[mitchmaine]

thanks grey. the problem for me is after you spend some time bringing a good healthy bidding battle up a couple thousand dollars to stall a couple hundred bucks short, and then get asked if you want to throw in the remaider, i might have just bought the horse out back on the lot, thats all. the point of going to auction for me anyway is the chancfe to buy a horse right. thanks for your reply.

[mitchmaine]

Strange thing happened this year at the auction. Never seen it before.
There has always been a no sale. If you have a minimum bid and don’t mind losing $50 besides the 5% on bid price, you can always take your own horse back home with you. I don’t mind that at all. But this year, the auctioneer started asking the winning bidder(in a no sale) if he wanted to spend the extra to take the horse, and if not, anyone else. ???????????????? its an AUCTION, why don’t they just start at the minimum bid?
The highest bidder is the highest bidder. If the owner doesn’t like the bid, tough luck.
Any one else have feelings about this?

[mitchmaine]

hi john,
penny said you called last week. i was in ohio at a horse sale (5 days). great trip, but sorry i missed your call. sounds like you are getting serious about this move. good deal. glad you are back around. we’ll talk.

[mitchmaine]

hi george,
smoothmouth means 12 years age. older teams are 9, 10 and older. the amish like them up to about then. most of them breed colts for themselves and the auction, so they are getting taller all the time, and i guess that means they are making them suitable to hitch teams as well but that is a guess. your chunks are very hard to find now, though some do come in. mind that i have only experience at this one auction house, been to dover but never waverly or some of the other big sales.
the “hitch commitee” hooks most of the horses the day before their sale so you can look at them and drive them and talk to the owners. they give the health of the animal as they sell nthe horse, but it goes quick and you have to be on your toes. if you find a glaring fault in the barn that the owner didn’t mention, feet, wind or something you can cancel, but once you buy or pay for them they are yours.
a team goes for twice the money meaning you bid on one horse, and if you are successful, you get your choice of either horse or both for twice the money. and you are free to bid on the other horse and maybe get him cheaper but that doesn’t always work. the uncataloged horses never get hooked and come through fast so you don’t get much time to look for nproblems. a quick look at the feet and legs up to the body and eye and your too late they are already gone. they line up outside the barn a few deep and you can talk with the owners a bit and follow a team you like up to the chain and have an auctioneer about six feet away. that works good, but if you have a seat in the barn they come by you pretty fast, and anyone who can actually hear what the auctioneer is saying is better than i. the number he repeats is the bid he is after or asking for, the real bid is less and might be yours. but if you have bid they keep you in view and ask with their hands if you want to continue. lot of fun, and after a few auctions and talking to owners they become familiar and friendly. don’t know what else to say

[mitchmaine]

hi george,
several teams, morgan perch and bel. perch, pretty horses. older teams, though, smooth mouth,$3200 plus per team. i like the crosses, always had good luck with them. lots of horses to choose from. and people too. standing room only on the crossbred day. much less people on thursday and friday.

[mitchmaine]

I think I see a pattern here. We have all been imprinted maybe. I grew up on my grandparents farm, and my granddad died just before I was born. My grandmother rented out the fields to a neighbor, who took off our hay and stored it in our barn for his use and ours. He also moved his team(king and harry) over to our barn to make more room in his for cows. they twitched our wood and made our hay. Other than riding them while they pulled hay up into the loft, I had no interaction with them, and they(horses) were gone by the time i was six, replaced by a tractor, but they(horses) were a strong presence. Enough so I had some as soon as I could. Can’t even imagine life without them.

[mitchmaine]

This is a great thread. Seems like after we have all drawn our line in the sand, there are so many lines its hard to find our own.
After posting the other day about the cruelties of electricity use on horses, it dawned on me that I use electricity every day on my horses when I let them out into the pasture. Electric fences are common and highly visable. Most people don’t think twice about it. Its accepted practice. We even might encourage a colt to brush the fence to get him used to it. Shock collars on dogs are an exceptable method of training most places. So electricity has a place in animal training.
I have a friend who pulls horses and uses the same electric fence charger to keep his horses up in the collars while pulling. A brush on the rump and they stay forward and ready to pull. Same charger, but I bet I might have lost a few folks on that one. his wife and kids can rake hay with the same team. And so on down the line to the end guy who indiscriminately abuses his horses with pain to get them to break a load.
When I was looking for mentors, horse loggers, it was 40 or 50 years ago, and those old men were born before the turn of the other century. 1880’s and 90’s. born before computers and youtube or facebook or electricity or tractors or running water. Or horsewisperers. Their talk would always include some horse that tried their patience or threatened their life, and the story would include a hammer or a pipe or a two by four, but somehow they would settle their differences, and the horse was the best they ever owned and lived twenty years and the wife a kids could rake hay with the horse. These were guys from another time or another planet. No tractors. Couldn’t afford another horse. So the horse went to school, end of discussion. Very straight forward matter of fact men, no excuse, it was what it was. And I get it a little bit better now. Anyway, more thoughts. Keep thinking.

