Goodbye Old Friend......

I have been neglecting this blog, as the horseback archery one has been taking over somewhat, and indeed I realise I may not have time to keep two of them going, and this could well be the last post on here.

If it is, it will unfortunately not be a happy post. Because last weekend we had to say goodbye to the incomparable Gandalf. I still can't believe he's gone. After 12 years he was so much a part of our lives that it is very hard to be without him.

Last Friday Ali noticed he was looking a bit out of sorts, and was lying down, then getting up then going down again. She stayed in the field to keep an eye on him for a bit, and when he went down like he'd fallen over, she got really alarmed. We called the vet and brought him in, by this time covered in mud. He continued to lie down try to roll, get up again and clearly was in pain. The vet did all the usual treatments for colic, gave him a hefty dose of painkiller and we settled in for a vigil.

Every 20 minutes or so we got him up, took him for a walk, put him back in the stable, where he immediately laid down. Ali sat with him in the straw, I paced up and down and went to see the other horses, many of whom were in for the night as it was so wet in the fields. All the time we were waiting for the tiniest sign that this may be passing, that he would appear more comfortable and start to look for something to eat.

Alas, it was not to be. After several hours with no improvement we called the vet again. Whilst we waited, we took him for a final walk down the track to the field, where for the first (and last) time he called to the others and one of them answered him. It felt like he was saying goodbye......

The vet told us the only other option was a trip to the hospital and surgery, we did not want to put him through that with no guarantee of success. So we did the only thing we could and let him go. We stayed with him at the end, he'd been given a further dose of painkiller, enough that he started looking around for treats so we could give him a few as the last thing we could do for him.

Afterwards, we brought Sky in to say goodbye as she's the sensitive one, who'd been with him since she was six months old. We think it's important for them to know when one of them passes away, rather than just disappearing from the field never to return. Ever since she has been strangely calm, but there is definitely a sense that things have changed in the herd.

So there we are, at the age of 23, Gandalf is gone. Ali wrote this on Instagram, which I think is a lovely tribute to the horse of a lifetime.

Goodbye old friend, we love you.......

Rock crunching

When we went out in the woods the other day we noticed some big piles of gravel had appeared. Presumably they're going to spread it on the paths to make them more vehicle-friendly in the winter. It's not little smooth, round gravel like you get in posh gardens, it's big uneven, lumpy shapes, calcaire they call it in France.

So naturally we decided to see what the horses would make of it. Going up and down slopes is good training for TREC and all that. Not to mention good practise for just riding out and about.

Well, they just walked up and down it, no problems. Sky might have wonky feet that don't look like a lot of people think they should, but she has no problem taking them and the rest of herself over this sort of terrain.

Who needs shoes anyway? :-)

Do you trust your horse?

Thought provoking quote from Ben Hart on Facebook this morning:

"In general, we want our animal to trust us, and developing the animal’s trust becomes the goal and focus of our work. Often however, when I ask how much an owner trusts their equine, it is clear that the development of trust has been accidentally one sided. We have to learn to trust our equines as much as we want them to trust us."

So do you trust your horse? Do you trust him enough to let go of his head? Ride him without a bit/tight noseband/martingale? Ride him bareback?

Do you trust him enough to be allowed out in a field with other horses? Or enough to take him out of the school for a hack? Have you ever ridden without a bridle at all?

No?

We decided to try spending time with our horses just doing nothing. Not bringing them in, turning them out, grooming them, feeding them, tacking them up, schooling them, but just doing nothing much. Just letting them sniff us, giving them scratches, sitting in their field watching them graze.  We especially love spending time watching them interact with each other and their mates......

We take them for walks. Let them have a graze on the side of the track. Hang out with them whilst they're being horses. Makes the relationship a bit more even sided......

I can highly recommend it!

Why I'm happy to have dirty horses......

Since moving back to the UK there is one thing about the horses that I see here that is really noticeable. They are pretty much all rugged, all of the time. Even when, as it was this last weekend, the weather is sunny and mild and in fact temperatures have been as high as 18 degrees C. We haven't had a cold winter at all, just a very wet one, and that I suspect is a large part of the reason for the extra layers.

When it rains and we get wet, we get cold. Horses don't though. Mine have nice thick waterproof coats that prevent the rain from actually getting through to their skin. You can see in this pic of Gandalf that the white clean bit near the skin is actually dry.

This was taken after weeks of rain. They don't have a field shelter, if it gets really windy the go and hide in the hedges. At night they have to come in to a yard with an open sided barn attached since the landowner doesn't want the horses on the land 24/7 in winter. They are always wet in the morning if it's been raining overnight so clearly don't take shelter in the barn. Unlike the cows they share with!

The other thing about the rain is, well, the mud. Here's how muddy our field has become this winter....

And I reckon this is the real reason for that nice waterproof jacket people seem prepared to spend sometimes hundreds of pounds on. Cos underneath that rug, he'll stay "nice" and clean. Nice for the owner, that is.

But do these owners stop to consider how that horse must be feeling under his rug when the sun is out and the day warms up? When he's losing his winter coat and would love to roll as it's so itchy? Or how he must feel when it's been raining so long the rug is saturated and he can't dry out once the rain stops?

 

Horses don't care how dirty and muddy they are, in fact for Gandalf it would appear the muddier he gets, the better......

 

It's just the humans who care.

 

Someone (who clipped, rugged and stabled her horses) once told me I shouldn't call myself Chevalblanc on the forum we used to frequent as my horses were never white. It would seem that for some people appearance is more important than a horse's wellbeing. Spending a load of money on rugs with pretty patterns on them must make these people feel better, same as tucking their horse up into a nice warm stable at night does. Shame it doesn't make the horse feel better. If you still doubt that, check out this article......

 

Oh, and my horses are white, but only in the summer ;-)

 

 

 

A lot has changed....

So it's new Year's Eve, traditionally time to look back over the last year, a lot has changed for us in the last year. In January, we said goodbye to our lovely Fina as she went to her new home with Sheila in the Lot. When we went to visit a few months later, it was clear she'd settled in well and was happy with her new life.

She'd grown her hair too, suits her......

 

Ali and I then started the sometimes hazardous job of teaching Kinna how to behave, she began the year with many tantrums and arguments.....

Slowly she started to realise that some cooperation would result in an easier life, although she continued to express her opinions........

Sky too began her ridden career, and she also had her moments......!

Mr G was as ever, the perfect gent and took the girls' antics in his stride.

He may or may not have been impressed when after Kinna departed to Sarah's for summer school, she was replaced with another baby, the Blonde Bombshell.....

Towards the second half of the year, we made the decision to relocate back to the UK so some decisions needed to be made. As it was apparent that Kinna wasn't going to grow as much as we'd hoped, we asked Carole up at the riding club if she'd be interested in taking her on, and so off she went. She's now having to work for a living, being schooled by Carole and hacked out by her husband, John, who has his eye on her for a bit of endurance.

And so after 8 years of having horses in France, Gandalf, Sky and Tari moved with us to the UK in December.

And here we are, in Gloucestershire, the horses seem to like their new digs (although they still have some reservations about the cows). The hacking here is.....different, I miss the ease of riding through the vines and the hacks to the river or the lake, but the countryside here is just as scenic and we're looking forward to discovering more of it.

So here's to a good year in 2014, well, it should be, after all, it is the Chinese Year of the Horse!

Gandalf the.......black?

Last week I was given a great excuse to make more fancy dress costumes, i.e. the announcement that they are organising a Halloween Fun Day up at the stables this weekend :-)

So off I toddled to Mondial Tissus, the (not very) local (and very expensive) fabric shop in Bergerac and spent ages looking for something black I could buy lots of without spending a fortune. Which still turned out to involve spending more money than I would have if I'd  invested in a ready made costume on eBay. But where's the fun in that?

Mucho fabric was required due to Ali's desire to go as one of the Nine, or the Ulairi, the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths, Black Riders, servants of the Dark Lord - otherwise known as them big, black-clad scary buggers that chase the Hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.

So armed with many metres of fabric, I set about constructing a costume. This mainly involved making a basic long tunic, adding dangly sleeves and a hood, and then trashing the whole thing to make it look knackered. Easy! Sorted the hood bit by sticking one of Mike's leather hoods from a LARPing costume under it, pilfered a latex sword from the aforementioned LARPing goodies and the job was a good 'un.......

Although there was one teeny problem - the Black Riders (and the clue is in the name) all rode dark coloured horses and as you know, I've got mainly white ones. I did ask Carole up at the stables if we could use her dark bay Trotter but she didn't think he'd be able to cope with the costume......

So I had to draft in good old Gandalf. He was prepared to go over to the dark side for one photoshoot anyway. We did a dress rehearsal a few days ago and got these shots:

I put that last one on Twitter and the nice people at The One Ring.net retweeted it, so now it's had more retweets than anything else I've ever posted. Someone suggested that Shadowfax had changed sides ;-) Maybe I should get some black paint for the party on Saturday.......

