Meet Domino & Delingr – the newest additions to the FeedXL herd
Question: What happens when you tag your (in)sanity officer and friend Lisa in a post about paint yearlings up for auction?
Answer: You end up buying a paint yearling! … and you can’t have one (unhandled… yeek!) yearling by itself so I had to buy two! 😆🤦🏽♀️
At some point when trying to work out how to transport unhandled yearlings I said to Lisa, ‘the more sensible option would be just not buy one’. Her response ‘when did good sense ever get in the way of a pretty horse!’. 😂
So there are TWO new horses to introduce you to! Taking my horse count now to 7! Yikes!
My ‘justification’ is they teach me a lot and help me to be a better nutritionist. And they give me cool stories to share.
The reality… they definitely do teach me a lot but I just love them and these two I couldn’t pass up!
Domino (paint) and Delingr (brown, both named by my kids) have had a rough start to life, especially little Delingr.
My plan is to show you all how you can take a young horse that looks like it has been half starved and through good nutrition and proper care, turn them into gorgeous horses!
I know virtually nothing about them. They are Paint bred, for anyone who knows bloodlines (I’m not included in this group) they ‘apparently’ go back to a stallion by the name of Cisco Kid.
I do know they have never been wormed, never had their hooves trimmed or had any sort of feed other than pasture!
So the plan at this point is to get them on a proper feed regime, handled, wormed, vaccinated, hooves trimmed and any veterinary care they may need.
I have started on the feed side of things because until we can catch them it is (clearly) impossible to do anything else!
I have my friend and brilliant horseman Adam Sutton from Adam Sutton Allround Horsemanship arriving on Monday to handle them for me and will get them drenched at a minimum while he is with me!
On the feed side, in the last two weeks I have introduced them to lucerne/alfalfa hay. It took a few days for them to really figure out eating it! Once they were happily chowing it down, eating 3(ish) kg each per day I moved on to giving them the tiniest bit (about 1 cup each) of sweetfeed in lucerne chaff.
Again, it was a process of familiarisation. They ate the chaff happily. The sweetfeed they were very wary of but did eat it even in the first few days I gave it to them.
After about a week of this, gradually increasing the amount each day to 2 cups each per day, I started to add a Breeding and Growing Feed, which is the feed I ultimately want them on.
Again they were a little wary but they did eat it from the first day I put it in front of them.
So far, this is where we are at! I am going to hold them at this amount of feed now until I can get them home and make them some little individual feeding pens because Delingr needs more feed than Domino but Domino is so much bigger and stronger that she tends to get the lion’s share of each meal!
I’ll share all of their FeedXL diets as I go along!
Our biggest task right now is to get them handled! It’s near impossible to do ANYTHING with a horse you can’t even catch! With Adam on the job from tomorrow we will have happy, handleable yearlings in no time!!
Photos here are ALL from the first few days they arrived.
Poor little Delingr is a sorry sight and even Domino, while in much better condition was dull and only interested in finding food!
I’ll update you with new photos often!
Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?
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