Playing Ponies

For the next three weeks I'm house-, horse- and dog-sitting. So in addition to spending every day with Quadi, i'll be enjoying the company of Kate's horses and dog whilst she heads for more tropical climes :)

Today was a lazy day in that I wasn't going to ride, but I was busy.

Upon arrival and for the past week or two, the gang were on restricted grazing, a big concern was an attack of laminitis or a colic because of too much new grass. They've gradually strip-grazed their way to a reasonably-sized paddock but today was the day to give them a whole fresh paddock. So I busied myself with electric fencing for a couple of hours, then mucking out. It was windy and rainy which initially irked me, and then I reminded myself I was desperate to be home to do this *lol*

They were most dull in that they had their faces in the grasses as soon as I removed their headcollars, but surfaced a little later to oblige my need to take cameraphone snaps:







I laughed when I took the last one, he was looking very alert and pretty, and I managed to catch him with his eyes closed :)

I'll be up at 7am every day to punt the boys out. My PJ bottoms were on under my jeans this morning, couldn't bear to change properly for the sake of turnout *lol* I had a vague idea I might lunge Quadi this evening but I didn't have the energy to do it properly.

Everyone was fussy about their dinners, not surprising given they'd had a brand new part of the field to graze through. Well, The Baby finished his, good lad! I left the grown-up boys with theirs, I'm sure they'll pick at them overnight. Annoyingly, their daily feeds contain their omperazole. But this is heaped at the top of the feed rather than stirred through so I think they ate the bulk of their meds immediately.

My Prima Ballerina Drama Llama Extraordinaire, however, has apparently been picking at his dinners of late anyway. Anyone ever lucky or unlucky enough to make my horse's acquaintance will know this is outrageous! One of his many monikers is Noo-Noo after the slurpy hoover-thing in Teletubbies which noisily cleans up spilled food :)

I thought i might start giving him sugarbeet now that we're out of summer and Quadi will need to build muscle and have energy for work. But given that he's just moved paddocks I didn't feel an increase in feed would be wise. Sugarbeet would have been ideal to encourage him to eat. I tried adding mint. That was enticing for a second. Then I tried adding a smidgeon of the yearling's balancer (which in retrospect was probably worse than adding the sugarbeet but it was immediately available!). This sort of worked but even still he stopped eating way before I left them in darkness.

Quadi also has a problem with the stable he's been giving, I'm rolling my eyes as I type this...he won't tell me if it's a question of feng shui, dimensions, furnishings, light sources, etc, but I'll try and find out tomorrow ;)