Lame

No, not the horses, me!  But up until yesterday we'd had a rather good week...

On Tuesday morning I thought I'd better see if the stand still for mounting lesson had translated successfully, so off we went to the road where Finn duly stood like a pony-shaped boulder for me to get on and was rewarded with a bit of carrot fed from the saddle.  I rode off down the road feeling rather chuffed with my l33t p0ny sch001ing ski11z, only for him to grind to a halt 10 yards later and look round going 'Oi! More carrot!'  I asked him to walk on, he started nibbling my boot!

Twenty minutes later I'd tried waiting him out, flapping reins and legs, growling, slapping my whip on my boot, waving it around his backside...and we'd got another 70 yards down the road, at which point he decided if he wasn't getting any more carrot he was going home and turned round.  At that point he got a smack on the bum and told to effing well get on with it - and he was a total angel for the rest of the hack! 

Having won that battle, I'd hoped for an easier time on Thursday morning, but he'd decided that the turning round and heading for home trick was one he wanted to repeat and tried it every minute or so for the first quarter of a mile, so we waltzed down the village in a series of small circles until he got to a manhole cover that he's walked past at least eight times before without noticing and decided that it was a pony-eating dragon that I needed protecting from and therefore he was taking me home.  I'd planned to take him out of the village and a little way up the main road, but didn't think it was particularly safe to be circling my way up a road where logging lorries come down the hill at 60mp, no matter how much high viz stuff I was wearing, so after I'd got a reasonably sensible five minutes out of him, I turned him round.  And, you guessed it, perfect hacking pony all the way home, until he realised that I was going to make him walk past our drive.  He tried a half-hearted dive to each side, got a strong leg and a growl and then gave in, so I rode him down to the road fork, gave him another bit of carrot and then went home.

The weather forecast is great for this week and I was hoping to ride at least three times, but yesterday rather put paid to that idea.  My husband stuck his head round the office door mid-morning to say that the breeze had dropped and the midges were horrendous, so I picked up the fly sheets and headed out to the field.  I'd done Merlin's and was just finishing up with Finn, who was standing at the small gate between us and the neighbour's field.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Merlin stalking up the field with his "I'm going to bite the pony on his arse" face on.  What I should have done was left the last strap on the neck cover, chased Merlin off and then gone back and done it up, but I thought I had time to get the strap done and then jump out of the way.  Wrong.  Horse teeth met pony bottom and Finn's only exit route was through me.  He barged past, knocking me over onto the stone dyke wall and then trod on my foot, which was sideways on the ground rather than flat.

By 3pm yesterday afternoon it was hurting like you wouldn't believe and alternating between nearly numb and almost pins and needles, so I took myself down to the surgery where they pronounced it probably not broken.  I'm hobbling around the place with the assistance of a wooden staff and swearing a lot!  I'm guessing that's the running knocked on the head for a few weeks - I'd just started really getting going with it again - but since it's the right foot, I may be able to scramble back into the saddle by the end of the week.

Black and blue

The saddle fitter arrived on Friday evening, about half an hour after I'd got back from Inverness, so I was still running round the field with a wheelbarrow trying to clean up a day's poo.  My lovely neighbours still let me use their school whenever I want (I'm selfishly pleased that their proposed house move to Aberdeenshire this summer fell through!), so I caught Finn, grabbed his tack and went through. 

Clare, the saddle fitter, has an injury to her back which means she uses crutches and Finn really wasn't sure about them - he kept side stepping away from her while she was trying to take tracings and kept one ear firmly locked onto them at all times.  She asked me to tack him up without his numnah and ride him so she could see how the saddle was in use - the moment I put my weight in the stirrup to get on he took off bronc-ing around the school.  I ended up face-planted in the sand with bruises to the underneath of my arms and my dignity!  I put his numnah back on to see if it was the different feel of the saddle which had triggered it and called Mick over to drag the mounting block in for me while I went to borrow my neighbour's lunging equipment as Clare suggested a few spins on the lunge before trying again!  While we were digging through the tack room for a lunge line, Finn had pulled away from Clare and bronc'd round the school again - I think it must have been the crutches spooking him, because he lunged fine and when I got on from the block and trotted him round for five minutes he was absolutely perfect.  I would have suspected a back problem, but I've ridden him four times in 10 days, including mounting from the ground, and there hasn't been a single issue.

