In the bleak midwinter….
It’s cold out there. I pray you are keeping warm and your driveway shoveled. At White Sulphur Springs, it is always a challenge to keep up with the camp roads and staff homes. We shovel, it snows, we shovel, it snows. Most of the ground is covered with ice chunks, covered again with snow.
It’s even more challenging to keep up with horse care and feeding during the winter. Water tanks freeze despite all the many ways we mitigate the cold. The ground is slippery and moving horses safely is very challenging. The WSS Wrangler team works very hard during the winter to make sure our herd stays healthy.
In the winter our horses are confined to smaller pastures. Each pasture is equipped with shelters to break the wind and allow horses to huddle together to keep warm. Some of our horses will wear blankets during the nights. On the coldest of nights, we will pull the herd into our barn to shelter for the night.
Bottom line, God designed horses to live outside year-around. As their food digests, it composts and creates heat which warms the animal. Their long hair traps the heat next to their skin and keeps them warm. They can turn their rear-end to the wind because the skin on their rump is thicker to keep them warm. When they are well-fed and in good condition, which WSS horses are, they can withstand extreme cold temps (even of up to -40 Fahrenheit.)
Freya has a nice long fluffy coat on her. Here’s a picture of her from just yesterday. She continues to develop her confident, curious, extraverted self. She is a force of nature. Our farrier visited last week, Luke. Luke gushed over her saying she has “wonderful feet” and is “well-bred.” This comment is coming from someone who sees hundreds, maybe thousands of horses, and it lends some credibility to our belief she is something special. God builds wonderful horses.
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