We Learn What Comfort Care Really Means

A 40-year-old horse teaches you fast that the goal is not perfection, it’s comfort. Up on our off-grid mountain ranch at 9,300 feet in the Colorado Rockies, we walk through how we’re supporting Merlin as he ages, what his daily routine looks like right now, and why we keep adjusting feeding without losing the structure that helps him thrive. We talk about grain four times a day, hay access, and the small hands-on moments that matter most, from scratches and massage to watching how he socializes with the rest of the herd.

We also rewind to a deeper, tougher story: Santi’s decline and the kind of extreme care that can come with late-stage equine health issues. We share what it was like managing sores, hygiene, and comfort day after day, plus what we learned when a prescribed medication led to a sharp downturn in her appetite, interest, and weight. If you care for horses, especially senior horses, this is a real-world look at observation, risk, and the constant balance between doing something and doing the right thing.

Then we answer a listener question we think about all the time: how do we keep our sanity while caring for animals off-grid? We get honest about exhaustion, mood, and how animals pick up on stress, along with the practices that help us stay grounded, like breathing exercises, yoga, eating in a way that supports stable energy, and making time for connection.

And because it’s mountain life, we end with a surprise visit from our wild bear, who outsmarted the trash setup and even opened truck doors. If you’ve ever wondered who’s really the guest in bear country, you’ll relate. Subscribe, share this with a fellow horse person, and leave a review so more listeners can find Off-Grid With Horses. 

Transcript

Welcome To Life Off-Grid

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello and welcome to another edition of Off-Grid with Horses. I'm Russell.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

And I'm Alex. Russell and I are going to share two life adventures of our lives with horses on our Colorado mountain ridge.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

We live way off grid at 9,300 feet above sea level, high in the Colorado Rockies.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Where the air is thin.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

But the breathing is easy.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

And life is hard.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

But the living is good.

Summer Finally Reaches The Ridge

SPEAKER_01 0:43

That's the date that we are recording this. And summer is finally here. It has been snowing until the last three weeks or so. It's still in the upper 30s sometimes at night, but most of the time it cools down to the 40s,

Merlin’s Comfort Care Routine

SPEAKER_01 1:00

and we're in the 70s. If it gets in the upper 70s, that's a real scorcher up here. We're enjoying the summer and things are going well. Last time we spoke, Merlin was doing okay, and he's still doing pretty well. So, Alex, why don't you give us an update on what's happening with Merlin?

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Well, Merlin is doing well. He is aging. He's 40 years old. And so the things that have happened to him and that are wrong with him aren't really something that is going to repair. And so I and we are doing everything that we can to be able to help him enjoy his life. And right now, what that means is he's getting grains four times a day, and he's getting massages or scratches four times a day, and is thoroughly enjoying his time when he has moments with the humans. He also really likes hanging out with all the other horses. Fern pushes him around. That's his penmate. I don't know that she really cares for him all that much, but she she pushes him around and that's okay. She likes to clean up his grain when he's done with it. Sa Karma is right there next to him in the next pen over, and he likes to make faces at her and throw his head around and scream. And then the boys, Shaman and Bear, are right over on the other side, and he likes to make faces at them and play with them and pretend he hates them, but I don't think he really does.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

And he got a haircut recently, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

He did in order to, in the hopes of being able to help him feel better and in the hopes of being able to see better what's going on close to his skin. I shaved his belly and under his armpits and up under his neck. And he seems to be doing great with having a little bit more airflow, and he's getting some regular coconut oil treatment, regular, maybe like twice a week fly spray. And that's helping him to be comfortable and happy so that he has the least amount of stress that he can possibly have in his life.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

And how is his diet? When we were here last, you were talking about his special diet and what you do for him for feeding. So how how's that going?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

His diet is good. I've just been experimenting with it again to see if I can make any changes that might make it easier for people who are taking care of him, myself and you and everybody else who we might have helping care for him. And that's again, does not seem as though it has worked, but we shall see. I will continue to experiment. Uh, right now he is still at getting uh grains four times a day and has access to hay 24-7.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

And you were doing it five times a day. Why did you cut back?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Well, he seemed to be not finishing the complete amount of his grain and each time, just a little bit, and that added up to almost a whole feeding. And so, in the interest of not being wasteful and trying to meet him where he is at, I cut back on the number of feedings and kept the amount of each feeding the same, and now he's not wasting so much.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

And you've been around horses the majority of your life. Have you had other horses that you've had to care for in an extreme way, like you're doing with Merlin?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Actually, we

Santi’s Decline And Hard Lessons

SPEAKER_00 4:30

have in more occasions than I actually even remember on a normal day-to-day kind of day.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Why don't you tell us about Santi?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

SAunty was the first horse I had in my new herd, and my new herd would be like my herd that I had have had as an adult. And she was an Appaloosa. She was given to me by my attorney that I worked for. I was a paralegal years and years and years ago. And she was a gift for a whole bunch of reasons, and I got her at 10 months old and loved her a bunch. She had really issues from day one. She thought she was tougher than the average little baby horse, and so she tried to bully other horses, and they beat her up and sent her to the vet. And other people thought she was pretty, and they ended up hurting her and sending her to the vet, even though she was mine and not theirs. She ended up escaping one time and managing, she was just, she was up at 10 miles out at the top of a trail ride, and she tossed her head somehow and broke her harness and departed at high speed, and she ended up hurting herself. And so I'd ridden her a lot. That was when she's about 10 or 12, and after that, she went into decline. On towards the end of her life, she lived to be 21. And that was what, four years ago or something like that, I think. On towards the end of her life, she had issues in her spine. It seemed like some things were happening, calcifications, could have been a stenosis of one sort or another, were beginning to impinge on certain nerves that were causing her to start to not be able to control her bladder. And so what that ended up turning into was sores all down her leg from her tail all the way down on both sides that were red, inflamed, blistering sometimes because of the uric acid. I ended up for years of the end of her life having to wash her with soap and water every day or every day that I could, and put on either Vaseline or diaper ointment so that she would be able to be comfortable even though she was having these problems in her body.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