The upshot is that the saddle fits fine, the bit I was worried about with the nails doesn't touch him, so I just need to pick up some wool from the field and glue it into place.  The saddle is a good one, a working hunter Farrington, one of the original ones made before Derby House took over.  It does need reflocking, but not urgently and she's recommended that I just get out and ride this summer and then let her have the saddle for a week at some point over the winter when the weather isn't so kind.

If that wasn't enough beating up for the weekend, he got me again this morning.  His nappy rash has cleared up beautifully with antibacterial gel twice a day, but a lot of the gel has ended up in his tail which has made combing out the occasional small piece of poo that gets stuck in there (it's a proper full bushy native tail!) rather unpleasant, so I marched out to do battle with a bucket of water, a sponge and a bottle of shampoo.  Being a typical pony, he stuck his nose in the bucket to see if there was anything edible in it and came up just as I turned round from closing the gate and bent down to pick it up again.  Pony forehead met human nose with a loud crunching sound and I think I'm quite lucky not to have broken it!  A few minutes of swearing later, bath-time was underway and it's a lot less sticky now, though I think I'm going to have to have another go in the next week as there's still a bit left in there.

Merlin, after initially loving having a friend, has now got a bit arsey about the whole thing and if Finn is on a bit of grass he thinks looks tasty, he'll march up to him and bite him on the bum to get him to move.  Finn has now got wise to this and will trot off if he sees Merlin walking over with his ears back.  The rest of the time, M is happy enough to graze next to him and yells when I take Finn out to ride even if he can see us in the school, so I think they'll settle down together before too long.  Hard to believe Finn has been here less than two weeks.  Interestingly, Clare - who is a BHSII instructor as well as a saddle fitter - doesn't think Finn is overweight, the stomach is just down to saggy muscles and the amount of air he's inhaling from cribbing on fence posts.  She says get him out and about and working before I put him on a diet, so we'll give it a go :o)

It does show that my confidence is coming on though - a year ago there's no way I would have got on a horse or pony I'd just seen do huge bunny hopping bucks around a school.  There's trust building here already.

Weight target reached

Thanks to bad weather and a day and half on box rest (of which more in a minute), Merlin weighed in at 451kg today and since he's about right on the fat scoring front (I can finally feel his ribs but can't see them and nothing else has gone too skinny) we'll try to maintain from now on.  Without going back over all the posts, I think he topped out at 511kg (though he was chunkier than that when he first arrived), so that's 60kg gone since last summer or 9st 6lbs which is only 5lbs short of a whole me!

I came over all May-ish and started a new fitness regime this week.  Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are Merlin exercise days, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday are running days.  I'm taking it very gently, so I'm doing Couch to 5K from the beginning again to break me back in, aiming for the Aviemore half marathon in October, and Merlin is doing 20 minutes' walk in hand around the village.

Or that was the plan.  We managed the walk Tuesday and Thursday, then on Friday evening I thought he was moving slightly oddly when he walked up the field for his supper.  Sure enough, when I got closer I saw that his left front pastern was so swollen that if you looked at his leg from the front it looked straight between the bottom of his fetlock and the top of his hoof.

Since he seemed reasonably happy walking around on it, there was no cut and it was fluid rather than hard, I sloshed it with cold water and shut him in the field shelter overnight to make sure he rested it.  The next morning it had filled up further, but drained almost immediately as soon as I led him out and sloshed it again, leaving a slightly less swollen pastern. 

We were heading into Thurso anyway, so I called in at the vet to check if there was anything else I should be doing.  As luck would have it, Bridget-the-eventing-vet was on duty.  She nixed my idea of giving him a little bit of turnout on the flat area behind his shelter, advising a short walk in hand on Saturday afternoon and then a restricted turnout area on Sunday if it continued to improve.  Plus stable bandages overnight to stop his legs filling.

A quick trip to the tack shop later and Merlin met his first cold water boot.  What a brilliant idea, especially for those of us who don't have hoses or mains water available at their field shelter/stable!  Merlin wasn't entirely convinced by the feel of it going on and the first one went sailing through the air and landed in the mud (now I know why they sell them in pairs...), but once it was on he decided it was A Good Thing and I had very little trouble when I did it again last night and this morning.

The stable bandages were a slightly different matter.  I'd only bandaged a horse's leg once; I was about 11 and the leg was plastic.  Still, I knew the theory, I'd found some videos on YouTube to refresh my memory - how hard could it be...?  As it turned out, the bit that flummoxed me was wrapping the bandage round in the correct orientation to end up with the velcro tabs on the correct side of the bandage, the first one took me three goes to get right!  I was concerned that I hadn't got the tension right, so popped down a couple of hours later to check they weren't in a tangle round his ankles. They looked fine, so I fed him an apple and went to bed, relieved I didn't have to worry about him tying all four feet together overnight.

