What now!

As I approached Dexter to halter him this afternoon, he seemed a bit spooky. He really did not want me to put his halter on and I struggled to get him to allow it. I thought "Hmm.. this is an odd setback, what the heck is the deal today?"

He was a bit jumpy, he was throwing his head up in the air, being overly flighty and sensitive in the face when I was leading him out of the stall and working him around in the barn isle. Since I dont have an arena or round pen, most of my work with him is in the isle or out in his corral, but its much nicer in the isle because the bugs dont seem to come into the wide open barn space, but they sure can get nasty and gross in the pasture and corral. So anyways, I was working on desensitizing Dexter with a plastic baggy on the end of a stick basically, he was doing okay, but I still was perplexed at how jumpy and sensitive he was on the leadrope.

As I worked on his left side for about 5 minutes, I decided to now work his right side. And after a few circles around me, I noticed something not quite right about his face.. It looked a bit odd, so I stopped him and immediately felt sick that I had not taken a few seconds to stop and wonder why he had been so sensitive and unwilling to be haltered. No, I just put him to work.. Poor kid had a huge cut/chunk of missing hair and skin on his face, just under the damn halter buckle! NO WONDER he was so sensitive, that halter was touching up against raw flesh..

Yes yes, very gross details, but thats what it is.. just a huge (bigger than the halter buckle) area, clean edge chunk missing from his face. I called out Derek to come help me, took the halter off immediately and just used a rope around his neck. We searched that stall and corral and found zero evidence of what might have happened, so maybe I am left to believe one of the other horses bit him?? I really have no idea, its big enough that the chunk missing should be somewhere.. mystery may never be solved.

We opted not to call in backup (the vet) because he was eating normal and it doesnt appear he broke anything. It certainly was painful for him, we had to really fight him to doctor it, flushed it with some irrigation solution and then spent another 5 minutes fighting him to try to get him to stand still long enough to goop it up to keep bugs out and infection away. That was not working, I finally told Derek to grab ahold of his ear and twist as hard as he could.. Well that worked! Finally I was able to even touch his face to get the goop on him. Poor poor kid..

So it's a minor setback as I will be unable to halter him for a week or two. It will need lots of time to heal and scab over before I can let anything put pressure on it like a halter. Which is OK I guess, he will learn how to be led and handled with a rope around his neck I guess! :) Unfortunately I think we will have to continue to "man-handle" him via ear twisting to doctor him up... for a stallion, he's sure acting like a sissy!