My journey through life on South Dakota Ranch
I’ve been in colorful Colorado for almost a week now, enjoying myself at my second Buck Brannaman clinic this year!
We got a killer condo- because my mother loves me, and my colt, Dino, is doing really great!
Here’s the teaser photos:
Buck
Cool condo chairs
Dino
I hope everyone else had as great a weekend as I did!
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Several weeks ago (I know, I know, I’m way, way, way, way, way behind in my blogging) I got to go visit most of our yearling to 3yo fillies, who live with a few of our random geldings. It was a beautiful day for photographs, and I’m going to share them with you.
This little package of horses decided they should run away from us first!
Oh well, it made for good photos!
They came around eventually. We rarely make a trip to the pasture without a bucket of oats. And the horses, well they love oats!
She needed a good stretch after all that running!
Pretty ponies and a pretty day; life couldn’t be better.
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I’m coming to you from the Lone Star State this week! I had to make a quick trip down here, which explains a lot of my absence. Not all of it mind you, but part of it, to be sure.
Most readers to this blog know that on the ranch we brand cattle every spring. The cattle here wear a “Lazy 33″ brand on their right hip. But what a lot of you probably don’t know is that horses can be branded too;and we do brand our horses. They wear a “DX” on their right hip. In South Dakota the brands are registered with the State Brand Board but only the livestock that lives west of the Missouri river need be branded.
There are two ways to brand horses:
1. A fire brand- which is the process of using a hot iron, such as we use on calves when we brand them.
2. A freeze brand- which is the process of using a brass branding iron cooled in liquid nitrogen (At atmospheric pressure, liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K (−196 °C; −321 °F) and is a cryogenic fluid which can cause rapid freezing on contact with living tissue, which may lead to frostbite). I must say- liquid nitrogen is just cool!!! Literally and figuratively! You could also use dry ice- but it doesn’t get as cold and can be harder to use.
The difference in fire brands v. freeze brands is very obvious:
A fire brand will burn the hide of the animal so no hair grows back in its place.
A freeze brand just kills the color pigment in the hair follicle. On a lighter colored horse, such as gray, palomino or white (there’s a color blog coming later this week), it can kill the hair altogether. It’s also less painful for the horse.
Freeze branding is a pretty simple process.
Step one: get your branding irons cold! We kept our liquid nitrogen in a sealed container that had previously been used for bull semen storage- from back when they used to artificially inseminate (AI) cattle here. When it came time to use it we placed it in a cheap Styrofoam cooler, covered with a towel. The liquid nitrogen really bubbles and hisses when it gets near a lot of air! We kept a lid on it!
Step two: use some clippers to knock the hair off the hide so you can get closer to the skin.
Step two: spray the newly clipped area with 99% pure, or ethyl alcohol. You don’t want anything less than either of those, because too much water in the alcohol can cause ice crystals to form when you place the cold iron on the horse, and it can ruin the brand. We wiped the excess with a towel and then repeated the process, not wiping the second time we sprayed.
Step three: place the cold iron on the newly shaved area, and apply about 30-40lbs of pressure for about 10 seconds. To kill the hair entirely which you’d want to do on a lighter colored horse, you’d hold it for 15 seconds.
You can see the frost on the handle of the iron in the top right corner of the photo.
If you look carefully you can see the liquid nitrogen turning to gas in this photo:
This is what is the brand looks like when you remove the iron- at first it leaves a depression in the hide:
And about 30 minutes later it swells up and looks like this:
What eventually happens is that the branded area scabs over, the hide falls off, and in a couple months white hair grows in the place of the brand and it looks like this:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we freeze brand our horses here on the ranch.
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In the previous installment, we covered the basic horse colors: Bay, Black, Brown, Sorrel, Chestnut.
Now we’ll delve into some of the more complicated colors. Not that they’re typically hard to distinguish, but they’re more complicated from a genetic standpoint. Here’s what colors we’ll learn: Dun, Buckskin, Red Dun, Grullo, Palomino. We have no shortage of duns, red duns, grullos or palominos around here!
A Dun is basically a diluted bay. That’s the simplest way to say it. The black points of the bay stay, but the base coat is diluted. Dun is believed to be the oldest form of equine coloration, and the original wild color of the domestic horse. It is found in cave paintings, and in other equine species, such as the donkey and the wild ass. Przewalski’s Horse, the last living wild horse population, is exclusively bay dun in color. The Dun dilution gene acts a bit like the cream (gene- discussed below) in that it dilutes pigments, but it acts very differently on different bases. Dun will dilute red pigment slightly to a pale/creamy red color. This gene also creates one or several dun factors, the most common and essential one being the dorsal stripe. All duns have a dorsal stripe (but not all horses with a dorsal are duns).
Our stud horse, WDX Nukem, is a Dun, and as such he makes about 80-90% of his babies dun. If all his babies came out dun, regardless of the color of the mother, we’d call him homozygous, but that’s probably more information that most of you are interested in knowing. However, in order to get a dun, you must have a dun parent.
As an aside- isn’t that a seriously good looking cowboy on that pretty stallion? Oh heck. I don’t care if anyone else in the world thinks he’s good looking. I adore him. And I do find him irresistible, and last I checked, I’m the only one that counts!
Here are some good examples of our dun mares with dun babies at their side.
Palomino is a color that nearly every person who’s ever heard of or seen Roy Rogers, is familiar with because his horse, Trigger, was a palomino. Palominos are simply red horses (chestnuts or sorrels) that have been diluted with what’s known as the “cream” gene. A palomino horse can be as dark as a liver chestnut or as pale as what might be called nearly white. They don’t always end up with black skin, and some are born with lighter colored eyes that never darken. They usually have a nearly white, or cream colored mane and tail- sometimes it’s got silver or gray hairs in it as well.
