I love long flowing manes on horses. It doesn't have to be crazy long but I love natural manes and tails. If I had a Fjord I think that would be the only time I would cut the mane....but if their mane was already flowing it'd be hard! I have trouble even doing a bridle path but practicality warrants it and I find it much easier for haltering and bridling.
Seamus has a nice thick mane, and a pretty decent tail. A great thing is that he doesn't get tangles very much just like Daenerys. Upkeep of the mane and tail is easy for these two. Chance on the other hand gets tornado twists from hell. I have to work so much to keep him untangled and when I do untangle him it doesn't take long before he's twisted again. But when it's all cleaned up his mane is beautiful! That's hair texture for you some types tangle easy. Maybe it's because he's Arabian?
Anyways. When I brought Seamus home he had some mane on one side and some on the other. Then it flopped mostly to the off side, his right. Now as you'll see in pictures below, his mane is falling on his left. I haven't had to really work with it to get to lay that way. I didn't even realize his mane had flipped. I would just groom him the way it seemed to lay. Doesn't really matter but I find it funny!
My big concern with his mane has been his rubbing the darn thing off!! Mr. Seamus decided he didn't like the dry barnyard area with little grass so he found a way to reach through the wooden fence in three different areas of the yard to find the grass on the other side.
It was wonderful not having to weed whack around the fence line but his mane! He lost a huge section of it with a few tendrils of scraggly hair left. How awful! I know he didn't care but I wasn't happy!
From some angles you could almost not see the missing hair but it was still gone and he was continuing to reach through the fence line to get the bits of grass. Ugh. Silly boy!
I spent days after work when I had a moment in the heat of summer to pull the middle board out of the fence, cut it if it was a 16 foot section instead of an 8 foot one and then put another board in. Basically the middle board was moved down by a board width and another put in above it to prevent my yogi horse from contorting to get his head through the boards and eat the grass.
Board by board, section by section I completed the problem area. The outer fence in the barnyard has a line of electric on the top so I luckily did not have to do those boards too. I just don't want electric where I walk through the human entry gap or near the water troughs. So I did it the hard way of pulling off boards and adding additional boards.
It's probably been about 3 months since the fencing has been updated to this new "anti-grass is greener on the other side" style. Seamus's mane is filling in some. I'm very happy. It seems trivial but I love long flowing manes. I'm not so set on having a really long mane or tail where I need to braid and wrap and basically make the horse look like an old lady with curlers in her hair all the time. I do like to maintain the hair and keep it flowing as best as I can for horses who live in the fields and barnyard.
Look at that silly beast!! A least he's looking more presentable! He sure likes to get into everything and unknowingly cause problems.....what next Shadow pony?
2 comments:
Hi. It's the same here, but we started out with electric wire either alone or over wood. No rubbing htere. But my horse has learned to rub his mane out on the barn itself.
And now the barn itself is being slowly displaced by the daily rubbing by both mane and tail. I'm at a loss. Do we need to build a stone structure, a castle, to maintain horses without the structures being pushed askew?
I'm still learning. We're in Germany. Most barns are not made of wood. I only hvae the crappy temporary structures because we live in a building-free zone - only agriculture.
I'm grateful for the innovative and creative approach you bring to your topics.
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