This morning I went down to find the gate half off its hinges and no horse!  He'd lifted it off the top bracket so it swung off the bolt and the bottom bracket, jumped it and taken himself off to graze on a ledge on the near-vertical part of the hill in the bottom field.  The stable bandages had stayed put - result!  He allowed me to catch him with reasonably good grace and when I unwrapped him, his leg looked completely back to normal :o)  I stuck the cold water boot back on for 20 minutes as a precaution while he had his breakfast and I mucked out and wondered, given his overnight antics, whether it was worth restricting his turnout or not, but decided better safe than sorry and gave him an L-shaped area of flat field to potter around.

This evening his leg still looks normal, he's still being ever so slightly careful with it over the rutted areas, but he's definitely nearly mended.  If nothing changes overnight he can go back on normal turnout tomorrow and we'll pick up the walking round the village again on Thursday.

Ptoooey!!

We had a first this morning - first time Merlin has ever refused a bucket of food.  And this is a horse who'll happily eat buckets laced with wormer, antibiotics, bute and all sorts of other things that horses normally turn their noses up at.

Brewers Yeast, however, seems to be a step too far! 

I finished the Total Eclipse last night and mistakenly assumed that since I was adding three of the four ingredients in it to his bucket, it wouldn't be a problem.  However, the BY smells a lot stronger as a straight than it does made up as TE (I'm wondering if they actually use Yea-Sacc instead) and though I was ready to dive right in to his breakfast (it smelt like Marmite), Merlin gave it a long hard sniff, tried a bit and promptly spat it out, pulling the most hysterical faces.

Lesson learned, I'll just add the linseed tonight, then if he eats that I'll try linseed and magox in the morning and once that's going down OK, add the yeast back a granule or two at a time.

In other news, it's 11C here today and he's happily naked.

The food chain

The UKNHCP forum reckoned if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so we're carrying on with the Greengold.  I'll get another bag ordered for when I'm next down at the dentist in Inverness.  Merlin has a definite order of preference with food at the moment.  Grass is at the bottom of the food chain since the beginning of November, he'll make sure his haynet is empty before he goes in search of the green stuff.  There's always HorseHage hidden in his net somewhere and whether it's top, middle or bottom, that'll get carefully picked out and eaten before the drier hay.  And if, like this evening, I've done his haynet in advance so he could tuck in as soon as I took him into his shelter, he'll even abandon HorseHage in favour of his feed skip. 

He has lost a little weight now, we're at the top of the 498kg band.  His moobs have shrunk and there's a suggestion of shoulder starting to appear, but I still can't feel ribs and he still has fat pads on his bum.  It's supposed to be a fairly mild week this week and then cold again the week after, so I shall continue to feed him the same this week and then add another handful of beet both ends of the day next week and up the HH to hay ratio if required, as he still has weight to lose.

I have another forum to thank this week: HHO or Horse and Hound Online.  We were forecast gale/storm force winds on Thursday night and I posted to ask whether I should keep Merlin in (as there's a byre roof breaking up up-wind of the field) or leave him out as normal to make his own decisions.  Every single reply said leave him out and I'm so grateful to them because his very solid 18x12 field shelter, which weighs a couple of tons, migrated TWO FEET south.  I can't get the mats to fit back inside, so I've cobbled them together in a new configuration which only leaves a little bit of bare floor but at least has no lumps he can trip over.  Mick thought we might be able to move it back with a land anchor and a pulley system, but the ground's too soft behind it and we just ended up dragging the land anchor out!  Once it freezes solid again he's going to take his Navara down there with chains and hooks and pull it square. 

We went for our only clop of the week this morning and he was really pleased to be out and about again; ears pricked and a really good even stride.  We did the mile to the health centre and back which was obviously no problem for his feet, so we'll start adding on a few minutes on the Polouriscaig track, which is stony, and see how he does with that.  Feet are still smelling better despite the mud.  I nearly, nearly, nearly tacked him up and got on this afternoon, but I think he would have thought going out twice in one day was taking the piss and I had to catch up on the post-snow poo picking in the bottom field.

It's been an expensive week though, he's running out of Total Eclipse so I've got micronised linseed, brewer's yeast and magnesium oxide ordered from Pro Earth on eBay, then got a bag of Speedibeet from CLB because Hilltop Horses weren't sure if their delivery was going to arrive in time for me to have one from them, went to Hilltop the following day and it had, so got another bag of beet and two bales of shavings.  £85 in short order, but at least that's all the feed I'll need until I run out of linseed in about 3 months' time.  Next purchase will be an Enlightened Equitation forum subscription - I've rejoined the forum there as well after a 10+ year absence.

