Stringhalt Attack – Part II: Barn Drama

It wasn’t enough for Copper to come down with string halt and basically be completely broken and mostly unrideable for the next twelve to eighteen months, oh no….

Unfortunately, his string halt diagnosis brought on a whole pile of barn drama that had to be dealt with as well, and that was a saga in and of itself!

The set up with the private paddocks at our facility work like this:

Someone buys into the paddock with a $2,500 deposit and now “owns” the rights to the land. They are responsible for all interior fencing, and the care and management of the pasture, barring weed spraying. They are allowed to buy and set up any structures they may like to within the guidelines; this can be as simple as a garden shed to hold tack, to a stable, muck heap, hay shed, yards, etc - the full she-bang.

The owners of the private paddock are then allowed to host a “guest” to help defray the weekly cost of agistment - or rent on the land.

I moved into a private two horse paddock as a guest, and well, ended up with a homeless horse.

It’s a long and involved story, but it started earlier than the stringhalt. Previously, there’d been a few issues as we were settling into the shared arrangement – things like the owner moving horses around and not filling up water troughs properly, not telling me when the worming was happening so the worming didn’t happen simultaneously on both horses like it needs too, gates getting broken, (Copper apparently tried to jump a gate and bent it! But must have scrambled over somehow…) – incidents that can cause problems at the time, but honestly, I thought we’d moved past all of it.

When the problems occurred, I’d done my best to communicate clearly and fix any issues my horse had caused. In short, I’d done my best to hold up my end of the bargain and be a responsible guest.

However, when the vet said that Copper absolutely had to be kept off the the flatweed and needed to be penned/yarded for as long as necessary, all hell kind of broke loose and we were basically threatened to be kicked out of the paddock. I had to let Copper back into the paddocks (because someone else down there had said that would be okay to do… Um, what?! Since when do we veto vet’s orders with a random’s “advice”?) or move him out in three weeks. The situation came down to the fact that it was inconvenient for the owner to let him stay in the only yard area that was suitable, and she wasn’t happy that he had to be in there.

Past issues were dragged up again, and though I did my best to handle the situation, I knew it wasn’t going to work any longer. I didn’t want to stay somewhere where I wasn’t welcome and were I couldn’t trust the owner to deal with the necessary management of my horse in a reasonable manner.

To top it all off while this back and forth was happening – Copper developed a lymphatic systemic reaction.

- Wut you meenz; I iz twubble? Corz not!! Now FEED me human bean! -

It started off as a bump above his right eye, and I thought that maybe a bit of dust or hayseed from the round bale he was eating from had gotten in his eye and caused the swelling. I’d seen that happen before, the incident that developed a partial cataract on the outside edge of his left eye. I palpitated all around the eye and couldn’t see any redness, weeping, or tenderness.

The next day I came out to check on him and it had gone down, so I kept a close eye on it. Come the day after and it had drained down under his jaw. I thought that was really odd – was it an abscess that had moved? I put Tuff Rock on it to see if it would burst and drain, like what had happened when he had a possible case of fistulous withers.

Nothing happened so I called the vet – my vet was away on holidays, so I had to call someone else about it, and it was four days after the bump had first appeared. Not-my-vet was concerned it was a case of strangles…. I was like Huh???

Note that:

- Copper had absolutely no discharge from the nostrils

- No fever

- Was bright eyed and eating his food

- Swelling was only under one side of the jaw

Anywho, I then had to remove Copper into an isolation paddock as per the vet’s recommendation.

So we walked him down to the hospital paddock which is near the main office buildings and stables, and set him up in there until the vet could assess him.

Blood test that revealed nothing and a double course of antibiotics later, so – two weeks in total - Copper still had a lump under his jaw and was still stuck in the hospital paddock.

Then the day after he finished those antibiotics, his back legs puffed up like sausages from the hocks down. I took his rugs off to discover he had swollen lumps all underneath his body, and a swollen sheath besides.

I had a chat to the manager and she confirmed my suspicions that the swelling was in his lymphatic system – he had a case of systemic edema. As it was a public holiday when this cropped up, as well as a Sunday (!! Why horse, why??) we decided that we’d see how he was doing in the evening and call the vet out the next day if there was no improvement.

Copper seemed a bit down and quiet at this point, but he didn’t have a temperature, and was eating quite well. So besides being a bit moody, all his systems were functional and his vitals were sound.

I was very relieved to come back that evening to discover the swelling had gone down by half! The next day it was still there, but less and by the middle of the week he was fine again.

Ugh. Horses.

I still have no idea what caused the reaction – it wasn’t bacterial, the vet didn’t think it was viral, so??? Stress perhaps?

My reasoning was this: he has been used to a way large grazing area (up to 10 or 12 acre paddocks), a large herd and a much more “natural” way of living.

Since moving, his grazing has be cut down to 1.5 acre paddocks at most, then he got stringhalt, was yarded in a tiny paddock area and had to be hard fed with round bale hay, and hard feed everyday.

On top of that, he was now separated from his one and only paddock mate, but then even worse, he was isolated for two weeks.

After that reaction, we kept him there for a day or two to monitor him, but then we had to make decisions about whether to move him back to the old paddock where the owner did not want us, or wait it out and try to find a new paddock to move into asap.

We decided to wait it out, and after one failed match up, we finally found a new situation.

Six weeks of living in the hospital paddock, being homeless hobos, and Copper moved into a new home!

Thankfully, he appears to have settled in nicely at the new place, and he has made friends with the chestnut mare who is more than happy to boss him about.

I’m happy there too – after a bit of stress and hassle getting everything organized at the new place, including a lot of flooding and swamp situations when winter really kicked in and brought buckets of rain (and we still need to sort out the stable, but we’ll get there) – I think everything seems to have worked out well.

Our new host is super lovely, and her mare is gorgeous. Copper is quite content and happy I think (he loves all the extra cuddles and treats he’s getting at the moment  : P ) and we have great facilities at our new home that are proving to be invaluable for winter.

But *whew!* such barn drama!

And to be honest, I am really uncomfortable with the whole owner/guest arrangement now. Yes, at the moment everything appears to be fine, but I had thought that previously, only to be booted out of our paddock over a situation that I had absolutely no control over. You can bet your buttons I wouldn’t have yarded Copper unless I absolute had too, and you can also bet I would have done anything I could to keep him from getting stringhalt, but you just can’t control these things sometimes!!

So while I really do hope things continue to go well with our current arrangement, I am also thinking that we will start saving for our “own” paddock. One day, if we need it, then at least we’ll have that option.

See ya,

bonita

Pics or it didn’t happen…

So this happened at 6 o’clock Monday morning – a ride!

He’s had two weeks off due to busyness and sickness on my part - lame, I know, but at least we are back in the saddle!

Predictably Copper was stiff, a little more unco than usual, and not a very soft ride for our first schooling session back but we still had a decent ride so I was super happy about that.

I dropped my stirrups for 10 minutes and did some no stirrup walk/trotting while circling and it really was some of the best circle work, in terms of consistent bend, that we’ve had in a while - despite the two weeks off.

I know why – it’s because my hips tend to contort on a circle, and my shoulders tip and twist and basically I make it super hard for Copper to actually work a circle correctly. I don’t know why this is – my theory is that it’s because I’ve spent so many years fighting my saddle for a correct position that the muscle memory is overtaking me and making me twist up like a pretzel.

But when I drop my stirrups something magical happens and my hips suddenly start sitting where they are supposed to be! My leg drops long to balance me, so my shoulders stay back, and basically everything suddenly works!! :O

Solution: lots of no stirrup work – particularly when riding circles. At least once, each rein, every ride. The plan is to retrain my muscles without stirrups and hopefully then be able to translate that back into the stirrups later on.

