Fun With Horses

Little known to most people, we have on our camp about 19 Afghan horses. They are not too unlike American Quarter Horses, except that they are not near as big. As you can see in the pictures, they are not much taller than six feet, although I couldn't tell you what that is in hands (unit of measure for a horses height). After I put these pictures up on my Facebook page, I got a lot of questions from people about why we had horses and why I, specifically, was working with them.

Without going into too much detail and giving away a lot of information I shouldn't, suffice to say that I work with a unit that "thinks outside the box" and does things a little differently. The main purpose for these horses if they were in shape, and they aren't, is to use them for military purposes. Why would we need horses if we have trucks? Trucks make a lot of noise, a lot of dust, and require a lot of maintenance. Horses are generally quieter and much less overt if you wanted to get from point A to point B, without a great deal of notice. But, like I said before, these horses aren't in the appropriate physical shape to do that sort of thing. The unit that was here before us, either lacked the knowledge or the motivation to take care of the horses in a way that would keep them in shape and mission ready. So, now, we will spend a better part of our deployment doing that, and hopefully pass on that to the next unit.

When I say "we", there is much more emphasis on the other people in the "we", than "me". Prior to working with these horses, I knew how to mount and dismount a horse that was already saddled and could ride it if it was docile and not prone to being rebellious. However, some of the other guys here grew up around horses and have a good idea of what they are doing and have experience in handling horses that are less than agreeable. One of the big parts of these horses being out of shape is that they were rarely handled or ridden prior to us getting here, so some of them are quite against the idea of being ridden. They're nice enough to let you mount them, but they have no intention of letting you tell them where to go.

Some of the other things that we have been doing with them beside exercise is health maintenance. The pen that the horses are kept in is pretty big, maybe about one quarter of a football field. It is all dirt, though, so their hooves never get worn down requiring a fair bit of work regularly. There is a furrier (sp?, guy who shoes horses) in town but from I hear he is overpriced and doesn't do good work. So, every once in a while, each horse has to have it's hooves cleaned out and trimmed, much like what Debra would do with goat hooves.

Another thing that we learned about horse maintenance is called floating the teeth. By the way, I think I forgot to mention that we got a veterinarian in a couple of weeks ago to teach us a lot of this stuff, but he is leaving in a couple of days, which is why we have to learn it because he has to move on to the next place or something. Anyway, teeth floating. Horses are much like cattle or goats in that they grind down their food, which for horses consists of hay, grains, and feed corn, before they swallow. After a while, their teeth become sharp to the point that they can no longer grind the food properly, so you have to take something that resembles a large dental mirror with a "float" or metal file on the end and grind down the points on their teeth until they aren't sharp. The horses are not fond of this and like to fight it, so we had to sedate a few of the horses while doing this.

That is where another learning lesson came in and that was how to IV inject a horse with fluids or medications. Pretty cool stuff really, basically you just stick a few fingers into the horses neck to pinch their jugular vein, which inflates the vein higher up. Once inflated you insert the needle until you get blood flow, connect the syringe to the needle, and in goes the horses cocktail.

The reason you need a ruffie for the horse is because when floating the teeth, it is best to put a speculum on the horse, otherwise it will bite your arm, like one of the horses did one day to the vet, causing a very nasty mark. The speculum holds the horses mouth open so that you can stick your hand in to check the teeth for points and not get bit. It doesn't put the horse completely out, but it does look like its had too much to drink.

The last thing we learned how to do, was to castrate a horse. Seriously, I thought that it was going to be a lot bloodier and a lot more disgusting than it really was. This time we gave the horse a cocktail to start, and then gave it something else to knock it out for about an hour, although the whole procedure only took about half an hour. After it was all done, the horse woke up, and started walking around; I am not sure how that is even possible. A few people had asked on Facebook why I was learning to do this and why the army was spending the time, energy, money, etc., to castrate horses. First of all, these are our horses, they don't belong to random people in our area where we have arbitrarily decided to go and emasculinate there animals. It is for the same purpose that people spay or neuter their animals. We have 19 horses here and if the males were not fixed, we would have many more horses. At one time this base had almost 30 horses, which were admittedly too many, but about nine or ten of those died when the Taliban, who has absolutely no concept of aim, shot a rocket at our base and it landed in a feed trough. Also, just for FYI, there have been no rockets fired at our base since I got here; apparently, my reputation preceeds me and they are afraid. Anyway, you have to fix your animals if you don't want them to breed. That's just how it works.

Another question I have been asked is why I am doing this. Well, I have a specific job that I do, but I don't do it 24 hours a day. There are some days when my job requires about an hour of the total day; however, I can't just do my one hour and then go back to bed. On this particular camp with its particular personnel numbers, everyone has to pitch in to do various "camp work" so that everything runs smoothly. Basically, there is a lot of efficiency going on here. So, a lot of the time, when my time is not consumed by my job, I help out with the horses because it is interesting and it is something that I can actually post stories about on the internet, unlike some of the other things I do.

So, there you have it. We have horses, they are getting healthier, I ride the docile ones, and we castrate the horses out of necessity, but only our horses.