The SafeChoice Choice

FarmWife has decided—yippee!—that I need more condition, which is not to say more weight, but rather more muscle and more nutrition. Grass hay alone isn't cutting it, and with the green grass gone and the colder weather setting in I've been looking a little light in the topline. The good news is that I now get some supplements in addition to the grass hay and salt block to which I am accustomed! These things are delicious, and I am immensely pleased with this turn of events. The bad news is that I am also supposed to be subject to regular exercise, especially now that my hock seems quite well. For now, under pressure of short days and bad weather, this exercise is limited to a little longing and short walks around the neighborhood. In the summer, FarmWife hopes that this exercise will include brave expeditions into the wild yonder.

Nutrena SafeChoice has always seemed like a . . . well, a safe choice—it is fairly low in sugar, and better for we easy keepers than a high-starch, sweetened concentrate. FarmWife used to feed SafeChoice to her easy keepers when they needed more cool calories back when SafeChoice was new and highly esteemed on the horse feed market.

Last month, she went to the feed store and encountered Original SafeChoice, Special Care SafeChoice, and Perform SafeChoice. "I want the kind that I used to feed when there was only one kind," she said. "Oh," said the clerk. "You want the Special Care SafeChoice. That's the original Original." Apparently the new Original has corn, which isn't at all what FarmWife had in mind for her easy-keepers! You humans and your taxonomies are still a little bit baffling to me, but at least clear answers can be found on the nutrition panels. (The exception to this is when the nutrition panel on a human menu item lists the values for one half or one third of a ready-to-eat thing, as though you would actually eat the thing as three separate servings spread across three days. That's just silly. Who eats half a soup cup?)

Now, I eat pellets for breakfast AND I eat three hay meals a day (small ones, but a mule takes what he can get). What a lucky fellow I am. Etty, who is a wee bit fluffier than me, gets pellets too: about forty of them. Although they're small, so is she.

FB