After that, I picked up my stirrups again and we had a nice as-good-as-can-be-expected trot and a decent canter on each lead.

I’m pleased that the spring sillies have gone away, and that I finally have a horse with a brain again. For about a month or so there it was like riding a four year old!

I would lunge him, and he’d be physically tired when I got up to ride him, but his brain would still be skittery, and he’d be “up” – ready to spook at the slightest thing.

It was the weirdest feeling – usually when a horse is physically tired, and Copper is like this – their brains usually calm right down. But with the spring sillies, I’d be pushing as hard as I can to keep him going, yet feeling like his brain was spinning it’s hamster wheel as fast as it could…

A very strange feeling!

So I’m very glad my pony-boy is feeling much more like himself again. Even if it was good practise working with a tense horse, I much prefer my steady Standie instead!

See ya,

bonita

Why Your Significant Other Should Be Trained In Basic Horse Management

TLDR version: Make sure your significant other can do basic horse care and management just in case you have an accident and cant’! There’s nothing like having backup when you need it.

I think you all know where this is going right?

I dismounted off Copper yesterday, and I think I some how landed in a small divot I didn’t see under the grass.  I came down on the side of my foot and twisted/sprained my bad ankle (the right one which I had severely sprained back in May).

This ankle has been unsteady for the last three or so odd months, I keep wrenching it, stepping on that foot wrong and semi-twisting it due to all manner of incidences - standing on Duplo (almost as bad as Lego. For reals…), half falling down stairs, falling into little potholes, you know – normal clumsy stuff that is not at all helped by the fact that I’m now 20 weeks pregnant and have a butt-ton of relaxin hormone loosening up my joints and muscles and turning me into the biggest klutz (No, seriously. I never drop as much stuff, stumble, trip and fall over as I do when pregnant. :/  But my OB is okay with me riding, so we are all good. :D )

- Conformation shot: beginning of spring… Is there any muscling improvement? I think so -

Anyways, enough back story, onto the good stuff – what I think happened was just fine, what I felt was ALL. THE. PAIN.  So I’m standing there, hanging onto the saddle for dear life as I’m fighting not to pass out right there and then. When my head stopped spinning I dropped down on the ground. The Pon-Pon was all curious and all “Hey, Human, wot you doin’? You ‘kay? Okey-dokey, I eat grass now…”

I just lay there, then I tried to get up and had to sit down again. Copper munched away, but he kept on ‘checking’ on me which I thought was cute! What wasn’t so cute was that I had a horse and a toddler to wrangle away from the arena and back to the yards.

I had Theodore (my three year old son) with me. Usually he plays, and I ride, and we are all good. At this point, he was happily playing with his diggers a couple of feet away from me, but I knew I had to get him, the horse, and myself somewhere safe so that I didn’t have worry about the horse or the child in case I did actually faint.

So I’m organizing the child, making sure Copper doesn’t step on his reins while grazing (the last thing I need is a broken bridle!) as well as trying not to pass out or stand on my right foot.  I helped Theodore pack up his toys, then we walked (I hobbled obviously) to the gate where I had to direct Theodore how to go under the fence when he has a big bag of toys in one hand and a giant stick in the other!

Theo finally got through and out of the way, so I could bring Copper through safely and follow behind. I just didn’t want my little guy anywhere near Copper when I was in so much pain and there was no way I was able to be alert enough to prevent accidents or stop Theodore from doing something silly.

Thankfully, Hubby had arrived by then to pick us up, but while I’m hobbling over to the car I’m thinking “Why on earth haven’t I trained Copper to support me if I do have an accident?” in between having to stop and rest on his neck to keep from keeling over. He won’t walk on with me hanging onto him, but gee, I sure wished he would at that point!

To cut the saga short, I manage to get over to the yards, call Caleb (Le Hubby) and gasp out what happened, then I  had to lie down and direct him on how to untack Copper - although he knows most of what do to already which was sooo handy, because there is no way I could have done it, and I wasn’t in much of a state to be able to do much direction.

