Yeah, the blankets on top of the cabinet would probably work, maybe with some plastic bags under it. Mine seem to like to sleep on plastic bags. Maybe it traps the heat or something, I don’t know. But hopefully if you start feeding them out there instead of on the porch they’ll start to hang out there.
In other news, I had to take Hope to the vets this morning. The farrier was out yesterday evening to reshoe her and Ellie and he noticed that her left rear leg was swollen from the hock down. I hadn’t even noticed it and I’m sure it wasn’t like that Saturday when we rode, but it was nearly twice the size of the other one and had quite a bit of heat in it. Other than that, the only thing we could see wrong with it was a small cut on the front of the fetlock that was scabbed over and another small scabbed over cut on the inside of the cannon bone on up towards the hock, but nothing that you would think would cause all that swelling. The farrier thought that she poked something in it, but said as far as he could tell it wasn’t still in there. So off to the vet’s we went bright and early this morning to have it seen to. The vet agreed with the farrier about the puncture and that it wasn’t still in there. He said that the swelling was probably cellulitis caused by the infection and gave her a BIG dose of pennecillin and another shot of some kind of steroid to bring the swelling on down. Then he gave me some antibiotic in powder form to put on her feed for a week or so and some probiotics to give every other day to keep her stomach happy. He told me to cold hose it 10 or 15 minutes every day and if it wasn’t significantly better by Thursday to bring her back. But hopefully that won’t be neccessary. And since I was hauling anyways, I took Ellie and got her Coggins drawn and a rabies shot. Fun morning!
Yikes... I sure hope hitting it with all that will clear Ellie’s leg right up. Let us know how it looks after the antibiotics have had a chance to work.