Managing Expectations

When I picked Karma out, I utilized Aimee's ruthlessly exclude (part 1 and part 2) and it has served me VERY well. I honestly can't even imagine what the last year would have looked like with a different horse. I have a three year old that I can give weeks off at a time, and we pick right back up where we left off. I don't have to worry about lunging or balancing my mental energy. Karma is just Karma.

The first 3/4 of February had snow basically everyday and I was over it

That being said I have to be very careful not to fall into the trap of expecting her to be perfect all the time. And honestly, I kind of hate it when people put the expectation of perfection on their horses. In my mind no horse is perfect, they all have their moments and off days and the expectation of perfection leads to dissatisfaction in the relationship.

She wasn't too thrilled with walking through 18+ inches

So while I am enjoying my fabulous baby horse, I also remind myself that I am incredibly lucky and I really shouldn't be put out if she wants to stop and stare at the giant pile of snow for a minute before she proceeds.

Feed XL Review

I am cleaning out my draft folder because its snowy and gross outside. Back in 2019, I impulsively bought a subscription when they were having a 50% off sale because I could analyze all three horses for $37.50. And honestly I wasn't terribly impressed for a few reasons.

Our hay supplier tests they hay and when you go to buy the hay you can see the analysis results. I was super excited, but I couldn't figure out a way to enter the information by hand. Everything I found required a specific file format, which I did have. Without the hay testing I wasn't too sure how accurate the information was.

All three of the horses have a higher than recommended crude protein intake and their recommendation is feed less forage. Which honestly I am not really worried about that, because I haven't seen any issue from that.

Where I run into a problem is with Cowboy. He is low in the digestible energy category in addition to being too high in the protein category and for the life of me I can't figure out how to bump up the digestible energy without out a) feed a ton of pelleted feed and b) making the program angry about him being way way way over the protein requirement.

My biggest complaint is one place it tells me to feed more hay and the other place it tells me to feed less, which doesn't actually help to balance the feeding program. I think the low digestible energy is the reason he is a bit thiner than I would like which I was happy to learn because I was struggling to figure out why the other two are looking a bit porky and Cowboy was looking a bit thin. (Turns out the actual problem was someone *Stinker* was hovering more hay than I realized. And Cowboy is holding weight better now that they are kept separate.)

Despite my dislike for lack of assistance balancing Cowboy's diet, I did think the subscription was an interesting experiment. I am just a bit bummed that it wasn't a bit more helpful on the balancing part and looks at the components individually instead of as a whole. I would have appreciated it more if it said look for X, Y, and Z in a feed in order to bring up the fat content without increasing the protein. And maybe if I was better educated in nutrition it wouldn't be an issue.