I posed the question last week, “if I clip do I have to acknowledge that winter is here?” And that was followed by a week of freezing temperatures that did, indeed, force me to acknowledge that at the mid-December point, winter is most definitely here. Okay, okay, purists do not need to remind me that technically we’re still a week and a half out. Actually, I take that back. Remind away. The fact that the winter solstice arrives and the days start getting longer again makes me so happy that I can take the thoughts of winter as long as there’s a little less dark!
But this weekend and week have found me tucked away in the warm (relatively speaking), dry barn working on the masterpieces that are my clipped horses. I started with Billy. As usual, he turned into the shiniest clipped horse on the planet. He’s been that way ever since I started him on SmartDigest Ultra. Many of the ingredients (including obvious coat-quality-contributors like Black Oil Sunflower Seeds, Flax, Chia, etc.) are in the other horses’ diets. So I am curious what it is that turns him so unbelievably shiny every winter!
Cassie was horse #2. She’ll get clipped again in 6 weeks to prepare for Thermal, so I took the easy way out and left her legs….whiiich might have also had something to do with the fact that it was freezing and I didn’t want to have to wash her legs! Also, I have a thing about horse’s ears. I don’t like to clip the hair out of them in the summer, and I can’t bring myself to clip the hair off of them in the winter, even when I clip the rest of the face/head. You’re supposed to be able to tell whether a horse is warm or cold by how their ears feel (although not as untrue as an old wives’ tale, I’ve found little correlation between ear warmth and horse body warmth through the decades), so I can’t help but leave ear warmers on for them. This leads to a pretty funny view from horseback…especially on the horses who change color as much as Cassie and Socks do.
Last two equines to face the deranged-lady-with-clippers were Sadie’s pony (Max), and Socks. I may have gotten slightly punch drunk, which resulted in a “war of symbols.” I told Sadie she had to guess what the symbol on Max is. Do you get it? (She did not).
(Answer: It’s a “greater than” symbol. Because his name is “Max,” so he’s always greater than everyone else….and yes, if I was being a little more accurate I would have clipped an “or equal to” line below the “greater than” sign, but I was COLD and ready to be done!)
Socks was the last (for the moment). She caught wind of Max’s symbol and felt the need to remind everyone that she’s greater than EVERYONE, including the pony!
And the final clipped horse, Rasen BHS, who came back to us this week after almost a year on lease. But I can’t take credit for his very nice clip job…that goes to the person who clipped him before he came home. We’ll just ignore the fact that my 10yo daughter FITS THE 16.2 HAND HORSE NOW! (Well, she does from the view looking down from a 17.1h horse anyway).
And as a small aside to the actual clipping. I have a friendly competition of horse hair designs going on with several friends. I’ve been amassing hair for a week and I still haven’t decided what to make out of it. I’m paralyzed by all of the options! But Sadie and I were messing around with it on Sunday and came up with a bit more symbolism:
So what happened to the remaining equines? Chico the pony went off to a lease home for the winter. Time will tell whether they decide to clip his Fabio-esque locks (I mean seriously, 12.2h of northern Canadian pony might have more hair than all the other horses combined!), but either way it won’t be me doing it! Evita is not a huge fan of clippers and doesn’t get very hairy, so I’ll hold off on her until Clipaggedon part 2 (Thermal Preparation). And last but not least; Tori, the 4 year old, who’s hairy and could really use a minor ‘do. But I finished #4 last night and just kind of lost my mojo. I’m so tired of clipping! That could be due, in part, to the fact that I dry clipped for the first time in many years. Usually I bathe the horses and start clipping while they’re still wet. But it was so cold this time I couldn’t bring myself to hook up the hose. End result; dry, dusty horses. I’m not sure my eyes will ever be the same after filling with so much dander and microscopic horse hair clippings! This was a great reminder that wet clipping is superior in every way to dry clipping!