Knobber horse

'Knobber horse' is an affectionate expression pinched from the Horse and Hound forums for when your horse has done something idiotic. I would call it 'having a donkey moment' except that would be an insult to donkeys...

Anyway, we were due some rough weather last Friday night so I went and caught Merlin to put him in for the night. He was being a git to lead, stopping every few strides to put his head down and graze, and by the time we'd got down into the third field I was thoroughly annoyed by it so I grabbed the leadrope about 18" under his chin, hauled his head up and marched off. He planted his feet and threw his head up - and discovered that the velcro on his field safe headcollar comes undone if he does that. He buggered off to the tasty grass and I was left with a dangling headcollar. Just the day I didn't want him to be trotting as well, because I'd forgotten to turn the fence on earlier, he'd done the splits to get at fresh grass and his right fore had started to fill again.

I stomped up to the house, grabbed some carrots, caught him and put him in, but he'd obviously decided this was a good trick because when I brought him in tonight he tried exactly the same stunt again. What he hadn't realised was that he was in an ordinary headcollar rather than the field-safe job and all he managed to do was stand on his own back feet and rip a bit of hoof wall which is now flapping like a hangnail - there's too much still attached for me to twist off and I haven't got anything tough enough to nip it off.

I'll call the farrier in the morning...

Still lame...

...and it's all my fault :o( He was almost better, but last Thursday he had a totally avoidable freak accident and we're back to square one. For the past couple of weeks Merlin has been spending two to three hours a day on the rich grass in the second field before going back down to the short-cropped third field and because he'd much rather stay in the second field he's been tricky to catch so I've been leaving him in a headcollar.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

On Thursday I switched the hose on to fill up the water bath in the third field and as far as we can work out he must have had his head in it at the time and spooked, because an hour later when I went down to check him before taking Mick out for his birthday dinner, I found the bath pulled about 10 feet across the field and Merlin's headcollar dangling from the taps :o(

I was very, very, VERY lucky that other than two small gouged bits of skin where the headcollar dug in and a graze on his shoulder he was absolutely fine - that could easily have been a broken neck.

Matters were complicated by us leaving at 7am the following morning for a 1300 mile round trip to see the Foo Fighters at Milton Keynes, but fortunately my very horsey neighbours were animal sitting and Merlin still had four sachets of bute to go from the original prescription, so I left them a letter authorising them to make decisions on my behalf and agreeing to pay for any treatment they and the vet deemed necessary, just in case.

He had his final sachet on Tuesday morning and 24 hours later was still clearing favouring the left leg over the right. The vet and I decided that the best course of action was another 8 days of bute, which he started on yesterday morning, and then another call out if the problem hasn't gone/nearly gone at the end of that. They've put him on a half dose because they want him to feel it enough that he doesn't go bouncing around the field thinking he's fine, but he does seem a lot more comfortable within half an hour of having it in the mornings.

Watching him today he's happy to take the weight on that leg when he's grazing and is looking a lot more sound on the flat. I'm seriously considering halving the roped-off space in the second field and putting him in there full time, because he's much better on the flat than on the sloped sections in the third field (which needs a rest anyway). He's definitely putting that right fore down toe-first though, whereas the left is landing normally. The farrier is out this afternoon to trim him (shoes have been off since November), so I shall ask him to take a look at the heel and if not then I'm guessing possibly he's pulled something in the back of the leg somewhere when he was dragging the bath :o( No heat or swelling in it though.

Hopefully time and vets will sort him out - whenever I start worrying about it again I remind myself that when I strained an ankle running on softer sand than I should have it took two months for it to stop hurting, so as long as he continues to improve, however slowly, I shall continue to thank whatever gods were watching over him last Thursday.

And start again

Oh dear, two week breaks in the schedule aren't going to do him or me any favours are they? But weather and work have conspired against us, so this evening was the first time in a fortnight I'd taken him out of his field. He lunged well on both reins, responded to most of my voice commands and all was good until I let the lunge rein go slack so he could walk through the gate in the electric fence and turn while I closed it - he trod on the loose lunge and the clip broke. That's possibly a 100-mile round trip to Wick at the weekend then, unless there's one in CLB in Thurso. Still, it means I have no excuse now, I'll have to man up and ride tomorrow!