Bloomfield, NM

As promised, here are pictures from our adventure to town today. We headed up to Bloomfield, NM to help out the government agencies (BLM and Forest Service) process the new mustangs. All the boys (except babies) had to be gelded, and everybody needed to get age estimated, dewormed, vaccinated, branded, and tested for Equine Infectious Anemia (commonly known as a Coggins test).

Age Estimation
Estimating a horse's age is sort of a fine art. Especially when you're dealing with wild mustangs that REALLY don't want to have anything to do with you, let alone have you sticking your fingers in his mouth to look at his teeth! Their teeth come in and change from baby to adult teeth at different ages (adult teeth come in around 3 years of age) and as they get older, the teeth sort of change shape as they get worn down.

Here's the chart they had handy. Of course the vet wasn't referencing it though!

Here's a picture of the crew working on gelding a mustang. I took a picture of the removed parts, but decided against posting that here for the more squeamish...

Chuny was Dr. Heidke's tech and everybody else was in charge of holding the horse in place. It was interesting to hear about the different veterinarians' preferred positioning of the horse for a gelding. Dr. Heidke likes her patients on their backs.

This is the set-up they had out at the facility.

It wasn't the most ideal, but it got the job done. There was a short funnel before the working chute, but it was such a drastic change that the horses would shove themselves through 2 at a time and we ran into that issue a couple of times. Now if only they would take something from Temple Grandin's facility designs...

And finally the question of the day...why isn't this horse a buckskin?