I wonder if Nosey and Banjo bonked their faces on the same object at Bowie? 
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Right?? I know with Nosey they didn’t halter her but just pushed her from one place to another with a long whip and strategic gates. They were told she was unhandled, which was not the case at all as I had no problems with basic haltering and leading from Day One. But I assume she got injured during one of these “herding” scenarios.
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Banjo had several scrapes—that main obvious one, but more over one eye and two on his poll and a couple under his jaw. Several on his shoulders. Most looked like horse bite marks—like he was trying to get his share of hay and got picked on. They weren’t as deep as poor Nosey’s. They didn’t appear to halter Banjo either—did the same thing, just opening gates to move him.
She DEFINITELY looks much taller in 3 weeks!!!
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I wonder if they met there? 
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Maybe! They might like to FaceTime so they can compare their current situations. 
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That last photo of Nosey – my first spontaneous thought was “Is that the same horse?”
Maybe especially with the sunshine light compared with the interior of the auction barn, along with the change in condition and yep, some growth.
She looks like the horse she was meant to be. 
Banjo looks good! He looks glad to be where he is, too. 
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Yes.
I had assumed they were a sales barn like most of the auction houses in north Texas, I must have heard that somewhere. But no, O’Dwyer (Bowie) has a contract and is one of the leading shippers.
Not the place to send a pasture cleanout, if you want to know they have a future.
[O’Dwyer is the company that handles the sales & shipping. Bowie is the town where they are located in. It’s common in TX to call the auction houses by location, rather than by their formal name. Also, O’Dwyer bought the sales pens in the early 2010’s, I think, so ‘Bowie’ as a sales pen has existed for much longer than their ownership.]
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Nosey is going to be a NICE horse. Beautiful mover, flashy but tasteful, nicely put together. And she has a great spirit—I love it when they have personality right out of the gate. So to speak. She is gorgeous. It’s so good to see them both happy.
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I hadn’t seen this before. Amen!!!
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LOL this would be a thing to see.
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My DH used to get some of his best racehorses from a dealer I called the grim reaper. Other trainers would sell him their horses for next to nothing to ship and he would do his damnedest to sell them along to another home. I feel like this is what Bowie is trying to do. Where do you send a “pasture clearout” otherwise that the kill buyers aren’t going to be bidding?
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Do mullein plants grow where you live? When i have a sheep recovering from pneumonia i will dry some mullein leaves in the dehydrator then steep them in hot water, add some honey and have my sheep drink that. Seems to help. Maybe not them, lol, but it does make me feel like i’m doing something to help them.
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I started drying mullein last year and making tea out of it. I found some instructions on line, and I don’t know what it is about that plant, but it really does make me feel better. It does the same for DH, so I know I’m not imagining it. I never would have thought of using it for sheep! I’ll pass that along to my daughter who is our resident shepherdess!
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Fair enough. You make a good point.
Plus in all honesty, if kill buyers aren’t buying horses, and for the horses that aren’t qualified for slaughter, they can also end up in bad circumstances if they just don’t sell.
The lesson barn where I learned to ride as a kid got almost all of their horses from the BO’s buddy, who I now understand was a local professional kill buyer. That’s what he did for a living after early retirement. Pasture cleanouts, working horses no longer able for the job, horses no one was interested in any longer. The two of them honestly saw it as a necessary service, basically re-purposing horses that were no longer wanted.
If the kill buyer had one come through that was safe for kids to lead around (pasture cleanout horses aren’t always), in the right age and size range, appeared broke to ride to any degree and did not buck or rear under saddle, he would give the BO a chance to buy it as a lesson horse. I really learned to ride on those horses, because some of those horses weren’t all that broke when they came to us.
Much earlier days, these guys were not hiding what the kill buyer did for a living and where the horses came from. We kids just didn’t really understand the whole picture. We did know that if a horse didn’t work out for us, or became unsound for the program, it was going on the kill buyer’s truck to Palestine (east TX slaughter plant). The lesson program was the last stop for these horses. If they didn’t work out there, that was the end of the line for them. The adults all took it matter-of-factly as part of life, and maybe then it was.
Just as an aside, one very big difference in those times, decades ago, was that because of the close proximity to the plants, there weren’t huge semi-trailer trucks packed with horses making long, long journeys to the plant. Our local kill buyer’s horses were going in a standard 6-horse stock trailer. It took less than a morning to get them there. After having lived in hay-rich pens behind his house for two or a few weeks. Sometimes, people individually giving up a horse they no longer wanted trailered their horse over as a single, and dropped it off at the pen for a check (a low check, it was more incentive to sell a sound horse to a real owner). The horse was having an experience they had likely had many times before. They got off the trailer into a pen with other horses and a lot of hay, where they lived relatively peacefully until it was time. Things weren’t perfect by any means, but it was nothing like the prolonged, days-long nightmare the animals have to go through now.
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I’m a sucker for a little Roman nose. 
The dex has really calmed down Nosey’s cough but it’s also given her an unhappy tummy so she’s not eating much. Le sigh. She also appears to be erupting teeth so that may be contributing to the lack of enthusiasm for her meals.
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Aww. She’s got a lot going on.
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Oh my heart - sweet little girl. Glad to hear her cough has calmed. Hope her tummy and teeth get sorted soon so she can get back on track. She is so adorable. I feel for her. 
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I can’t give some of mine dex due to EMS. My vet gives an antihistamine called Trianamine. It works well for hives etc. Just a thought if the dex is too much.
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Her eye is a little worried, and it must be hard for her to not feel perfectly … but even just this head shot looks so much healthier overall than when she arrived at your farm.
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I must get Nosey a pasture ball. She was trying so hard to get the aunties to play with her and they had way too much interest in eating instead. So I threw an old jolly ball into the field and she was thrilled. Circling, sniffing, pawing at it, rolling it, trying to pick it up, bouncing back and kicking at it, I laughed and laughed watching her. I’d love to find one of those big balls she could play with!
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