Goodbye the Year of Chaos, Welcome 2021

This time last year we all were likely looking forward to a good New Year with all the promises that it portends. This year I think we are scampering into the New Year halfway looking over our collective shoulders hoping we leave all the scared baggage behind. However, and there is always a however, an honest view we can find many good things to bring with us into the New Year.

Despite all the bad things that happened to us collectively...the Coronavirus threat and government lockdowns, and my personal tragedies in losing a sister a few weeks ago, many friends throughout the year, and my best horse coming up chronically lame, I am choosing to focus on the good things. I got to spend more time with my own horses, other people and their horses, and despite the pandemic had a overwhelming response to my annual Arena Challenge as people were seemed kind of desperate for competition and normalcy.

I found a good new horse with great bloodlines counting Poco Bueno, King and Leo, and that purchase was timely like I mentioned my good Hackamore horse, Junior, came down chronically lame. X-rays and nerve blocks showed navicular and an arthritic condition of the coffin bone. Such a sad thing to see such a good horse in that condition.

 I rode Junior, now 20 years old, as a Range Rider in BLM grazing units gathering cows and as a Conservation Law Enforcement Officer riding him in remote desert areas and the mountains patrolling for archeological thieves and game poachers. I've used him in Horseman's Challenges, Team Penning, Ranch Sorting, demonstrations and teaching clinics. He has certainly paid his dues and has more than earned to spend the rest of his years just as a pen mate to the other horses as long as I can keep him comfortable and his pain level low. I hope to do so in the short term with daily Equioxx tablets, monthly Adequan shots and Platinum Performance CJ supplement with his morning and evening pelleted feed. At some point working with a Vet specializing in equine orthro issues, Junior will likely receive steroid shots and maybe stem cell injections. We'll see.

The new horse, a Palomino gelding named Jake, is working out well. He picks up an understanding quickly. His only bad habits are wanting to trot everywhere - doesn't matter if you are leading him or just sitting the saddle, he wants to trot. So there was an understanding curve with him being with me, learning that walking is good until I ask him otherwise, but I do enjoy his willingness for forward momentum. His other bad habit was chewing on everything that was left where he could get it. Four fly masks and three halters so far, but everything after one is my mistake. As I write this I have more Double Diamond halters on order as I went through all my spares.

Another thing I am grateful for is a new puppy, now not so much a puppy...65 pounds and still growing. In early June, my wife and I watched the movie "Call of the Wild". The next morning while I was away from the house, my wife texts me a photo of an 8 week old puppy that someone threw over our fence line. Not the first time. I guess the words out that my wife rescues and fosters dogs. So that afternoon when I saw the pup, I knew I wanted to keep him. And keep him we did naming him Buck after the dog in the "Call of the Wild". He has taken to the horses. Playing with some. Wary of a couple, and comfortable enough with one in particular to lay in the Sun next a pile of hay while this horse grazes. Can't help but contrast how different species of animals can get along, but we humans are killing each other and destroying property in the big cities.

Anyway, I hope most can sent aside the bad things, instead focusing on their blessings and the promise of a good, new year, and spend more time with their family and their horses. Happy New Year and Safe Journey!

Pack Horse Library Initiative

I think part of the unique American mindset, and more so during Christmas, is to find joy in heart warming stories of people helping others or doing something to better than communities. I was going to originally write about my Veterinarian, Amy Starr DVM, who always goes the extra mile in treating animals and who not only provides charity Vet and other services locally and in Mexico but in SE Asia and South America as well...but I ran across this story which I had never heard of and had to research more on. Thought I would share.

The Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program that delivered books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943, under then President Franklin Roosevelt’s initiatives to create jobs and decrease illiteracy to help lift America out of the Great Depression.

The Pack Horse Library Project was unique in that it was completely worked by women which at the height of the program used 30 supporting libraries to provide books and other reading material to 100,000 people. Pack horse librarians were paid by the WPA and these stalwart women traversed the difficult country side, often traveling as much as 120 miles a week to deliver reading material to these remote rural residents in rural Kentucky. They provided their own horses and mules, and reportedly were not deterred by bad weather.

By the end of 1938, there were as many as 270 librarians riding out across rural Kentucky counties. As many as 1,000 riding librarians participated in the program over the years with the program ending in 1943, the same year that the WPA was dissolved, as unemployment plummeted during wartime as US manufacturing picked up to produce war machines needed to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.