Your Horse Live

Now we're in the UK, many events we never used to be able to get to are now merely a wait in a motorway traffic queue away......yesterday we decided to make the trip up the M5 to Your Horse Live. Quite a good day out, but not the best event I've been to all year.....

Took us half an hour to get into the car park, which was a muddy field at 10 am and by the time we came to leave, they'd had to get some tractors out on standby to drag cars out, luckily we were very near the hard track so managed to get out unaided (my old car would have needed help from a tractor )

Once inside, I couldn't believe just how much shopping there was, more even than at Olympia.......We had a job fighting our way through the crowds oohing and aahing over the sparkly browbands and embroidered jackets to actually get to an arena. At one point we nearly walked into Charlotte Dujardin wearing a huge furry headband thing......

The smaller arena was good, you didn't have to queue for ages like for the main arena. We saw Jason Webb in action, I like him, have seen his bridleless riding vids online before. He did a demo on his horse Diesel and they clearly have a great relationship. He was bridleless, guiding him with his seat and a long whip for showing direction and he was refreshingly honest about this being a work in progress and what had worked well at home wasn't working so well in front of a crowd elsewhere (as the horse charged round the arena without listening to him at first) but he stuck with it and got there in the end.

Ali really liked him so went to get his autograph afterwards

We listened to a few people in the equine Learning Zone, there was a Q&A session with Carl Hester, Jason Webb, Paul Tapner & Ben Hobday...

Outside they had the Rescue Village, with all the charities bringing some inmates along, and Hovis, of Horse and Hound fame, was there, looking very fed up with being shut in a stable and kicking the door to bits....

Then we went to queue up for the main arena to watch Paul Tapner in action. He did a quick masterclass on riding cross country fences.....

But most importantly, we saw the guys from the Centre of Horseback Combat again, and I treated myself and Ali to an early Christmas present :-)

Don't know if we'll go to YHL again though, as I said, too much shopping and not enough horses for my liking........

Equine Massage

Excellent day yesterday, met some new people and got to see my favourite little Arab horsie :-D
Went to an equine massage demo by Megan Webster of Springfield Equus. She started off with a bit about how it all works on the muscles etc and showed us some massage mitts (including the one she referred to as a "porno mitt") then got us to do silly things with our ears

and massage each other, Tamzin seemed to enjoy hers!

Then she showed us how to massage the horse from head to tail, starting with the poll/ears area. Duke, our demo horse (a taller, very much cleaner version of Gandalf), doesn't like having his ears touched

but once she'd put on the mitt, he was happier with it....

She showed us stroking movements (effleurage)

and compression strokes, with hands or scrunched up mitt

and then concussion movements (not to be done on bony areas!)

More on the movements here

An interesting one that I'd never seen before was massaging the muscle down the front of the shoulder, and seeing if you can get your hand in and pull the muscle out slightly, many horses are really tense here and in the neck

Also, an often forgotten area is the coronet band, gentle palpitations here are good for the feet

After the demo, we got to have a go on the horses, I was really surprised by just how cold Duke's lower legs and shod feet were after being so used to my lot feeling warm....

We gave Ras a bit of a go with the mitt, but he was more interested in the mare next door than our ministrations, I suspect......

Megan is coming over to Tanya's on Wednesday to massage Polo and Sorcier, might take G over there for a workup too.....

Fete du Cheval

Went to the Fete du Cheval on Sunday at the Western Horse Farm where I had my lesson last year. They had a load of stuff organised, a rallye in the morning that I would have loved to have done, and all afternoon there were demostrations of different disciplines. Jo asked me to go along because she was doing a showjumping demo on Socianda and I had to do the commentary in French. Luckily she'd written it all down for me in English so all I had to do was translate. Don't have any pics of the jumping as I was holding a microphone, but Socianda did brilliantly and jumped up to 1m15

After that we had a Western Trail demo, which as far as I could tell was TREC in a Western saddle

This lovely horse was a 21 year old Anglo who did everything in just a headcollar, and his rider didn't need spurs, maybe because she didn't feel the need to do the whole macho cowboy thing? Or is that just me being unfair on the boys.....?

After that we had a dressage demo, this rider was apparently runner up in the Championat d'Aquitaine, she did a freestyle to music,

Then there was a lovely team of Bretons...

...and finally some Western reining. This is Frederick, who runs the place, on his stallion Smart which apparently won the National Championships last year.

I actually quite like his riding, apart from this:

And there was another chap on a gorgeous palomino QH

His sliding stops were a bit less dramatic

....and that mane looked fab doing the spins, although to be honest I don't really see the point of doing that to a horse either.

Then we had to go home because the SNO was reaching her sell-by date, which is a shame as the dressage lady was going to do a garrocha demo later in the day, would like to have seen that.......and they also had some fun barrel racing, and Socianda came second beating all those Western horses. Stewart took some video, it looks so much fun:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsdivu_jo-barrel-racing-for-fun-at-western-show-july-12_sport?start=3