Buckskin is also a diluted bay. Again, diluted with the “cream” gene.
Here’s a good example of a Buckskin mare with her palomino colt.
A red dun is a chestnut horse that’s diluted with the dun gene. In order to really see the difference in the yellow colt above, and the dun filly below, you have to look at the main undertone- the yellow colt has no red in his coat.
You can see that this filly has the dorsal stripe and if we could see her legs we’d see the tiger striping there as well. She’s more apricot in color, but they can be nearly as red as a sorrel colored horse (from part one).
A grulla horse, is essentially a horse that would have otherwise been black- again diluted with the dun gene. They’re very mousy in color, and can range from silver to very dark. This is the rarest of the dun colors. We have two grulla horses in our string. Our stud, Silver Bueno Tom while he is bay, he carries what is called the “sooty” gene- it mimicks dun by providing a dorsal strip, but no leg striping. When we cross him on our dun mares, we’ve gotten these grullas. You must have the dun gene passed on from one parent. So you theoretically shouldn’t get a dun from a bay daddy and a sorrel mare. But you could from a bay daddy and a dun mare. Confused yet?
Here’s a photo of one of our two Grullas:
I apologize for the delay in this information. My computer loves me again, thanks to Zach’s younger brother.
Happy Thursday!
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This is has been a summer of firsts here for the kids.
Nine year old Ty has been doing a lot more riding this summer. So much more that he even had his first ride in the pasture to help us move cows a few weeks ago. He rode his sister’s steady mount, Pommel.
He has also spent plenty of time riding the cutest pony ever, Lil Banjo. Who bucked him off this summer. His face when that happened was absolutely priceless. It was more excitement than fear. Oh to be young again!
And he’s started his first colt- Orphan George, who’s registered as DX Gorgeous Georges. If had I had the energy, I’d show you picture of the two of them, but my fuel level is on empty right now. For now if you want to see what he looked like as a baby, here you go.
Since his first ride out in the pasture, he and Kelsey have taken a couple rides together. The other day I was able to capture them riding together on film. Enjoying the day, and the company of each other. Kelsey is riding her horse Hope, and Ty is riding, Kelsey’s horse, Pommel.
Those two are so close; it’s really nice to see how much they love each other.
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Please be patient with me. I’m having a world of computer problems this week; in fact I’m coming to you live, from the cowboy’s computer because mine is, well, quite ill. Which isn’t good because my life is on that computer. I have so many photos and stories to share, and the rest of the color blogs that’s I’ve begun to write, are DOA until I have access to all my photos again.
I miss you all and hope to be back soon.
Just when I think the days can’t get any more beautiful, and the colts couldn’t possibly be any prettier, and that my photography couldn’t possibly get any better, a couple weeks ago I had one of the best days behind a camera. Ever. I am undoubtedly one of the most blessed people on the planet. I’m going to let the photos do the talking. There’s more photos coming soon, but know that these are among my favorite! You can click on the first photo, and go through a slide show that way, in case you’re new to these parts. The cute little colts you see scratching and rubbing noses are apparently buddies. They were roughhousing with each other that day. I just wasn’t fast enough to catch any of it.
Happy Sunday!
I realize that a lot of people who read my blog don’t know the difference between sorrel and chestnut, or brown and bay- a horse is just a horse to them. So I figured, since we have a horse of just about every color here on the ranch, this is a great excuse to show off some of our pretty horses, and educate my readers on some horse terminology too! Bang! Two birds, with one stone! Ok. Maybe I am just a little too excited about this!
First, the American Quarter Horse Association, which is the breed registry that most of our horses belong to, officially recognizes 17 colors. Bay, Black, Brown, Sorrel, Chestnut, Dun, Buckskin, Red Dun, Grullo, Palomino, Gray, Red Roan, Blue Roan, Bay Roan, Cremello, Perlino, White. Of the colors listed, the three that we don’t currently have here on the ranch, are Cremello, Perlino and White.
We’ll start first with Bay. It’s an easily distinguishable color, as the base color is red based while the legs, mane and tail are black.
This is one of our 4 studs, Chachi. Three of our 4 studs are bays.
Next is Black- quite self explanatory, though it’s often confused with brown. The difference is, that a black horse has black points- and while they may fade in the sun, their nose will always be black, whereas a brown horse will have lighter points- at the nose, the flank, and often the ears.
Notice how black these colts noses are? There is some sun fade through their flanks, but these are some BLACK colts.
Now, a good picture of a brown horse, one of our stud prospects, DX Tabasco Tivio, aka Cisco; I’m sure you’ll be able to see the difference straightaway!
You can see that he’s not really red enough to be considered bay, and he’s not black enough to be black. So he’s brown.
Sorrel is a simple color to distinguish. People often call a sorrel horse, a red horse. There are several shades of sorrel. This and bay are the most common horse colors.
Here is DX Toots Zee Pop, aka Gidget.
The last color we’ll cover in this post is Chestnut. Genetically it’s the exact same as sorrel, but it manifests itself in a different way. Both my horse Gump and his little brother, Dino are Chestnuts. Next to black, it’s my favorite horse color!
DX Jurassic Classic, aka Dino:
And because I can’t leave him out:
Dx Gump
In the next color installment, we’ll cover the following colors:
Dun, Buckskin, Red Dun, Grullo, Palomino.
Happy Thursday!
XO
