Dino is a bit bored being stuck in:

Gosh, not updated here for a while! Oops!

It’s been a bit manic since my last update as I had an exam, which was extremely annoying. Dino has mostly been on good form, but the day after I did my exam I thought he felt a bit stiff. We’ve been out hacking a bit and trying to stay out of the school and have been working over poles to try and get his core strength up. Every time I start to push him a bit more he seems to get stiff through that weak right hip. I spoke to the Feedmark ladies at Olympia last week (OMG! The dressage was amazing!) and we’re trying him on Activet supplement for a couple of months. It’s for older horses but it has some boswellia, glucosamine, MSM, vitamin E, selenium – good muscle and joint stuff basically. He’s not stiff enough to make me think I need to get the osteo back to him but I think if we could make him a smidge more comfortable he’d use himself better and we could build up some muscle. He’s just not quite stepping through.

We’re doing a bit of straightness training too which will hopefully help. I’ve signed up for the mastery, even though it was very expensive, and I’m going through all the fundamentals stuff at the moment. Hopefully the combination of the Activet & ST will help him use that hip better and not get stiff or sore. Difficult with this sort of thing, as I well know from my own physiological issues; you need to do the exercises correctly sometimes through slight discomfort to build the correct muscles.

We do have a bit of mud fever as of, well, Thursday I guess. I went over his legs really thoroughly on Wednesday and there was nothing but by Saturday I found what I thought was some mud but when I pulled it off it was a scab and it started bleeding. 😥 I clipped his feathers today which he was very upset about and I found I could feel a lot of small scabs, and see a few larger ones which I’ve removed. He looks very silly now and will be in for the week but I think I’ve caught it very early. Mostly his skin is very pink but not actually too broken. A week in won’t hurt given the state of our ‘fields’ (I use the term loosely!!!) at present. It’s awful. I’ve been talking about moving him East and thinking about the timescale for that and I’m wondering if I should try and do it before next winter. Frith is just awful at this time of year. 🙁

Still musing about taking him DIY in the New Year; one of the girls who stables her horses at the yard is taking over as livery manager. On one hand she does know her stuff (when she’s not letting her dressage trainer put her Friesian in draw reins) ….on the other…she’s a bully and has a temper. A really really bad temper. I’ve seen how she handles her own horses when she’s in a bad mood and I have concerns.

So Olympia last year my instructor talked me into buying white jods and getting my butt out to some competitions. This we have done and hopefully there will be more dressage in the New Year, along with some clear round jumping. But this year at Olympia I treated myself to a body protector so hopefully I can get Dino out to Great Westwood or Milton Keynes EC for some baby cross country 😮 We shall see!!

I shall try to keep this blog a bit more up to date but meanwhile have a Christmas Dino-deer*:

*we had a bit of an argument about the bells. They slightly freaked him out.