A New Tactic

So Tuesday the scratches were in full effect. The scabs on Axel's legs are huge and he's very sore. I even resorted to giving him some bute to hopefully take the edge off. J had the warm water turned on so I hosed down Axel's legs, in retrospect a cold hosing might have felt better but the warm water helped work some scabs off and wasn't quite as shocking. I couldn't get all the scabs off, some were on there to stay. After I soaked him for quite some time we went in the barn and I scrubbed him up with the chlorhexidine. While I waited for that to dry I removed another horse's worth of hair from Axel's winter coat and convinced him to eat some bute. He didn't eat all of it so I'm hoping he got at least a decent amount to make him feel a little better for the day. Since he's so sore I decided to try some tri-care on the spots where I picked the scabs instead of the MTG. At this point I'm just kind of pulling at straws to find something to make him comfortable until the pasture dries. My initial thought is that having less scabs should help at least a tiny bit.

I did a little research and it seems like perhaps Axel could have a copper deficiency. The symptoms of such are mud fever, dull reddish coat, swollen joints. All three things Axel has. So now I'm looking at finding a copper supplement and seeing if he'll eat that. I probably won't have J&J feed it to him every day but between N and I we can probably get a decent amount in him a few times a week. I know J&J would offer to feed it but I think at 4am feeding time the last time a person wants to do is deal with more supplements. Considering the month's worth of joint supplement Axel gets lasts several months, I'm thinking it gets skipped once in a while. I am looking forward to having the horses at my own house and being able to make weird diet changes without putting someone else out. Another reason I'd rather not send them back to the farm when the Baby gets here, who's going to pamper my spoiled horses?

I did bring Cody in for a few minutes to do a little ground work and let him run around a bit. I could tell he really wanted to roll while I asked him to circle but because of that he had a really nice long and low trot, good back stretch! When I was done on the lead line I let him roll and then I asked him to move out a bit and stretch his legs. I did scrape about a half a horse's worth of hair out of his winter coat but he's got a ways to go (and he gets groomed twice as often as Axel)! Lucky boys get the weekend off. I wanted to make it out to the barn one more time before the weekend to tend to Axel but it rained yesterday and it's supposed to rain Friday as well and we have to get the house cleaned up for some guests so it's probably not going to happen.