Moving on

Diary

Posted: Thursday 8 March, 2007

by Rosemary at 8:34pm in Equines 1 comment Comments closed

Dan has finally decided to take the plunge and resign from his job at the Council and go freelance. But that's not what this diary entry is about.

Partly because Dan will be working away a bit, we decided to approach our neighbour and ask if we could graze Smokey with his horses. A trial period has been agreed so weekend before last (is it that long since we posted anything?), I long reined Smokey from Blackfaulds home. Claire came with me for moral support.

There are three other horses across the road - one retired trotter called Johnny's Decision (Johnny); one trotter called Coalford Legend (Coaly) and a two year old soon-to-be trotter called Winning Hand (Andy). Smokey was turned out with Johnny and Andy and we waited to see what would happen. In an ideal world, we would have kept Smokey in a seperate area for a while, so they could get used to each other. But it's not an ideal world!

Claire took the videos - I think they're pretty good! If you listen closely you can hear the intakes of breath as Johnny and Smokey show each other the soles of their hooves. But none of them are shod and no harm was done. We all had a good laugh when Johhny went for his "bath".

Some interesting horse behaviour on show - Smokey managed to expend a whole lot less energy than the other two. In the last clip, the reason he pulls up short is that he saw the haynets tied to the fence.

The videos were taken on Saturday. There was a bit of chasing on Sunday; by Monday it was really half-hearted and now they're all quite content. Andy's being gelded next week, all things being equal, so that will put his gas on a peep and quieten things down a bit.