What's inside a horse?

Interesting morning at the open day today at the local equine vet hospital.....

Beautiful day so we walked over with Chox

When we got there, Éowyn was fascinated by the cut up horse's leg and hoof......

...the number of teeth they have....

...but most of all by the lady doing the fecal egg counts!! She asked many questions about" going through the motions" and was rewarded with a close up look at some poo.....

Those teeth are things of beauty really when you look at them close up (although reading this story maybe Ross Jacobs wouldn't agree with me...)

There was also a pair of beautiful Shires, and we got a demo of how to plait their mane (Éowyn approved of the sparkly bows)

The owners aren't far from here and do driving lessons and working with the horses (ploughing etc), they said to come and see them sometime so I think I will :-)

More Interdressage

Today it was Ali's turn to do her thing. She decided to enter a showing class, so it will be judged on turnout of both rider and horse. That meant a lot of preparation! I showed her how to plait his mane, which is a fiddly and time consuming job, and I don't think it looks as cool as the running plait we did for Sky the other week, but the people judging these things are obviously old school British judges, so proper plaits it is!

Good job Gandalf is a very patient boy......

Then we did his tail.

 Ali got her posh stuff on, white jodhpurs, how impractical is that? I wonder who thought that'd be a good idea for showing........probably a man.

Anyway, here's the video. Had to have a musical soundtrack because the original soundtrack featured a lot of Éowyn screaming after being told she couldn't be in the video, have the camera, ride the horsie or play in the road........

Plaits

Today we decided to have a crack at this month's Interdressage in hand class. Sadly we hadn't managed to ditch the Small Naughty One, but she was sent to stand in the corner when we did the video and I will take the soundtrack off so you can't hear the crying.......

Skyfaxa hadn't quite managed to get all the dirt back on that we washed off the other day but still needed water strategically applying, I really shouldn't have so many white horses.........She was very good about it, and then was also extremely good whilst I attempted to wrestle her copious amounts of mane and tail into some semblance of a plait.

Not sure if you're supposrd to do running plaits, but I can't be bothered to mess about with those little individual plait thingies and she's got far too much mane for those really. She didn't care, all she wanted to do was eat!

And no, she isn't as white as this any more.......