WOW ABOUT THE HOW!

The recent Horse Owners Workshop held at the Ag Partners Farm Store in Cannon Falls was a huge success! We had approximately 60 people attend! Wow!

It started off with a live demonstration of an Equine Massage by a local expert, Kelly Norman. She did a great job describing what and why she was doing certain things. “Horse massaging” may seem a bit quacky and bit extravagant since most people don’t even pay for a massage for themselves!

But, if we think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense! Let’s think about this, if you were to carry a backpack that weighs 10% of your weight and then start doing the activities we ask our horses to do… first of all, you’d probably cause a good laugh to anyone watching! But you’d probably cause an injury or strain pretty quickly.  Likely the injury would be from being out of shape, poor mechanics, and/or poor balance of the backpack. (Which in this case, is our pretend rider.)

Here are some signs your horse may need a treatment:

  1. Behavioral signs: head tossing, irritability, cinchiness, anxiety
  2. Muscle restrictions or tightness from training, working, rapid growth, and injuries
  3. Lameness you just can’t seem to pinpoint
  4. Poor saddle fit
  5. It’s a new horse and you want to build the trust you have with each other.

Kelly focused on the fascia tissue of the horse, just like we have.

“Fascia is a tough connective tissue which spreads throughout the body in a three dimensional web from head to foot without interruption.  It surrounds and invades every other tissue and organ of the body: including nerves, vessels, muscles, and bones.”

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(The information found in this post has been taken from Kelly’s “Touch of Health” handout dispersed that night.)

Next up was our Equine Expert from Purina, Rachel Mottet! Rachel has her MS in Equine Nutrition and has taught  equine courses, which made for an excellent presentation. Her topic was the “Ins & Outs of Equine Nutrition”.  She had an informational and very interesting PowerPoint describing some of the key steps in equine digestion and where different things are absorbed in the tract. Along the way she pointed out common problems that occur and answered questions as they arose.

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Thanks to Purina, we were able to give away a lot of door prizes and ten people went home with bags of Purina Equine Senior Active. The feedback we’re getting back on this product is GREAT!

*My family actually won a bag and it’s really going over great for our 27 y/o Quarter Horse. He is still able to eat hay but he needs that extra, specially formulated nutrition for his age.

For those that attended, thank you! What were your thoughts? What can we do to improve? What should our next topic be?

-Andrea Rohl

Set up an equine massage by contacting Kelly Norman: (651) 380-6536 or at her website www.touchofhealththerapy.com 

Equine nutrition questions for Rachel:
rsmottet@landolakes.net

And here is a link to the article The Beacon published by our customer, Rosie Schluter! Thanks for the great article!

http://www.cannonfalls.com/main.asp?SectionID=5&SubSectionID=5&ArticleID=25589&TM=45002.49