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[RC] MY ARIZONA STORY/Explain, Pls - rides2farIt was fun to see the way the westerners run things and how and why it works for them. Okay, Angie...the snipped statement has me curious. Care to satisfy my curiosity and elaborate on it a bit? Wow.. VERY percepetive! When I went to bed last night with Bill reading my post to make sure I hadn't said something he needed to stop me from saying there was another paragraph in the story that that statement referred to...dealing with the fact they gave no electrolytes. Bill deleted it thinking I was insinuating "these poor people don't even know you use electrolytes">g< He was also trying to help me get the length down and thought that was a boring detail. He's totally unaware of the recent electrolyte debates on pros & cons, east/west, humidity,dry, ulcers, etc. So...basically, what he cut out was that I told that another way things were very strange out there for me was that we gave no electrolytes, at all. If I heard that from someone I'd assume, "OK, this horse eats large amounts of hay, etc". Nope. Heisman ate grain. Not wet grain mixed with beet pulp, just wet grain. Lots of it, enthusiastically, but he never had any green grass to graze on, and pretty much passed up the chances he did have to eat hay since he was scarfing up wet grain. It's really liberating to do a ride on someone else's horse, with them there making all the decisions about pace, food, whether to worry about something, etc. So I didn't worry, I was just puzzled. Didn't seem, in my experience, that it would work. Worked fine. Hmm. Something to file away and puzzle over. The arrangement of the vet checks was probably the other major difference. Granted, there were only 18 horses in this 50 and I know there are plenty of rides out there with lots more. Most of the "formal" design of our vet checks with P&R areas roped off, etc. are to deal with crowd control. If we had a ride and expected 50 horses or so to use the vet check and the checks were away we would probably be more casual about where your pulse got taken (over by the tanks) etc. I didn't see any CRI's being taken, but that doesn't mean they didn't. I don't believe they did on my horse but they could have slipped it by me. We didn't pull tack. You pretty much have to do that here just to get the pulse down, but the vet did check up under the saddle for sore backs etc. I'm not insinuating the vetting was lax. I didn't see anything missed. But at our rides I'd see lots of horses vetted. Out there I saw...us. Really saw very few horses during the course of the race. No crowds, just another horse here and there. Hey, here's one...they didn't give me a baggie to keep my ride card in! Gotta have one of those out here but not there apparently. The card was even printed on *paper* (we use heavier stock, cardboard). Guess they're pretty confident nothing's getting wet there. Angie =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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