scored at the MRER convention raffle drawings

We have cool conventions with ride managers donating entries + other stuff  with lots of names being pulled for the raffle not just a few.

And I SCORED.   Two ride entries to rides that I will try to get to plus a great hay bag.  I have one bag from that vendor and have been meaning to buy more.  Now that I have two I don't have to hurry on buying although I'll probably try to get a 3rd one early this summer.

I rode Tanza Sat morning because it was nice but forecast to get cold and icky Sunday which was true so I missed the morning talk.  It was on riding to achieve light collection and I figured "Ive gone to 5 centered riding clinics to learn this so I can really safely skip this lecture"

Afternoon talk was by a vet on 'alternative therapies'  A lot of times I find that rather BS, but I enjoyed the talk and was excited to find she has a clinic just down the road from me.   She has me convinced that I should skip vaccinating the horses this year because Sadie and Tanza have allergy issues and she has been involved in studies and they've found that horses have immunity for 3-4 years from vaccines and do not need annual shots and getting shots to things they already have antibodies for can cause allergy issues.

I take her word more than a lot of veterinary acupuncture and chiropractic practitioners  because she said *if my horse is colicking the first thing I do is give him a shot of banimine and then I'm going to do some acupuncture stuff*  well I'm pretty sure she didn't use the word stuff, but that was the gist of it.   She gave examples of when it would not be a good idea to use chiro or acupuncture treatments as well as examples of horses that were helped by them when conventional treatments had struck out.

She does something interesting where she draws blood and then injects it at acupuncture points to treat allergies so I will have her work on Tanza and/or Sadie if they have the skin allergies this year.  At least I will try it first,  the explanation of making an artificial bruise stimulated the lymph system and can reset it to be more normal seemed sensible to me.

And if Dr Mike is worried about not doing rabies or WNV shots I may have titers done if its not super expensive.  I really don't want to have to give a bunch of allergy shots every year and Tanza registered positive to a lot of stuff on his blood tests so I sure don't want to trigger anything else even though it was a stupid 'natural' fly repellent that set off his allergies.