Fete du Cheval

For once there was a Fete du Cheval local to us, in Ste Foy la Grande, so we toddled off this afternoon in the sunshine. To be honest, having been to a few of these things I was wondering if we'd see some sorry sights, and there were one or two who were looking a bit unhappy.....

These guys were all flinching away from people trying to stroke them, maybe not the best thing to bring them out in public.....

But there were many more nice looking horses, this huge girl is a Percheron belonging to the guy who sold me Gandalf, she must be twice as wide as him!

She was earning her keep doing carriage rides today....

As were some less than impressed looking donkeys!

And for the first time I actually saw some barefoot and bitless people, this Friesian stallion had beautiful feet, not just unshod but properly barefoot with lovely fat frogs on show when he did his party trick

Pretty sure I've seen them out riding before, with no bridle at all,  only a neckstrap. There were a couple of others in rope headcollars too.
My friend Marianne was there with her lovely paintings, handsome chap in the middle of the top row ;-)

And the Ste Foy Poney Club had some artwork on display too, rather liked this one :-)

There is a spectacle on later, but we had to come home as the SNO was having a tantrum at not being allowed to have a  Barbe à Papa, mainly due to buggering off when she should have stayed in the play area and giving Ali and me a hectic 10 minutes looking for her......

 

Never mind, she's back at school tomorrow.......

Beasts of burden

So I have just finished reading Joe Camp's book, Soul of a Horse. A very interesting read, all about how Joe and his wife first started sharing their life with some horses. This bit really made me think:

"Dr Matt was right when he said that until recently horses were pretty much just beasts of burden. But I believe many of them still are. Just different burdens. Instead of pulling a plow or wagon, they're jumping fences. Or racing. Or doing heavy-handed dressage ballets."

(He's American, so we'll forgive him for not being able to spell plough.)

Last year I remember seeing this promotional video for the Hickstead jumping on Sky. Lots of slow motion footage of the jumping. And lots of big bits, tight reins, heavy studs and leatherwork. Anybody else think these horses do not look happy?

Some of the dressage horses I saw at London 2012 certainly didn't either.

As for racing, starting a ridden career at two is, in my humble opinion, not good for any horse. I also don't like the way most racehorses are kept, little turnout, lots of concentrated feed, rugs, shoes, all the things we do to horses for our convenience, these things certainly aren't convenient for them. A huge percentage of them develop ulcers from the stress of their unnatural lifestyle, hardly surprising is it?

So why does all this happen? Same reason we've been using the horse as a beast of burden for thousands of years, because it suits us and because it makes us money.

But this abuse of the horse's trusting, compliant nature doesn't just go on at the high end of competition. Every time I go to a show here I see unhappy horses and heavy-handed riders. Kids wearing spurs. Ponies in gag bits. Tight nosebands. The infernal de Gogue. Horses getting hit because they didn't understand what the rider wanted of them. The list goes on.......

You don't have to take my word for it. Here are some pics I have taken in the last year or so - and these are just some of people I don't know, plenty of others I could include but this blog gets me into enough trouble as it is ;-)

The human race doesn't have much to be proud of really, does it?

The new girl

Been a bit busy this week. On Thursday, we took Kinns down to my friend Sarah's near Montauban as she is going to spend the summer there getting an introduction to classical dressage. As we were driving all that way (huge thanks to my chauffeur, Tanya), I thought it might be worth checking out  this little cutie whose ad I'd seen on the internet

Turns out she was worth it, not just because she looks like she should be in a L'Oréal ad (and one of my friends thinks she looks like Pamela Anderson) but because she is an unspoilt baby who was a bit apprehensive but was nonetheless prepared to let us take her away from all that she knew and stick her in a trailer (twice).

So she is here now, settling in with Sky at the new field down the road we've been offered the use of, it's clear she's not been handled much, has never had to give her feet, Howard is coming to trim tomorrow, I suspect we won't get much done. She's also had a headcollar on for too long and has a scab under her chin due to it rubbing. And she still has a lot of foal coat, needs a bit of a grooming session.

But we'll get there. She doesn't even know what a carrot is, just like Kinns didn't at first.....she's a yearling, Comtois x Mérens, will definitely get big and chunky enough to carry me around one day, her legs are nearly as wide as Sky's already :-/

Oh, and her "official" name is......Céline. Which I hate. So we are currently brainstorming a better one....

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.....