Radar is fit and ready to hunt, this Saturday hopefully. Though he has recently discovered his gallop and I am still pretty speechless ! He's a very big and very strong horse to be such a rocket, and if he wants to head the field all I'm going to be able to do is apologise to the Master later .
A stable girl at the place I went to give him a really good workout on Monday was speechless as she saw him tread directly on a stone and not even notice it. "he just ... but ..... wha....." His workout was eight miles up and down hills in under 90 minutes, much of it on sandy/stony track with around thirty jumps along the way, all with artificial (i.e. stone/scalpings) take offs and landings.
The front shoes he came with six months ago would not now even fasten to his feet - the nail holes are outside the hoof wall
Jazz is better at this time of year than he was last year, by a long, long way. I attribute it to being off grass for nine hours a day, on it only overnight, feeding yeast and increasing his magnesium. He will occasionally feel a stone, but nothing to speak of and he has real concavity for the first time in the summer. His feet have been pretty flat at this time of year for the previous two years.
Button the Shetland has a big belly and is rock-crunching on his feet. Thank goodness! He only gets the dregs of someone else's feed bucket so he doesn't even have magnesium supplementation. Let's hope that doesn't change as he grows, because he's only a two year old at the moment.
Thank goodness for being shoeless too. We have had a big worry with a huge lump right at the site of a spavin on Jazz's near hock. After a week of fretting about whether it is a spavin or not, a tiny patch of hair has come off it and it looks like a kick. As well as that, he has had (another) kick right above his hock on the inside. If it's a kick, and if Radar had shoes on, he'd have been in real trouble, with a chipped or broken bone for sure.
hmm I'm a bit worried about a grass growth spurt as Reps can go back out on Saturday after staying in for a bit to try and recover from the LGL.
He's been in for 7 days and still struggling with footiness over the stones so I'm thinking that he actually might be a lot more sugar sensitive than I first thought as even the hay I am giving him seems to be affecting him now!
He's been on a completely new diet for a few weeks now and I've gone a bit crazy with buying lots of natural herbs for him!
Still looking for a solution to his footiness and general stiffness - anyone would think he was 28 not 8! But almost all supplements have glucosamine in them - not great if he seems very sensitive to sugar!
Well, after there being not a lot to report for the last few months I finally have Hera with me in Northern Ireland - and not just here with me, actually in the back garden.
There is a 300m track laid out around a 0.8acre paddock with electric fencing but at the minute she is confined to her shelter (20x20ft) plus an ~800ft2 stone area with a slowly increasing amount of grass/mud, she is getting approx 20ft2 of grass (ie fence across the 10ft track moves 2ft) every few days so it is very slow going and we're not yet getting the benefits of circular movement but so far :touchwood: she is coping OK. She ignores the extra grass most of the time, preferring to stand and supervise the humans while eating her haynet.
She's had a few hours out muzzled on the track most days to hooley/roll/mooch and get her head down to the little grass she can get, but after a sunny/rainy day she was a little hesitant on the stones having previously not noticed them at all so I have to be careful there. Thankfully she was fine again in 36 hours. She's on GH laminitis prone supplement and gastri-x which are hopefully helping.
We are pootling out most days, haven't found any off-road hacking yet but have found some excellent Hills - she is going to have an even lovelier bum soon! She's been ridden bare until today as we've just been walking/jogging out for 30-45 minutes and she hasn't been noticing even the horrible small pointy gravelly bits, but we now have full compliment of boots and pads for our longer rides and tomorrow some proper trot work will be introduced.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum