musings on Shade

I rode Shade this morning, only 3 miles. Had to push her a bit early but she was feeling pretty good at the end of the ride. We walked plenty so I had lots of time to think about her recent illness and her allergies etc.

Shades CBC count was 40 for hematocrit if I recall correct terms. Normal is more like 30, Dr Mike said 40 is race horses on red blood cell #'s. Shade has always seemed to have some tendency to wind easier than Grey and Cindy did, wind meaning puffing hard. She has a very dished face and I remember worrying a bit if it might heed her endurance when she was a youngster. So I wonder if the high blood cell count is an adaptation to not being the best breather to begin with and if the probably narrower respiratory passages mean that having some allergy inflammation and mucous lining the sinuses affects her more than the next horse. She doesn't get any iron supplement (just the trace in the horse mineral mix) --we do have some iron in our water, the toilet tanks get rusty, but not a huge amount -never see rust flakes in water tubs or so on.

Luckily I don't have any goals of getting competitive with Shade so she doesn't have to be able to suck in enough O2 to canter a whole endurance ride and she is doing much much better since I pulled her off the questionable alfalfa hay, switching her to grass hay with some bales having some alfalfa in them and dropping all the cold remedy herbs JIC. Mom is so sick I can't really be MAD at her, I just should have been more snoopy when she volunteered to start giving all the horses some late afternoon hay --expanding from me asking it for Sadie due to the ulcers she had late last year. My anger is just very limited sympathy for mom's jaw pain --sort of a 'serves her right for giving the horses allergies with her penny pinching' attitude.

I need to take a bunch of pictures of Lady and try to get a good one for advertising. Dreamhorse having a $20 charge for photos is making me picky about getting a good pic. This will be helpful for other ads too. I sure hope I can get her re-homed. I'm still in the mode of looking for a buyer rather than trying to get a neighbor to stick her on pasture for grandkids to ride or rescue donation but dang I was horse poor with 4 equines + mom and dads that they don't do anything with so I really need to get rid of this 5th horse.