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Wild Parsnip—Who Knew!

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A friend of mine posted this information about the Wild Parsnip plant today on my Facebook feed. I have seen this plant many times but never knew it could cause such a violent skin reaction, let alone kill a horse. – Linda P Wild Parsnip (or Water Hemlock) Wild parsnip or water hemlock is one of the most deadly of poisonous plants that grow in the fields or open range country. In Colorado it is usually found growing on ditch banks or in meadows. The common garden parsnip, as well as the cow parsnip, are related but quite different plants and are not dangerous to livestock. When a garden parsnip escapes from cultivation and grows wild it does not become poisonous. All parts of the plant are poisonous but more especially the root stalks The poison is a resin known as toxin. The root and stem of one plant will kill a horse in an hour. After a horse has eaten wild parsnip he will manifest symptoms of violent colic within a few minutes. He soon develops symptoms of cerebral frenzy, saliva flows from the mouth, the pupils are wildly dilated and the breathing is labored. The poison in wild parsnip js rapid in its action that any remedy to be effected must be given promptly. In an animal that can vomit an emetic should be given without delay. Morphine to relieve the terrible pain and melted lard or some other fatly substance may be given. It is doubtful whether permanganate of potash would be effective in […]

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Is Your Horse in a Good Mood? See if It Snorts.

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My horse, Abanico, snorts and talks quite a bit. I found this article forwarded to me by my dear friend Mary Cook quite enlightening! I hope you find it as well—Linda P Published in the New Your Times By Karen Weintraub July 11, 2018 Photo Credit: Miguel Vidal/Reuters No one can talk to a horse, of course. But a new study set out to find whether horses are trying to tell us something when they snort. In the study, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers in France determined that the snorting exhale that horses often make may be a sign of a positive emotion. Mathilde Stomp, a doctoral student at the University of Rennes who led the research, said she set out to understand whether the snort could be used as an measure of the horse’s mood. She and her collaborators recorded 560 snorts among 48 privately owned and riding school horses. All the horses snorted — as little as once or as often as 13 times an hour. The horses mainly snorted during calm and relaxing activities, and those that spent more time out of doors snorted the most, the study found.

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The Curious History of Horses in North America

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Caption: Fossilized horse teeth—a molar and an incisor with some enamel remaining—from approximately 13 million years ago  (made you look!) Serendipity struck while I was doing research on the limber pines at Pawnee Buttes, near the junction of the boundaries of CO, NB and WY. While on a break, I found shade and a soft seat on a pile of sand eroded from a tall cliff. I was sifting the soft sediment with my left hand when my fingers encountered something hard just below the surface. I extracted it and found myself staring at a fossilized tooth, an incisor that retained some of its enamel. A few minutes later I found a molar. These were from an ancestor of modern horses that lived 13 million years ago (mya). My lucky find of fossil teeth reminded me that horses were native to North America (NA), but their history has some intriguing twists and turns during their migration around the world. The family Equidae, which includes horses, zebras and asses, evolved in NA during the Eocene Epoch, 54 mya. The genus Equus, including the horse, Equus ferus, evolved during the Pliocene, between 4.5 and 4.0 mya in NA. During glacial periods, accumulation of ice on land lowered sea level to the point that an enormous expanse of land called Beringia connected current day Siberia and Alaska. Approximately 4 mya horses spread across NA and some populations migrated across Beringia to Asia and then to Europe. As recently as the Pleistocene Epoch (2.5 mya to 11,700 ya) the family Equidae

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