The dark horse returns....

So here I am again, spending a bit of time with Organza. Mixed day today......

She's just moved to a new home, still in her little herd of 3. They've been there for a few days, I didn't want her to get too settled into thinking she's retired, so went for a visit today. Took her out of the field, initial anxiety, then attempts to eat, then shuffling feet around, then the realisation that she's OK on her own but still knowing were they are.

After a few minutes, happy to stand with me doing nothing, still alert but not anxious. Moved her a bit further, one of the others called, anxiety returns, I wait. When I get a calmer horse again, we tack up, Cait tacks up Kyriane, we go for a walk, Ali on Organza, she's alert again but not too worried.

She watches Kyrie doing some trotting around and seems ok with that.

So I get foolishly overconfident and tell Cait she could go and do her own thing. As Kyriane hooleys away it's too much for the girl, me trying to get her attention back by using the lunge line seems to just make it worse, Ali does an (actually not very) involuntary dismount, Organza takes off after her friend, I lose a bit of skin on my hand as I didn't let go fast enough.......

Then we get her back, she's still stressed, actually shaking, she takes off again and heads off back to the field after a brief hesitation over whether to stay with Kyriane or go back to Netty. So we are clearly going to have to take things much, much more slowly. My fault, have forgotten what Fina was like at first.......

So we went for another walk, but just around the edge of the field and along the vines a bit so she could still see Netty, and then got Cait to move Kyriane away slowly........and when she was calm about it she got her to come back as a reward.

It's a start......

Jumping and Jappeloup

Interesting day at St Seurin sur l'Isle on Sunday. Not exactly successful, but we had fun anyway......

Nahiade, the big horse from the club that Ali was riding, was fine to load, travelled well, was happy to be hanging around by the trailer, tacked up and in the first collecting ring. Then she went into the main collecting ring with the jumps and after the first one, charged off round and round in circles...... So Ali just sat there and let her get on with it, and got her calmed down and ready to jump some more practise jumps, and eventually she was OK jumping them more like she does back home at the club.

First competition nerves, we thought, then Ali went in to do her round. She jumped the first two fine then shot off round the arena and poor Ali had to really fight to get her under control enough to jump the rest of the course. She got her round, but racked up a score of faults for "refusals" (charging past a jump she was supposed to go over) and time faults. Her instructor, Carole, initially thought it might have been Ali's nerves getting to thet horse, but then she got her calmed back down in the collection ring before the second class and she was cool as a cucumber. But once back in the ring, the same thing happened, it looked to me like she (Nahiade) was really stressing about the whole thing. Ali got eliminated that time for missing 3 jumps.

So Carole decided to jump her herself and did an engagement sur terrain for the Club 2 class.......and exactly the same thing happened, calm as you like in the collecting ring, and tearing round like a demon in the class. So we are a bit stumped by this. I wonder if something bad happened to her during a comp and now she thinks it'll be like that every time? Maybe that's why she was sold off? Or maybe she just got too used to doing speed classes......

If only they could talk........

Still, got some nice pics....

.....even though it was seriously chucking it down all afternoon, this was the collecting ring

St Seurin's claim to fame is that it was the home of Jappeloup, the little French jumping horse that won gold at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. I remember him doing a lot of the same competitions as Milton, one of my faves. As it happens they've just made a film about him (only in French as far as I know) which we went to see the other day.

Here he is in the eighties alongside the late, great Milton

and winning that gold medal

He's buried at St Seurin, we saw his grave and his old stable door plaque

 

And guess what? Pierre Durand, his rider, was actually there giving out the prizes......

Shame Ali didn't win one....... :-/

Kinna likes to keep us on our toes.....

Yesterday, Ali and Kinna parted company for the first time. Once again it was all about the grass.....Ali had gone ahead of us and asked her to canter back so she decided halfway along to stop for a snack. She did a few all four feet off the ground bounces, I caught the start of it on camera:

then the saddle which wasn't girthed up tightly started slipping down her neck so Ali didn't really have a chance.......

Kinns immediately started stuffing her face, totally not bothered by the saddle round her ears, so Ali had to take it all off and resaddle her. We continued our ride, we were going to the vet's to get their annual jabs done without having to pay the call out fee.

They were fine with this, the vet's is on a big roundabout on the main Bordeaux - Bergerac road but the horses are well used to heavy traffic. The locals are somewhat less used to seeing horses apparently, as a fair amount of slowing down and rubbernecking went on, good job there wasn't a pile up! Then the vet came out with the microchip reader, as we needed to get the girls' details verified before they can go on the list to do Club competitions (paperwork, as ever, has to be done if you want to do anything at all in this country). Kinna took one look at that and backed away eyes rolling and snorting. She doesn't like the vet, ever since she was microchipped as a baby, as they don't use a local anaesthetic here and it hurt. In the end I had to read her chip, and the vet had to sneak up on her with the jab whilst I distracted her with an apple......

Gandalf meanwhile had dozed off in the sun and Sky was trying to eat the shrubbery. Left them with Ali whilst I went to pay the (still overinflated) bill and the girls were trying to edge her towards the grass on the edge of the car park.....

But then we got back on to ride home, and Kinns was good as gold all the way back. Maybe she'd had enough fun for one day....  ;-)

Pink my ride.....

Here's an article from the Daily Mail I saw today. No I don't read the ghastly rag, it was on Facebook this morning. Now aside from the concerns that I have with attaching bits of metal to a horse's hoof anyway, being a fluffy barefoot treehugger type, my other complaint is why do they have to come in pink?