[mitchmaine]

hi george,
i always run the throat latch on my bridals through the cheek ring on the halter and it has (seems) always worked. i have a horse now who can shake a halter and it seems like he always has one ear free. but he hasn’t ever rubbed both off.

[mitchmaine]

hello there and welcome,
i don’t know if you are familiar with maine organic farmers and gardeners assn. up in unity, me. or their low impact forestry program, which has a field day/weekend coming up in november? it is a great place to network with pro and farmer loggers and swap tales, work horses, and bulls*#t. its a great weekend. give it a try.
mitch

[mitchmaine]

@Countymouse 36695 wrote:

Despite the many downsides of competitive pulling, one of the things I like about it is that there aren’t “soft criteria.” If whoever pulls the most weight wins, than there is room to be creative in the use of training techniques, equipment, breeds, mixes, etc. that might be frowned upon in other areas. Being completely free in how you approach a challenge is exciting to people like me, as you can experiment with practices and techniques and see what works best in an objective way. It sometimes makes traditionalists angry, though, because sometimes a nontraditional practice proves to move more weight. Reguardless of this, though, I think the 2nd and 3rd and 4th place pullers move a lot of weight, and don’t really care if someone got a blue ribbon?

hey andy, some of those creative ideas can be a little hard to accept. when i first started buying horses to go into the woods pulling horses were the only option around here. one horse i had would go crazy if you rattled a chain around him, and break out in a sweat. and break your wrist if you tried hooking him to a log.
feeding a 50 pound bag of grain per day, or sweating a couple hundred pounds off a horse with no water and bundled up in horse blankets on a july day to get a 3200 team into the 2900 class, steroids(yup), drenching your horse with water and jabbing him with a electric cattle prod the minute the evener hits the stoneboat gets them to move quick.
excuse me for mentioning these methods, they are cruel. but the lure of a blue ribbon can make a man do extraordinary things. just saying………

[mitchmaine]

hey geoff, dogs get to be like people, especially when they start riding shotgun. sorry for your loss bud

[mitchmaine]

i like what mark said about the rust. my mower doesn’t really start to mow well until the rust on the bottom of the bar has polished itself running on the ground. someday in mid summer when you lift the bar to bolt it up and you can see yourself in the bottom of the guards like a plow after its done a few acres, that is when things start working well for me. also, a flip or two on the foot pedal as your mowing, lifting the bar an inch or two and letting it fall lets matts go sometimes.

[mitchmaine]

hey marshall, just wondering that myself. he was in brit. columbia this summer and phoned us twice and we had great chats. didn’t sound like he was planning on coming over the border tho’. hope he’s good.

[mitchmaine]

george, there is a special section for the end of the knife on our mower conditioner. its a double section (or it has two points). thats the best way i can describe it. it has three rivet holes, but two are standard length, so i have always thought it would attatch to the end of a horse knife. and i have always wondered how it would work on a horse mower. its job is to keep the end from plugging. it runs a little longer than the knife and sticks out through the shoe a little and breaks up the ball of grass that makes in the hole in the shoe. don’t know if it would help you or end up a wild goose chase. but there it is. best wishes, mitch

[mitchmaine]

Peyton, the tools used to move wood, arches, scoots, go devils etc. all provide wide variables. The wood you move and the terrain, and the distance, all variables. Your only constant here in the experiment is your horse(s). so get to know what they will and can give you spread over whatever time frame you want your workday to be. I think horses feel better when they sense when the job will end. If you keep a schedule to break for lunch and quit around the sametime of day with them, they can set a pace of their own. Outside that framework, they can get balky if they can’t sense the “end of the job”. Works the same with mowing and so on. Once they know what is expected of them they can give you quite a days work. Back to twitching, once you get a feel for what your team will/can do, you can better judge the variables like size and specie of wood and distance and so on. Start with a ridiculously light load, and add on till the start to work and back off a little, and when they start to muscle up, work it up again. Corn is the “high octane” of the horse fuel world, but don’t over do it. Good luck there.

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