Busy day

The trimmer came for his second visit today. He says all of their feet have improved, Ches and Kinna's are particularly good, and an 8 week interval is fine for them all as they do so much exercise. People have tried to tell me that unshod horses can't do lots of roadwork as their feet will wear away, but Chester and Gandalf have shown otherwise!!! Sky's feet still have some flares but they are growing out, her feet look totally different since she's been having a barefoot trim rather than a farrier's pasture trim.....

 Ali got out of school an hour early so we took Gandalf and Sky for a walk. G can't be saddled at the moment because of his lump (which is getting smaller) so Ali hopped on bareback.

We went past the garden with the noisy Alsatian behind a plastic covered fence (it's the noise it makes jumping on the fence that bothers them, not the dog itself) and stopped to let them graze and get used to the wretched animal, as it's on one of my nice hack routes. Next thing I know, the dog's owner has come out and after calling it to totally ineffectually, had a go at us for winding his dog up!!! I got the chance to trot out some choice rude French words.........

Anyway, I achieved my objective, which is to get Sky not to jump when the dog jumps on the plastic. Mind you, the first time it did that, it made me jump too!!

After that we went to fetch Éowyn from school, horses totally unfazed by lots of screaming kids, not really a surprise considering they live with Éowyn really......

...and of course, she insisted on a lift home!

Thailand

Just got back from ten days in Thailand. Amazing holiday......

We saw some animals that you don't see in Europe much. Like elephants. And tigers.

The elephants were fantastic. We went for a ride first of all, somewhat slower than the horses, with a swinging stride......

......but that wasn't the best bit.
They took off their saddles and we got back on.....to take them for a bath in the river. Brilliant fun!!

Here's a video. The elephant Ali was on was trained to get rid of its riders!

Then the next day we went to see some tigers. They are kept by the monks in a temple and are raised by hand so are very tame, although you still have to be careful around them and follow the rules! We got to take one for a walk

Then the kids went off to play with the baby tigers and feed them.....

There's a lot of controversy about this place, I have read that the tigers are drugged, not fed properly, left out in the hot sun for hours........I have to say that we saw no evidence of this. Apparently it all started because some abandoned tigers ended up at the monks' temple and they took them in. Now they breed them and hand rear them so people can get close to them. We spoke to a couple of volunteers who work there and they had no concerns about the welfare of the animals. Yes, the tourists pay to see them but the money goes on taking care of them......

In fact I was pleasantly surprised how well animals in Thailand in general were cared for, I was expecting far worse. It's a Buddhist country though, so maybe not surprising. There are lots of cats and dogs around, they all follow the food for scraps, even on the beach but they were never agressive and a couple of times I ended up with a cat on my lap!

And then there were five......

Well I now have five horses in the garden.......Tanya is going to the UK for Christmas so we rode her two over here on Monday.

Lovely sunny day, a nice ride except that Chester kept trying to pull my arms off getting his head down to graze........ponies, eh?

Then on Tuesday my friend Sue and I walked the girls over here, another lovely sunny winter's day....

Sky was very interersted in some horses in the field behind Sue's house, heavy horse mares, Gandalf lived with them for a bit a couple of years ago, they're nice girls.....

Then yesterday I went to fetch Gandalf as we were supposed to be going to do a Christmas fun ride today (annoyingly we had a load of snow last night so that had to be cancelled). On the way we stopped at my friend Jennie's and she gave us some mince pies, G seems quite fond of them.....

Jennie's little dog, however was NOT fond of Gandalf, when Jennie asked me to hold him for a photo, he was so scared of G that he weed all down my leg......

I'm not smiling, it's a grimace!!

So now I have 5 horses here, all eating hay like it's going out of fashion, but they seem to be getting on alright. Will have to wait til it thaws out a bit to take Gandalf back up to Jane's......

A portrait.....

...of my lovely Gandalf! Decided I could grow old and die before it would occur to my husband that I'd quite like a portrait of my fabulous horse so I commissioned my friend Marianne to do one of her great portraits of him as a birthday present to myself, and here it is:

She really manages to capture an animal's character, it's not just any grey horse, it's definitely him. Her site is here if you want to see some more of her work. Need to start saving for portraits of my baby girls now! Oh, and the dog too.......

Well it started ok......

Went for a hack yesterday, nice sunny morning, birds singing, flowers nodding in the breeze etc. Great, we thought. Went down a track we haven't used for about 6 months, first problem, the farmer had closed off the path with one of those awful barbed wire gate thingies, there's no way you can open them on horseback cos they are always stretched tight so you have to get off, open it then jump out of the way before it twangs back at you, lead the horse through, get him far enough away so you can haul it back into place without it twanging into him, you get the idea......

There were 3 of them across the path in all!!!

Then the field was somewhat overgrown:

Not great when you're trying to keep your extremely fat horse away from lots of grass!!

Still,we soldiered on and eventually got into the woods.


Lovely in there, it was, no flies, not warm enough yet, no hunters, perfect.

Then on the way back we had to go and check on my friend's horses as she's away for the weekend, this would have been fine except that her neighbour's dog was wearing one of those Elizabethan collars and as far as Maverick's concerned, they EAT horses........

Jane got off and lead him past and he was starting to calm down until the neighbour came out with a whip and started trying to round the dogs up with it!!! That finished Mav off, he was snorting and jumping around, we had to leave at that point!

Gotta love the French........

Oh NO!!!!! A Dog!!!!

My friend Jane has gone off to the UK for a week or so and we are looking after her dog, Ruby. Aliénor is delighted of course and poor Ruby has to suffer being dragged over a series of makeshift jumps in the garden (Ali wants to do dog agility, the fact that we don't have a dog is neither here nor there.......mind you, she's pretty good over the jumps all by herself).

The cats, however, are NOT impressed one little bit......

Went to see some puppies......

A couple of weeks ago we took in a bitch and her pups that had been living right next to a local church. She'd whelped in a stand of pampas grass next to the road, it took me all afternoon to find the pups! Anyway, she belongs to a local shepherd, he came to take her and the pups home, she'd wandered off to have the pups and he couldn't find her, so had moved on with his flock and the locals had been feeding her. Pretty much as soon as we'd taken her in, he turned up to get her back. Today we went to see her at his farm and I was very plesantly surprised to find the bitch and her pups in a big airy clean barn surrounded by livestock. There was fresh straw everywhere, loads of hay, even salt for them. There were cows and very young calves, tiny lambs, some had been orphaned and were in with ewes that had lost their lambs to try to get them adopted, there were goats, chickens and an enormous black pig! Aliénor absolutely loved it!! None of the animals was scared of us at all.......