Fly Spray

I’ve been playing with different fly sprays lately. I usually make my own – 1 cup skin so soft, 2 cups vinegar, 1 cup water, 1 Tbs Eucalyptus oil, and 1 tsp citronella oil. It works fine, but requires a lot of coverage on the horse, so I use more. Of course on the flip side it’s cheaper to make than it is to buy most sprays. Anyways, I ended up trying Ricochet horse spray, which is all natural. It works really well, but once the horse sweats much it’s gone. I think it repels using the smell and that’s why. I recently got some Equicare Flysect Citronella since I always think citronella works well. The bottle lasted me over a week with 2 horses, which is pretty amazing. If I only ride one horse a day it’s still 3 whole applications of spray. The horses haven’t been stomping when I’ve been riding or out grazing, and the only bugs I’ve seen on them were the monster horse flies which I promptly killed by hand (eww!). The Flysect also has a dry texture for being oil based. It really doesn’t attract dirt and also makes the horses look extra shiny. Anyone else have any good fly spray finds?

I ended up doing a jumping school Monday night since it was just me. Stampede was fairly obnoxious when I was warming up on my own. He has this certain spot in the ring I was riding in that he is always wary of. There are a bunch of jump standards and poles that we use for shows stored over there and evidently he thinks the boogey man hides amongst them. So we end up doing a lot of bending and moving off my inside leg to get past that spot. After I got done flatting I went over to the other ring and started jumping and he forgot all about any scary objects and focused on the task at hand. He jumped well so I was happy with him. I have a bad habit of forgetting to use my leg when he’s going nicely and I seem to be getting over that.

Rode Phoenix today out in the field. We trotted over this manmade hill a few times, I figure it’s good for keeping his hind end strong. He always enjoys the field more than arena work. I guess at 23 years old he’s probably spent a ridiculous amount of time in the arena. Besides he’s always good so why not take advantage of a nice summer night.

Here’s an updated of Stampede’s leg funk from a couple of days ago. It is definitely looking better, but it’s taking forever.

Leg funk again

I started giving him the tetracycline but he decided that he wasn’t going to eat grain if I kept squirting that junk in his mouth so I had to stop. It’s hard enough to keep weight on him that it’s not worth the fight. His blood work came back kind of funky, but didn’t show anything that would indicate infection. Must be localized at least. My vet is still trying to come up with a reason for the strange blood work, but we are taking him off supplements to see if things go back to normal or if it’s something else.