Monday 28 February 2011

Horses in the bottom Paddock

A couple of years ago, my wife was approached by a couple of girls who had a horse that they needed to agist for a while. We were assured that the arrangement would be short term as this was just while they sorted out selling their horse, Jack.

The girls were both pretty hard up and had children to feed as well as the horse to look after. So I was annoyed, but not surprised, when they more or less abandoned Jack on our property. Oh, sure, they came around once in a long while with a bag of carrots, but the paddock was pretty quickly reduced to dust by his rapacious appetite. I decided that the horse had to go and that the girls were being more than a bit irresponsible. I contacted the RSPCA and asked for advice. I was told, to my surprise, that they couldn’t do anything about Jack unless he was being starved. Obviously, I couldn’t starve the beast, so, with the help of one of my horsey friends, I started to feed him and get him into shape.

In the meanwhile, the girls were told that they had to do something with him or I would give him away. Oh, yeah, that got a lot of action. Anyway, long story short, I gave Jack to a friend of mine who is now using Jack as a paddock pal for his other horses. Jack is happy, the other horses are happy and the girls (and their children) are well off my property.

Well … we miss Jack. He was a cantankerous horse with an attitude and poor feet (turned out right front hoof) that made him, more or less, unrideable, and he terrified my youngest daughter. But, we miss him.

My neighbour has recently got himself a couple of horses. His property is about the same size as ours, so the horses eat all of his pasture in about four months. A while back, being right neighbourly, we offered the bottom paddock to our neighbour as a place where they could keep their horses on a rotation basis. The limit that we set to this arrangement was that we would want to use the bottom paddock again when we get sheep (not an immediate goal, but certainly there on the horizon).

The neighbour is a very nice bloke and he graciously allows our daughters to visit him and be shown around his parrot cages (he breeds rare and exotic parrots for the pet industry). His partner is a lovely woman who is always very nice to us and to the girls too. So, over the fence we decided, we’d have horses in the bottom paddock again, I wouldn’t have to mow it and my neighbours pasture has time to regrow.

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By the way, this isn’t one of those, “you wouldn’t believe how my neighbour took me for a ride” stories.

As you can see from the picture, they are very picturesque in the bottom paddock.

Horses, in my opinion, are nice for someone else to have close to me, without me having any responsibility for. Yay!

Abandoned Cats

clip_image002Late one night while my wife and I were sitting down to a nice relaxing night after both daughters had gone to bed. Our puppy, Max, the Cardigan Corgi was getting very excited and started to bark at the veranda doors. At the door we found a little black kitten. The poor little thing was thin and mewling terribly. We brought the kitten in and put the dogs out. Within minutes, the dogs were barking again. We went outside and found another kitten in the apple tree.

Now, my wife and I are not cat people. Plus … our garden is a habitat for countless native parrots and other native birds. Cats, also, eat chickens. On the other hand, our daughters had expressed a deep and abiding desire to have a kitten. Rock … hard place …

We decided that the kittens were in desperate need to have food. So we fed them some puppy food and a small amount of skim milk.

The two kittens were lovely little tom cats. They seemed to be quite healthy, but they were very skinny.

clip_image004We determined that we would take the kittens to the RSPCA in the morning so that they would be given the care and attention that they deserve. The surprising thing for me was that they were obviously well cared for, just … well … abandoned. I suppose that the owners thought that it was better to abandon them rather than take them to the RSPCA themselves, I mean, after all, the RSPCA is, what, another kilometre down the road from our property. Ah well, who am I to judge?

We kept the kittens in a warm box in the garage overnight with some water (that, of course, they spilled everywhere). In the morning, my lovely wife took the kittens to the RSPCA where they were probably wormed and fed.

Heavy Machinery on the Farm

When we bought the property, the previous owner had an underground rifle range built into the side of the hill. The range was covered with corrugated iron and was constructed with heavy steel pipes. At the back end of the range, there were about 24 2000mm x 400mm x 25mm steel sheets welded together to provide a downward sloping bullet guard. Some friends and I harvested these materials some time ago, but I’d left a huge chasm in the middle paddock (about 3m x 20m x 2m). All of the soil that had been dug out of the ground to make the rifle range was piled up next to the range.

I hired a 1.5 tonne mini-excavator from COATES Hire for the weekend so that I could re-fill the hole and do some other stuff around the property.

I managed to get some of what I wanted to do finished, but not all. Most of the pile is now in the hole but I wasn’t able to clean up the top paddock. The top paddock is just too steep for something as top heavy as an excavator.

Next, I’ll hire a bobcat!

I will be harvesting some trees from my mate’s property in the next couple of months to make fence posts for the top paddock. I need about 120 fence posts, so that should be fun.

The Quarantine Pen

The quarantine pen has been constructed using 2,400mm star posts, 4mm white wire and 2000mm chicken wire. Each pen is 6m x 3m with a 500m wide gate.

There are two of these, side by side, with the gates sitting side by side (to make it easy for me to access). Across the back half of the pen I have also attached 70% shade cloth so that they have some decent cover.

The pen also has some tensioning posts stuck in at the corners so that the wires can be pulled taught.

I have constructed a pair of shelters in the quarantine pen from a pair of apple crates and a pair of cherry crates. The front was knocked off the apple crate and the cherry

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crate was nailed on to the top (upside down) to make a nice box. I then screwed on some exterior grade plywood to make them a bit more weather proof and filled the bottom up with hay. The shelter in the background is the Cherry Crate on Apple Crate construction … only Holly thought I was taking a photo of her.

Ah well … she is a pretty goat after all.

Holly’s favorite game at the moment is to climb up onto her shelter and stick her head out between the two joined shade cloth sheets (they are held together with nylon cable ties).

All going to plan, the quarantine pen will be out of service again in about 2 weeks time (here’s hoping!).

The Quarantine Story

Well, the goats have been in quarantine for a month now. And they are beginning to get a little fed up with it. Our older doe, Holly, has managed to maintain an average escape rate of once every three days. So far she has:

· Wriggled under the wire – so I attached heavy steel pipes to the bottom of the mesh;

· Pushed the gate out at the bottom – so I put a concrete block up against the gate;

· Jumped over the top of the enclosure – so I put an extra wire line around the top;

· Made a huge hole in the lighter wire of the gate – so I attached some exterior grade plywood to her gate; and

· Made a mysterious escape – so I scratch my head and say … huh.

clip_image002The younger doe, Minnie, just patiently waits on her side of the enclosure. Well … I say patiently, but actually there is an awful lot of bleating that goes on.

The main objective with the quarantine is to keep them separated at bed and meal times, so that they don’t share too many fluids. The quarantine pen has worked pretty well for that, although the proof of the pudding will be when I take them back to the vet for a blood test in March. I have very mixed feelings about that deadline.

I would hate to have the blood test come back positive for CAEV. I have already lost two young does and I don’t want to lose any more.