Peri's Progress and Other Photos

Remember how awful Peri's leg looked when I wrote about it before?

Here it is three weeks later. No maggots, no necropsied flesh, no giant hole that lets you see down in between the leg bones. Just a lot of pink new flesh.

The leg is still weak and floppy in that area (presumably from nerve and tendon damage) and Peri still lies down most of the time, or hops around on three legs.

But her attitude is cheerful, her appetite is good, and she has learned to lie still and let us do the daily cleaning and rebandaging of the wound, so it looks like she's going to make it through this adventure after all.

(See Peri's Reprieve if you missed reading her story the first time around).

While I'm on the subject of legs: Leeloo went back to the vet again today for another checkup and bandage change on her broken leg.

(See Life Plays Us Like a Game of Jenga and The Dogleg in the Dog Leg, if you missed what happened to her).

She's making such good progress that she doesn't have to go back again for a month now.

Unfortunately, having the vet change the bandage again alerted Leeloo to the fact that bandages can come OFF, so when she got home, she immediately chewed the new bandage off, and we had to put it back on ourselves.

But in the meantime, I took a picture of her "Bionic Puppy" leg, showing all the pins and braces holding it together.

It's been a bad summer for legs here. Besides Peri and Leeloo, our cat Henry and our mares Char and Scylla each were briefly lame in one front leg, for unknown reasons. Fortunately, they recovered without expensive vet care!

I narrowly avoided a potential medical emergency of my own tonight. When reaching down to turn off the outside faucet after watering the animals, my hand passed within six inches of this lovely and sinister looking Black Widow Spider.

Normally I don't kill spiders. I figure they're mostly going to eat bugs that are more annoying than they are, so I like to let them alone to do their job.

But, sorry, I just couldn't leave this one to live and reproduce right next to my back steps where Ken and I and all our cats hang out regularly. We do not need any more medical emergencies here, either of the animal or human variety.

On a brighter note, I had to take a picture of the hay in our hay feeder after we filled it up tonight.

I thought it looked pretty, the way we arranged the alfalfa and orchard grass bales in an alternating checkerboard so that each horse will be able to reach some of each kind of hay when they come in to eat.

Naturally, they'll all crowd in and rush to gobble up all the alfalfa first, so it's important to make sure each horse gets her fair share.


Here are the horses waiting for us to open the gate so they can come in and eat that alfalfa.

Here's what happened when the gate was opened.

That's Torchsong, our yearling Paint/Saddlebred cross filly at the end of the video. Quite the firecracker today, wasn't she?

Poor thing, she's at the bottom of the herd's pecking order, so she knows there's not much point in hurrying in to be fed, since the other horses make her wait until last anyhow.