Herbs and Medicinal Riding

·5-7-08
Brenda visited our house today with her new horse, Affie. We put her horse in the pasture to get acquainted with our horses who were contained in the barn lot. There was much neighing and posturing.
· Meanwhile, we went off to a meeting on herbs, Brenda’s reason for being in town. I’m not convinced to go au naturel yet, though I heard mucho praises sung about herbs whose names were totally unfamiliar to me. Perhaps some of them are worthwhile. Also mentioned were common herbs like rosemary. I think that and other Italian type seasonings are purported to be good for staving off colds.
· I wonder, with the FDA doing practically nothing to monitor big name drugs, who, if anyone, is monitoring the herbal industry? It’s a mystery. Also, with drug companies paying for their own studies and putting out suspect “facts” cherry-picked from those “studies”, can we expect that herbalists’ conclusions are any more honest or scientifically accurate? Just a little food for thought.
· Point of interest: The lecturer highly praised eating crushed raw garlic cloves as a prevention for the onset of pneumonia. I’m thinking that if I were a pneumococcus and came onto garlic breath of that magnitude, I would, indeed, run the other way.
· I’m not saying there’s nothing to these herbal cures. I’m just saying, how do we really know? And that also goes for modern medicine’s pharmacology.
· After the noon lecture, we returned to the house in hopes of going for a horseback ride. About the time we arrived, the wind picked up, dust was blowing in the air, the sky was dark. In general, it looked like the gods were angry. However, we decided Brenda had trailered her horse 40 miles to do a ride, and we were going to do one, cooperative gods or no.
· The wind settled down a little in response to our decision. We went out to fetch the horses. At first, Affie didn’t want to be caught. He was having way too much fun running around in the pasture. Boss was galloping around in response to Affie’s excitement, preventing Mischief from coming up for a treat. Finally got Boss penned up in the bull pen corral and caught the other two. Boss was disturbed at being left alone. He neighed loudly from his enclosure as Mischief and Affie went off to the trailer.
· We drove to the Cedars, a few miles west of our house and had a nice hour’s ride, blessedly uneventful. As Steve always says, if no one got jobbed in the dirt, we’ve had success.