, and walked away. She’d either eat it or not.

I came back and found her bucket licked clean. Ok. Applesauce = poison. Applesauce-covered alfalfa pellets = yummy.

My horse is sick.

(Ro would like to point out that she is not the one spending all day scrubbing an innocent horse’s nose and shoving stuff up an innocent horse’s bum, so perhaps we could reevalute who is “sick” in this situation—the applesauce-eating horse, or the person with the thermometer fetish?)

Today was more of the same. Her attitude has perked up. She’s eating, her temp is normal, and if I could just get her to drink more water, I’d feel a whole lot happier about the whole picture.

But on the whole, I think next year I will dress her up before she takes matters into her own hands again. This Mucinex Monster is not my idea of a good Halloween.

Horses and Riding, Horses I Have Known, Ro

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