Why do traditional nail on shoes come in pink too?

 

or hoof boots?

What's the point? They're going to end up covered in shit mud anyway, aren't they? So is this....

...and this

Now as the mother of a five year old pink princess I can understand that little girls might like to have everything in pink and are too young to know how damn impractical it all is (and presumably mummy will clean everything anyway). But an increasing number of grown women seem to be parting with their hard earned cash for pink nasties, and a quick Google reveals you can get just about anything in the puke inducing puce....I mean, who thinks this would look good on their horse?

or this?

or this?

or this?

Well, she does, obviously, but don't get me started on that.....

I know this will probably annoy even more people than previous rants, but I really do HATE pink!!!

First TREC of the year

Yesterday was fun. We went up to Beaumont again for a TREC special PTV competition. Ali got to ride Sunny, Tamzin's big bay horse and she also did a round on Ches. We got there a bit early so we had a sneak preview of the course, to show Ras, Tamzin's 5 year old Arab, that nothing was going to eat him......

Then Isabelle and the rest of the team showed up so we got the horses ready and the competition started. Tanya went first on Chester. He did his usual ambling along, tried to eat the gate, got his head down during the immobility and generally did the least amount of work possible.....he woke up enough at the end to actually jump the hedge though!

Polo went next and was fine, unsurprising given his gymnkhana background.....

and given his size the low branch wasn't exactly a challenge!

 

 

Then it was Ali's turn on Sunny. He is 16.3hh and not exactly skinny, so it's a lot of horse to hold together. There was an interesting moment at the gate opening.......here she is saying "what do I do now?!"

She got it closed in the end without dropping it though, somewhat unorthodox technique....

Unfortunately, the low branch was a bit too low for Sunny....

But he jumped beautifully, I think Ali might have enjoyed that bit!

She also managed to get on him from the ground, she's very bendy.....

Little Ras was funny, he did fine with most of it, then suddenly decided the gate was out to get him and shot off across the course, I had to dive out of the way after I'd taken this pic!

Then Ali did a round on Ches, who decided he was going to be scared of the carriage that came trotting up the road and leapt out of the middle of the ruelle he was supposed to be crossing.

So Ali came 6th on him, Hollie was 4th and Ali came third on Sunny. The winner was a girl on a Merens riding in just a headcollar, she was brilliant!

Looking forward to the next one......would love to take Kinna next time to see how she copes.

A controversial choice?

So yesterday I went shopping in our local supermarket, Leclerc. This being France, they sell a lot of things that you don't often see in Tescos. They have a tankful of live lobsters and crabs just waiting to be taken away and dunked into boiling water by eager chefs. You can buy whole bunnies ready skinned and gutted for the pot, minus their ears but bizarrely with the eyeballs still in. There is a whole range of snails in the freezer section and various poultry on the butcher's counter with heads and feet still attached and dangling attractively over the edge.

And then of course there's the horse. This was the display for Basque specialities on promotion a couple of weeks ago.

Whilst a lot of folks in the UK are indignantly protesting at the horsemeat which seems to be present in everything from "beef"burgers to lasagne, consumption of horsemeat in this country has apparently gone up, as more of the French are trying it to see what the fuss is all about.

So yesterday, fancying a bit of steak for dinner, I decided to look at more than just the beef section. Faux filet de boeuf, I was surprised to discover, was €23 a kilo. Further along the chiller, just past the veal, was faux fillet de cheval - costing a far more reasonable €12.90 a kilo. Yes, I know, horses destined for slaughter have long journeys in horrendous conditions. This particular steak came all the way from Mexico, where I know their transportation/handling/slaughtering record is awful. I have seen video footage from a slaughterhouse in South America and it was far worse than the one doing the rounds on the internet of secret filming in a UK slaughterhouse recently.

 But these days, price is an important factor in my choice of supermarket shopping, so I bought the horse instead of the beef. The horse is already dead, after all. If I didn't buy it, someone else would. There will always be a market for horsemeat in Europe, whether I eat it or not.

 So I took it home for my dinner. And it was delicious.....

Also it's apparently much better for me than beef, containing less fat and more of the cholesterol-lowering omega 3 fatty acids.......so you've got to wonder, really, why don't people eat more of it?

Another lake ride

So  today we rode to the lake. The weather forecast lied to us about it being sunny. Until we were almost home of course, then a bit of sun broke through, just in time to get this pic of Kinna cantering like a sensible big grown up horsie

She has been a total star today, no spooking, no bucking, no throwing her toys out of the pram about not being allowed to graze, no acting up when a load of baby Lippizaners came hooleying up to the fence (why do they breed so many? Are they destined for lasagne or Ikea meatballs?)

We have been past massive tractors, several bonfires, lots of yapping dogs (some loose), through dense woodland requiring some contortion from her rider, over ditches, up and down steep banks, through massive puddles and she has calmly done it all

 

She really has exceeded my expectations today :-)

She even went for a splash in the lake

Sky on the other hand was a pain in the arse, because she wanted the grass, so there was the usual protest in the form of planting, going backwards, stopping dead and doing a little prance about, so that, coupled with the fact that she was cold due to the lack of sun, caused the SNO to bail out when we got to Jane's, so she went to the lake in the car with her father and Sky got to spend all day in the field being chased around by Maverick. She must have annoyed him as she's got a huge bite mark on her back!

Managed to get her to do a bit of sensible cantering on the way home though.....