The Tack Room “Museum”

The last week in February we started calving and had a bad cold snap. Calving was just starting for us, and it was while Art and I were regrouping in the tack room recording some eartag numbers of new pairs in the barn, digging out last year’s record book to make some calving season comparisons, and assessing what our morning’s priorities were that I noticed all the strange things that are collected and saved in our tack room.

Some of our odd collections are on display in the window sill. Many are absurd but do make interesting conversation pieces. The items I re-discovered compelled me to write a column about some of the findings in our tack room and later took pictures to blog about.  I likened the things that have been saved there, to a “museum” of anomalies.

The exhibit that triggered a column idea was staring at the collection of toenails belonging to one of our kids’ cows.

I also talked about some of the eartags that get saved and found these old eartags still hanging on a nail in the old milking shed from before Art and I were married.

Then I remembered my husband’s unusual key chain that he had saved and the story that went along with it. Its story had to be a part of my column also.  It was one of a pocketful of bull calf scrotums that were discarded after castrating at a branding. This particular one dried into hard leather so he drilled a hole to put on a keychain. He attempted to save all the others (NOTE: this was back in his young bachelor days…before I knew him and his eccentric past), explaining that they could be sold as fur-lined pasties but forgot about them in his shirt pocket until he pulled the shirt out of the washing machine smelling rather stinky.

This is not just an ordinary stick sitting in another of our tack room window sills. This is the stick that had been found stuck inside one of our gelding’s buttocks one late spring morning a few years back. Our best guess was that somehow during the night he’d run through a pile of tree branches beneath our willow tree and one got rammed into one of his butt cheeks. It’s had a lot of show-and-tells, so much that the blood that coated it has all worn off.

As I mentioned in my column the most gasp-worthy part of this stick story/show-and-tell is that the bluntest end was the end that was stuck in the horse’s butt.

This is one of our cow horses Bean, whom we found a stick protruding from the inside of his butt cheek. We managed to load him into a trailer and have a vet remove the stick. His wound healed but eventually we had to take him back because the spot would fester again every few weeks. It turned out there was another chunk of the stick still trying to surface which had to be removed. The trauma did not change him. We still call him Bean Dip once in a while but he also remains to be the the saddle horse of choice when getting a cow in.

Just to prove that there is such a thing, this is the collar found on a prairie dog that had been eradicated on one of our pastures–one of our rarest “museum pieces.”

The only thing I couldn’t dig up but Art said does exist and is in a box somewhere in one of the outbuildings is saved teeth from old cows.

Sometimes I pick up rocks or old glass bottles I like for one reason or another and Art wants to know why I keep bringing them in the house. I ended my column talking about how I shouldn’t get any more flak from my husband the next time I bring home a rock or antique bottle I found to display in the window sill of my kitchen or mudroom.

So, now that you’ve seen what’s in our tack room “museum” what kinds of oddities are in yours (or your shop, garage, etc.)?