What happened towards the end of her life?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

She just I guess the calcifications just continued to grow and the impingements became more severe and everything just became more severe. You know, I love Western stuff, and I'm not talking about horseback riding, but like Western medicine and Western mythology and Western psychology, you know. But a lot of times, both in medicine and in veterinary care, people just try things and hope that maybe they work without any kind of care and any kind of testing. And they prescribed a certain thing for her, and she ended up taking an extremely sharp down turn in her health. She lost like all her interests. She like stopped wanting to eat, she stopped wanting to walk around, she stopped wanting to interact with the other horses. For about three or four days before I pulled her off of the meds, she lost hundreds of pounds. And so I began to try to help her gain that weight back once we'd stopped the uh once we were able to get her appetite back. And so I was feeding her a weight gain grain mash seven, eight times a day, as many times as I could. She had lost so much weight, she couldn't

Staying Sane While Caring Daily

SPEAKER_00 8:23

eat very large amounts anymore. And so she would just get little small amounts as as much as I could give her multiple times throughout the day.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

We had a comment from a listener that was asking about how does all of this stuff that we do up here at this location, which is you know high elevation, way off grid, difficult life, when you're taking care of the horses and getting up early and doing all of this, how does that affect you? What do you do to keep your sanity? That's assuming I have sanity still.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

It affects me. I get very tired. Sometimes if I don't get enough rest, I get short-tempered, which affects everybody around me, including the animals, because they can feel the vibration when I get upset or if I'm raising my voice. It's it's a rough life. You know, this is nothing like the the homesteaders who originally lived on this land, well, not originally, but who lived in the homes on this land before we did. It's not hard like that, but it's still really hard. You know, even though we have uh electronics and and Wi-Fi and you know, electric stuff so that we can pump the water out of the well without having to do it by hand, it's still so hard. And if sometimes you don't have time to eat and sometimes you don't have time to sleep, that's that's just how it is. And to try to help keep anybody else from suffering from m my stress and being drained, I try to, you know, of course I do yoga yoga with the horses, and I do breathing exercises so that I can try to keep my brain from being starved of oxygen and I can make be able to make good decisions when I need to. And I try to eat well, I try to eat less meat than more just because I seem to be a happier person when I do that. Having time to myself and having time with the animals and having time with other people like you, Russell, really does a lot of times make the difference. All kinds of different

The Bear Breaks Into The Trucks

SPEAKER_00 10:39

different ways that on different days that help to be able to keep from uh going down the rabbit hole, as it were.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

I've noticed up here that every day something happens. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's difficult to plan because every day something happens that messes things up. This morning, when Alex got up, she went out to the living room and looked out the window, and I heard her say, Oh no. And she said something else, I can't remember what it was, but it wasn't positive. And so I got up right away and ran out and said, What's going on? What's wrong? And I usually figure something with a horse or something had happened. And our neighborhood bear was giving us a visit. I I've put a fence charger on our trash can, but he managed to knock the trash can over. So he was chowing down. And our bear is he's big and he's a little bit smarter than I actually thought that he was. He actually impressed me this morning because our bear knows how to open car doors. We didn't know that till this morning, but when we looked out, I have a little pickup. Three of the four doors were open, and when we went out and looked in the pickup, it was pretty clear that he had crawled inside the truck. I don't know what he did in there. He didn't destroy anything, but he had definitely been inside. There were paw prints in the in the truck on the seat. There was drool on the seat, so he saw something in there that he liked, and but he didn't destroy anything. He he he crawled back out and then apparently went over to Alex's truck and opened her door and crawled inside of it as well. In Alex's truck, he found Alex's purse, which was far more interesting than anything in my truck. And he he pulled it out and turned it upside down, and looks like he shook it and threw everything that was in the purse on the ground. And then when he after he had done that, he went back to the trash can and was sitting down, and Alex walked out and walked on the deck and yelled at him, and he took off, which was good. We saw him a few days ago, and our friend Bob was here, and Bob and I yelled at him, and it didn't faze him at all. He just kept doing what he was doing and completely ignored us. But Alex, he saw that Alex was a force to be reckoned with, I guess. And so he he took off. He's not a mean bear, he's just being a bear, and we need to figure out a way we have a quote unquote bear-proof trash can, but uh this guy's just too smart for a bear-proof trash can. He figures out how to open them and he he still gets in them, but he's just being a bear, and we figure that his family at least was here before we were. So we were talking this morning, and we're not sure if he is our guest or we are his guest,

Closing Thoughts And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_01 13:54

but we'll figure out how to keep him from destroying the trash. It's not good for a bear to get in the trash, they get into habits of that, and that that can be really anyway. We are running out of time, and so until next time, I am Russell and I'm Alex, and we're here at Off Grid with Horses. We'd love to hear from you. Contact us at info at offgridwithhorses.com. Let us know what you think. Let us know any ideas, any suggestions you'd like, anything you'd like to hear for other episodes. Also, we have guests up here very frequently. If you'd like to come up and visit, send us a text or an email, and we'll see if we can put something together. It's offgridwithhorses at info at offgridwithhorses.com.