I was glad Caleb already knows how to do some of the simple stuff, but I really want to step it up a bit after this event. If he could mix feed and groom well enough to make sure the saddle mark is all gone, that would be good too…

Yeah. My horse got turned out for the first time ever with the saddle sweat patch still there. Not a good look. :S  But at least he got turned out ‘coz there was no way I was going to be able to make it out to his paddock to do that!

Whew. What a story. If you got this far, well done!

As for the ride itself; it was good, but we are still muddling a lot. My current thoughts are that I might be too concerned and fussy about Copper’s frame – how he is or isn’t carrying himself uphill and forwards (not head set – I try not to think about that at all, because I know it will come in time!).

I think I need to stop trying to put so much pressure him to be super light in front and do more work on relaxing his back and producing as much uphill as he can manage while also doing some figures. He is really light while going around the outside track, but we really need to get stuck into our circles and serpentines now, because he tends to dive onto the forehand again when asked to bend. Which is not so good.

You can’t have a half light horse… It means he isn’t truly balanced or carrying himself. So that’s the next step in our training. Transitions and bending. Transitions while bending! Apparently walk-trot transitions on a 20m circle are hard. 

But I’m going to stop now before you all choke on the giant lumps of text.

See ya,

bonita

Arrrghh!!! Rant on a OTSB’s Trot

Today I am going to be posting Playing Around With Tack Changes, a rant. 

/Rant Begin/

So I have been blogging over, and over, and over again about Copper’s trot and how it’s a gosh-awful ex-trotter OTSB bullet train for disaster* (don’t remember? Try here and here and here).  I’ve tried buying him a new saddle, changing my riding techniques, buying him a new girth and bit (more on that another time…) – I’ve tried longer walk warm ups, lateral work, spirals, circles, no circles, cantering, not cantering, just about everything I can think of, and to date, I think I’ve only managed to unlock his back successfully at a trot all of, oh, twice.  In the ten + years I’ve been riding him. TWICE!!!

To be fair, most of that time, I had no idea what I was doing or trying to achieve with him. All I knew is that he was hard to ride, and his trot was always “uncontrollable” for me. My Dad could ride Copper just fine, but I always struggled.

It’s really only been this last year or so, when I sold Joey and started riding Copper properly again, that I’ve really been delving into his trot work – the hows, whys and wherefores.

But for all the rider breakthroughs and ‘duh’ moments, like, yes, he really does need a new saddle, I still haven’t figured out how to get his back moving in the damn trot.

Which is only like the second gait. We haven’t properly worked at his canter for years! I started cantering him a little bit more recently to try and improve his trot but he’s gone back to his motorcycle hooning days because he is not balanced in the trot so he can’t freakin’ balance in the canter… ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

I seriously am so fed up right now. And the whole reason for this is that I asked an innocent question on a FB Dressage forum I’m a part of which ran along the lines of “I can’t seem to post to my OTSB’s trot so I spend most of the time doing a sitting trot – is this a training issue or a rider issue and do I need to fix it right now or wait for his trot to improve?”

Some people were all “No, it’s okay – it’s great you’re doing sitting trot” and others were asking if he was pacing, but the clincher comment and the one I immediately recognized as hitting the nail on the head was this one -

“It may be that he's too tight in the back - there are different side effects of tight back and too smooth to post can be one of them. That means he won't have any kind of swing and will keep his body still while just legs move - very possibly something useful from the track while pulling. If you're going at a quick tempo you should slow the tempo and work on balance which will help and allow swing.”

And I went Yes! That Is Our Problem!!

And then instantly fell into a spiral of doom, gloom and depression because….

I’ve been freakin’ trying to slow him down and balance him for what feels like a century. AT LEAST over a YEAR…

I can’t post to unlock his back and let it swing, because he leans into the bit and charges around on the forehand like a freight train at full speed.

