So, just before Christmas, Tom’s new ultra-high-fenced turnout (hereafter known as Colditz Turnout) was finished. Yay! And he loved it.<\/p>\n
He loved it so much that he actually stayed in it. Although when he cantered around it every morning, looking up at the top rail, I’m not too sure if he was thinking ‘Nah’, or were the words ‘I could do that’ running through his little head?<\/p>\n
Anyway, he stayed in it.<\/p>\n
And then the weather changed. First we had two days of minuses celsiuses*<\/strong> that made the act of even thinking of turning the horses out a foolish one.<\/p>\n Then we had the snow. You may have seen some of the snow in the Youtube clip that I put in a blog post a couple of days ago?<\/p>\n Well it snowed a fuckload more that night, so much more that I couldn’t get up to the stables to see the boys the next day (yesterday).<\/p>\n Somewhere between the ‘And then the weather changed’ paragraph and the ‘Then we had the snow’ paragraph was one day in which Tom started behaving very oddly.<\/p>\n He stopped eating.<\/p>\n He didn’t eat his breakfast or his tea and barely touched his haylage net \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I mean *barely touch it*. And he hadn’t been kicking the door at mealtimes either.<\/p>\n My first thought was ‘Fuckit! Tom’s got colic!’ and picked up the phone and hit the speed-dial button to the Equine Hospital before you could think ‘Ohmygodhorsesdiefromcolic!!’.<\/p>\n But then something made me hit the cancel button. ‘Relax, Mr Rabbit’ said the smooth and silky voice in my head. