Horse Pics!

Just a couple of horsey photos from my trip to Alaska. Unfortunately, the zoom on my camera is a little bit weak, but it was great to see people out exercising their horses on the beach. One horse had a rider, one was being exercised at liberty, and there was a pony on a lead rope, too (not shown).

Want to learn more about exercising your horse at liberty? Check out Alice Trindle's upcoming Beyond the Basics column in November.

And one last horseless photo, just because it's pretty scenery.

Site Tour: New! Site Search

As we continue to upgrade our new website, new features are added. We now offer a full site search that allows you to search all categories of the new website and our old archives in one search! You'll find a box that looks like the one below in the sidebar on each page of the new site. Go ahead, try it out.

Health Alert: Equine Pigeon Fever in Colorado

Click the link below to read Colorado State University's special report on increased cases of pigeon fever among Colorado horses:

http://www.completerider.com/ucolorado/PIGEONFEVERINEQUINES.html

Keep your equine friends safe!

Back from the wilds of Alaska

I hope you enjoyed the National Geographic videos from our recent posts. I have to admit that they were a bit of a time-filler, as I was on vacation, visiting some family members, over the last few posting times. Now I'm back from Homer, Alaska (with stops in Anchorage, Soldotna, and Kenai) and I was hoping to have some moose photos to post here. I know, moose aren't a part of the equine family, but I thought they'd be a fun tangent. Sadly, they were all in hiding and I didn't even see one off in the distance. I did see a small family of caribou outside the city of Kenai, and the nose of a Beluga whale poking out of the water along the way down the peninsula. Then there was an otter in Homer, many species of birds, and the insects I tried to ignore (only added one mosquito bite to the current collection--hooray!).

What does this have to do with horses? Not a thing (although I did see a few of those around, including people who were exercising 2 horses and a pony at the beach on a rare sunny day) but I think that horse people appreciate the broad spectrum of wildlife (flies notwithstanding) and it's always nice to go to a new place and see the animals in their natural habitat.

I highly recommend that if you get a chance to travel out of your home area, you take it. On previous trips to Alaska, I've seen bears (from a distance!) and moose and elk, foxes that have no fear of planes, baby bald eagles, and a wide variety of sea and tidepool life that is hard to find elsewhere. I've sat just a few yards away from swimming otters and eaten surprisingly good stew made from halibut and kelp.

Travel is good not only for seeing new things, but for giving you an appreciation of home and all that it has to offer. I'm grateful to be back amongst the Washington firs and ferns, waving at the deer and coyotes as I drive by, and giving my own critters the attention that they missed.

I hope all of you get the opportunity to travel, not only through our beautiful Pacific Northwest, but as far as your imagination may take you.

Site Tour: Go to the Polls

The next stop on our continuing site tour: Northwest Horse Source polls. We have three of these little gizmos on the site: one on the home page just below the introductory text, one on the sidebar in the News section, and one in the sidebar here in the Blog section.

Each Monday, these polls are updated (usually by noon), with the old information taken down and the new poll placed. Voting is easy! Just select your answer and click the "vote" button. If you'd like to see other people's votes before casting your own, click the "show results" text link.

Once you've voted, the poll will automatically show you the current results any time you log onto the site.

Quick tip: if you see square boxes beside the poll answers, you are allowed to select more than one. If you see round "radio buttons," the poll will only allow one answer per voter.

Our polls serve a variety of purposes. We hope they're fun for you, and we love getting your feedback. We also use them to learn more about our readers so we can continually improve the magazine and the website. Have something to tell us and don't want to wait for it to come up in a poll? Email us or use the suggestion box near the bottom of each page, in the sidebar.

More National Geographic Video Fun

One more video, just to include a broader equine range...plus, zebras are always fun, and zebra foals are even more so!

Wild Horse Video

Here's an interesting video from National Geographic about a Northwest wild horse preserve. Please be patient with the advertising, as it is how NG supports the ability to bring us these videos.

Enjoy...

NWHS Site Tour Continues...

Have you noticed our Photo of the Week contest?

Each week, NWHS posts a photo submitted by a reader here on The Cyber Saddle. Just email your photo to us in jpg format, and each week we will select one photo to post on the site. Photos can be any member of the equine family--horses, mules, donkeys, zebras...we might even post a camel or two!

Want to see this week's photo? Just check out the sidebar and scroll down.

Let the world see what your equine friend are up to! This week's photo comes from Christine Caples of Washington. Thanks, Christine!

Safe Feeding

We occasionally receive articles from other horse organizations, and while many of those go up on our news pages, there are a few I like to highlight here because I think they deserve a little extra attention.

Those of you who get our newsletter may have read the previous article from safegrass.org, but I wanted to post this one here with free access for all.

I'll now turn this blog over to Ms. Watts...

"Is Old Hay Better for Horses with Laminitis?"
by Kathryn Watts
Copyright 2008, Rocky Mtn Research & Consulting, Inc.

As I travel around the world, learning and teaching people about feeding horses with laminitis, I keep hearing a recommendation that has never made sense. People say that leaving hay in a shed for a year renders it ‘safe’ for horses with laminitis. You will commonly hear cattle producers say that the nutrient content of hay changes after ‘going through the sweating period’. This is true in a certain context, but the changes that occur happen in the first month, and only apply to hay baled above 20% moisture.

To continue reading, go to: http://www.safergrass.org/articles/old_hay.htm

If you would like to sign up for our newsletter to receive updates, horsekeeping tips, and other articles like this one twice a month, click here use our newsletter signup form!

Site Tour: Accessing the Event Calendar

As promised, here are a few more tips and tricks for exploring the new NWHS website.

Two ways to get to the events calendar

Did you know that you have options when it comes to finding events or posting your own? Our actual calendar is still hosted on our old server, so it operates exactly the same way as it always has, but now you can access it in a couple of ways.

From the Home page, you can find a text link under Learn More in the upper right section of the page. Or, from any page on the new site, look for the image at left in the right hand sidebar.

Now you'll never lack for something to do!

As always, you can find a printed version of the events calendar as the "What's Happening" column in the magazine. Remember to post your event online by the 5th of the month to have your event included in the next month's issue.

Need help using our new site, or do you just want to learn more about the features? Look for the help button near the top of every page.

RSS Coming Soon

As part of the new Northwest Horse Source online presence, we will be setting up RSS feeds for the articles, blog, and news sections of the site very soon. We're getting the "help" functions in place first so if you have questions or problems, they'll be easy to solve.

Response to our RSS poll was pretty evenly split among those who wanted a feed, those who didn't, and those who weren't sure what RSS was. We decided to offer the option because it won't affect those who don't want to participate. For those who don't know what RSS is, here's the nutshell version:

RSS, commonly defined as Really Simple Syndication (there are other definitions, such as Rich Site Summary), allows you to set up a link so you get any updates to our site delivered to your favorite reader. Every time we post a new article, if you have the article RSS feed set up, you will receive notification and a direct link to the full article text. You can choose where the feed is sent--usually to a feed reader that can appear on your home page or in certain email programs. It's an easy way to keep up to date with the latest news and happenings at NWHS without having to check the website frequently.

If you'd like a more detailed description of what RSS is and how it works, check out the definition on Wikipedia.

Horse Laws and You

Whether you run and equine business or own horses purely for your own enjoyment, you may have run across some legal issues that you weren't sure how to deal with. A lawyer who runs a general practice can be helpful for advice, but finding an expert in the field of equine law can be extremely beneficial. Rachel Kosmal McCart offers articles with free equine advice on her business website for Equine Legal Solutions. You can learn about such issues as the legal way to give away a horse, how to successfully host an equine event, and even horse related traffic tips.

Go ahead, explore her links and learn. And let her know you saw it at the Northwest Horse Source.

Who's Watching NWHS

I hope you all had a fantastic Labor Day weekend, and that those of you who followed us on LiveJournal have managed to make the leap over here.

We're still working out a few kinks and bugs on the new website network, but would love your input on what works and what doesn't. You are welcome to contact us (contact info is at the bottom of the page, or use the suggestion box near the bottom of the sidebar) with feedback and ideas.

For the next several weeks, I'd like to take you on a tour of the new site features. Let's begin with a little map you may have noticed in the sidebar of the Articles and News pages called the FEEDJIT map.

What's a Feedjit?

A Feedjit map tells you who has been visiting that section of the site today. It updates frequently, and if you click the map, you get a larger view that you can scroll around and check to see what people in different areas are reading. It will also show you the most popular pages that day.

So far, after only two days of having the new site live, we've had visits from all over the US, several Canadian cities, as well as a couple of visits from the United Kingdom and Honduras.

Want to see who's looking at us right now? Go to the Articles or News section and scroll down until you see the Feedjit map in the sidebar. Click and explore!