I can’t slow him down posting or even in two point because he doesn’t listen to my seat and previously mentioned bullying through the rein aids and locking his jaw around the bit.

I can’t do spirals and circles to slow him down because all the handy lateral work has shown him how to evade through his shoulder and he basically shoulder-ins out of the circle and turns the whole things in a- ugh, I don’t even know what.

And, and, and…

Well, I just don’t know what to do with him at this point!! I’m at my wits end, so of course I’m going to go Google exercises to unlock a horse’s back at the trot and get it swinging. I don’t know if I’ll find anything useful.

If I don't, I guess I’ll try trotting poles. He at least has to use his back over them even if I still can’t slow him down.  *SIGH*

Dem Depressed Feels. I haz a sad.

/End Rant/

bonita

Mid-week Ride. It Happened.

Just after I was having a good ol’ pity fest over being a weekend rider, I rode yesterday (Wednesday). There’s no photographic evidence, but I swear it happened! And it was epic. Well, being able to ride was, the ride itself not so much…

Copper is super fresh still; there’s a ton of green spring grass and clover coming up, so he’s all “Weeeeeee! Running!” and I’m all “Gah! Slow down! Can’t we have one ride where we’re not bolting around every two minutes without having to walk the entire time??”

Seriously. He’s a hard horse to ride. You have to work for every stride, every minute you are on his back. Not that he is spooky or silly, it’s more like, if you are not constantly working on releasing his tension or your own tension, you won’t get any softness with him. Not a single bit.

He can be soft, but you have to work *exceptionally* hard for it.

It’s much too easy to disintegrate into a pulling match with him. He is all too ready to tense up if you so much as twitch a hair out of a soft, correct position, and then he takes off, and you tense up, and he tenses up even more…. And there you have it. It’s a war between horse and rider. Nasty.

I try like anything to avoid this, but it still happens occasionally. Like yesterday. We started off ok, had a normal walk warm up and some good walk-trot-walk transitions.

I like to ride without stirrups for the first ten minutes or so, but I am not sure that that was helpful for Copper yesterday. As soon as I picked up my stirrups I noticed he had really stiff shoulders, and a tight back behind his withers.

So I spent the next half an hour trying to get him to release his back while trotting. We did the most awful spiral-in circles; no geometry or even full circling to speak of. We went up, we went down, I tried to post from my hips but couldn’t even get my butt out of the saddle?? I did the head flexion trick, but that only loosened his shoulders for a short while, and not his back, so he was tight again almost straight away.

We even did leg yields successfully! And yes, I was right. He did only need a seat aid, not a leg aid as well. D’oh. But we’re leg yielding at a trot now, yay! 

Too bad the yielding only activated his hindquarters, but still did not loosen his back. Ugh. So frustrating. He can be tense and work through his butt. He is the master at using all different parts of his body while still holding tension and blocking in others. 

His back is a tricky place to release. I’m not even sure how I got it to relax in the end, but something clicked. I did a lot of reaching forwards with the inside rein to allow a place of softness, and I tried dropping my shoulders down and back to release that muscle between my shoulder blades, (under my bra strap). I also blew out through my mouth and concentrated on releasing any tension in my seat.

So like I said, something- I don’t what- clicked. He lifted his back, and suddenly I could post and sit to his trot comfortably!  He was blowing and snorting, and his back was swinging and soft. Best of all, his gait was also rhythmical and cadenced. We did walk-trot transitions and it was still soft and relaxed. 

Finally, I had some quality trotting from him.  I don’t know how we got there, but I’m going to keep trying to do it again and again – without the battling in between!

He’s so tricky to figure out. I just hope I’m actually improving him and myself, and not muddling the both of us up. I miss having lessons.

I suppose I just have to keep on trying to listen to his responses in the meantime. One thing is for sure, he’s not at all shy about letting me know when I have it wrong!

See ya,

bonita