Pasture Upgrades

With TC definitely staying at the ranch until something happens that makes me want to move him to a new barn (not ruling that out), we have decided to do a horse shuffle and give TC a new stall, paddock, and now pasture. 

He first went into stall 4, the stall furthest from the house. He went in there because the fencing was the most secure and it was easy to have Riot (stall 3) go up and around TC's paddock to the upper pasture (which is too rich for Sunny and too hilly for Rico). We figured that TC wouldn't do well with cable fencing and it was a temporary situation at first. 

When the pasture was still green!

Now, TC is there for at least the summer and has trained my mom to take him to pasture enough where she's sick of it and wants to give him a pasture permanently. She asked me if I thought it'd be okay and I said absolutely. So we started talking about the logistics and he is now in stall 1! Rico will be next door in stall 2, Riot in stall 3, and Sunny in stall 4. TC keeps his pasture and the others split the rest of the space. 

TC's pasture goes almost all the way to the property line and that plus his paddock and sacrifice area (he's only in the pasture for 5 hours a day because he would get fat) will mean that he has an entire half acre to himself when he's got his full area! This is definitely the biggest living situation he's had since he was four years old living in pasture with other horses. And at that time he had no shelter other than trees, so this is a big improvement I think. 

He settled in SO well. The first day he probably thought he was being turned out and that he was just forgotten about, and he wasn't going to scream at the house to be brought back in. He was not happy to see me come down on the second day to ride him. He's normally a whinny and come over to me horse but he stayed way out in his pasture and only whinnied and came over when I came back out with a carrot. But I think by now he's realizing that this is his life now, no one forgot about him in his turnout, he now lives in his turnout! 

This is almost your semi-permanent home, buddy

I'm really glad I can give him this kind of space for the time that he's at the ranch! At the end of the day, the facility isn't what I need for my sport, so we will not be there forever, but I'm so happy to 1) give him this space now and 2) know that he's happy there so it will always be our home base if he needs time off or if I need to ride him less or if we run into another issue at a boarding facility. 

I know that with all the anti-stall posts going around on social media, there will be a lot of people wondering why I'd ever think to move TC and I do want to remind everyone that I live in the bay area about 10 minutes away from some of the biggest tech companies in the world and that this kind of pasture availability is unheard of. I'm extraordinarily lucky and privileged to have this for my horse for even a short amount of time. So 1) don't judge me if I end up moving him and 2) don't judge people in my area for having horses in a smaller space than TC's giant half acre! 

I wrote about how hard it is to find boarding in the bay area in this post. After going through the house buying process, I have to laugh at my 2019 post about how *insane* the housing market was at the time. In 2021, we had a house that we put in an offer 50k over asking and there were TWENTY TWO OFFERS (we were in the bottom half because of course we were) and it eventually went for 350k over asking. The only way we got our current house is to put in a bully offer for 100k over asking with no contingencies the day after it came on the market that expired 2.5 hours after we made it AND we got lucky that the agent we were dealing with didn't do a lot of work in this area so didn't know how insane the market was. 

Things on the docket this year: hanging
out with the neighbor cows

So, lucky for TC that I've got the ability to get him out there and lucky for me that he's had enough "life experience" as my mom put it, to be allowed to live there. It was made VERY clear to me that he was NOT welcome for the majority of year's I've owned him because of how wild he was. I thought that was hilarious and not at all surprising.

Happy pasture days, TC! Hope you enjoy it!