Viva Carlos Blog Hop: Fess up to your mistakes

L. Williams has this to say: Today I am gonna fess up to one of my biggest horse care mistakes. Will you fess up to yours?

A lifelong association with horses who, for the most part, lived at my house, means there have been many opportunities for horse care mistakes. Luckily, incidents have been few and far between. (In no small part thanks to my parents, who were relatively knowledgeable horse people, and Pony Club, which terrified me into thinking every plant in the pasture was probably poisonous.)

• Once, I forgot to latch the pasture gate and received a call from bewildered neighbors in the middle of the night, who discovered they had three extra horses in their pasture and did they belong to me? Mercifully, none of my horses were hit by a car, injured by falling into a ditch, or hurt by the neighbor horses.
• An elderly palomino mare my dad inexplicably picked up at auction (this was a hobby of his for a while) broke into our feed room and ate an entire tub of Strongid daily dewormer pellets. She was totally fine, but I berated myself for not locking the room more securely.
• In college, I had a dreadful time keeping weight on Moe. Instead of talking to a vet or starting by increasing his roughage, I fed him a witch's brew for breakfast and dinner: senior feed, beet pulp, corn oil, apple cider vinegar, a hoof supplement, a weight gainer supplement, a joint supplement, and a can of beer. He was getting about 15 pounds of feed daily, when I probably should have just had his teeth checked and increased the amount and quality of hay he was getting. 
• More recently, I neglected to call the vet about Moe's weird eye thing (which turned out to be an ulcer) until it looked really bad. Big mistake, as the ulcer could have easily gotten worse and affected his vision.

I'm grateful the horse-care mishaps haven't been life-threatening or terribly expensive!