Ollie at his "Nose-It!" bin.	Lorna's re-purposed firewood bin holds two "Nose-It!"s.

The Long-Ear Report Well, I am feeling very superior, for now. My mule, Humphrey, has now decided that it is not totally beneath him to be knocking cubes out of a strange looking contraption,with his nose. Only took a week. Any of you with mules will know why I feel superior. For now. At first he would use it only when I wasn't around. But I have a 2-way device in the bedroom which lets me hear what he is doing at night. And he definitely has been using the N-I at night. He will even use it in his stall now. And the others all think it is great. I'm really hoping I can use 1 or 2 as an overnight feed dispenser in the stalls for the guys who will want to stay in at night over the winter. That's my blind horse, for sure, and his buddy for company (but who really would be ok outside, and can eat hay), and 29-year-old half-blind Ollie, who decided by January last year that he's had enough of out- at-night protocols. Lorna in Ontario (known for her innovations with hockey hay nets) September 5, 2009

	Tangledmanes mud boat for Nose-It!
Tangledmanes Nose-its on packed snow.	2' x 4' wooden feeder toy box

I decided to make another feeder toy box
to fit between the barn beam and the side
of my fabric shelter.

It needed higher sides than the trough
because the horses will sometimes toss
the Nose-It out of the trough, where it will
almost invariably land hole-down in a mud
puddle.

Once the ground dries out, we may not
need the toy boxes. However, I will probably
continue to use them to keep the cubes clean
since we are actively and intentionally churning
up the turnout track to eliminate grass.

Another option which works well to contain
a Nose-it and keep it off the dirt is an 18"-tall
hay crib (in the linked photo it needs a solid
floor and removal of the triangular top corners.)










This picture shows how the new feeder
toybox fits in the unused space along the
side of my fabric shelter, which I call a
"run-through" shelter. It's open at both ends
and the floor is covered with pea gravel over
landscape fabric.

Stella thinks the shelter's a big scratching post,
so I hauled some barn beams over from the
wreckage of the dairy barn here and propped
them up on old milk cans that I'd dug up out
of the field. Now that's Recycling!

As you know, I never use tie strings on my
small-mesh hay nets. Instead, I used those
tie strings to lash the barn beam to the upright
posts on each side of the doors.


~JoAnn Johnson
March 25, 2009
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