We’ve been getting some much needed moisture, mainly in the form of rain, though snow is predicted for tonight. Unfotunately, with the rain, came a cold front. The horses have had enough warm weather to thoroughly deacclimate, and Lily got cold and started acting colicky yesterday morning. She was fine by the time I got to the boarding barn, where she was standing blanketed in her (comparatively) warm stall.
Here at home, Smoke had also looked cold, shivering slightly. I put a blanket on him, and since I rarely do so, put it on inside out so I couldn’t fasten the straps properly. I removed it to fix the problem, and Smoke evidently decided that if I hadn’t learned to put a blanket on properly by now, he wasn’t going to stick around while I figured it out. (Probably would have helped if I had haltered him first.) By the time I chased him around a bit, I decided it looked as though the exercise had warmed him. He seemed fine the next time I checked him.
I try to use blankets as little as I can, since horses are marvelously well-adapted to the cold, and do much better in extremes of cold than extremes of heat. Blanketing interferes with their adaptation to cold, and can also present risks of rubbing, overheating, or chilling if the blanket gets wet. The coldest horse I ever saw was a Thoroughbred from which I had just removed a wet blanket during a spring storm. I replaced it with my trainer’s New Zealand rug, which are designed to keep the horse warm even when soaked. New Zealand rugs have a waxed canvas covering and a wool liner, and if I lived in a wet climate, I would try to get one for each horse.