Scorchio!!

So this is how the weather has been for the last week and it looks like there's at least another week of it on the way......

Great for holidaymakers, not so good for those of us wishing to actually do stuff with our horses :-/

So the other day we brought the girls back to the house so they could escape the heat in the barn. Elentari's first experience of being on a road went rather well, she spooked at the first car that went past, then decided as Sky hadn't reacted, these things weren't really worth worrying about :-)

Those white lines on the floor were definitely suspicious though.....

Then today, having brought Gandalf home too, she did her first ride and lead. Unfortunately, he has decided he doesn't like her much, and tries to bite her if she gets too near his head (I guess he's had enough after all these years of Sky and Kinna biting his neck) so she was a bit hesitant to follow along at first and kept trying to get back to Sky. Maybe I'll have to do a R&L with just the two girls, that could be, um, interesting!! But for a first time out, she wasn't half bad.....

She even went under the railway bridge......

....and jumped the ditch :-)

We had to go early to beat the heat, got out at about 7am, would have been earlier but we had to wait for the SNO to decide which shoes to wear. Apparently pink flowery sandals are just the thing on a bicycle....

Talking of footwear, Ali and I found some shoes to go with the black studded dress, how about these?

Half price too :-)

In other news this week we have been to see Kinna again and she's looking a whole lot better. In fact, she's showing signs of wanting to break out of the "invalid" paddock and rejoin the others. She was happy to have a headcollar on this time so she must be less sore.  Her skin is all falling off though, it's really weird, the stuff coming off is as stiff as a board and there's new skin growing underneath it.

The vet called with Squaw's blood test results whilst I was there, her liver has been affected by something which is why she's so photosensitive (couldn't get a needle anywhere near Kinns to take blood, but it's got to be the same, the symptoms are identical). Vet reckons it was millepertuis (new bit of vocab for me) - St John's Wort. But why would they eat that with all the grass in that huge field? Or is it just the pollen as there is so much more of it around this year due to the wet weather and it's flowering later than usual?

Poor baby Kinna

As you may recall, Kinna went off down to my friend Sarah's for summer school a few weeks ago. Not for the first time either, she and Sky were there for the summer a couple of years ago, with no problems at all. So we were a bit surprised when Kinna suddenly started getting a scabby nose. Sarah thought it might be sunburn at first, but then it spread to the rest of her head and her legs which started to swell up.

She also has these strange ridges on her skin

Just after she started getting these symptoms, Sarah's coloured mare, Squaw, got the same, but only on her white bits. The vet came, and Kinna was her usual "cooperative" self, which meant it took two and a half hours to get her treated :-/. After the struggle they'd had to get a needle in her she decided after that she didn't want anyone doing anything else to her, not even putting cream on her.

So Ali and I went to visit her yesterday and it took us about 20 minutes to convince her to let us put a rope round her neck and take a look at her. No way was anyone going to be putting anything on her head. But looking like this, who can blame her?

The vet came back and took bloods from Squaw but couldn't get anywhere near Kinns, not even after we'd put sedative in a feed for her. She remembers the EIA incident only too well......and has never been good with needles, ever since the vet hurt her doing her microchip.

So it looks like she's going to have to  come home, trying to arrange that for next week. It's bizarre as she spent the whole summer there in 2011 with no ill effects, and Squaw has lived there for years and nothing like this has ever happened. The other 2 equines are dark skinned and absolutely fine. Could it be the buttercups/St John's Wort? Maybe there are just many more because of the wet weather we've been having......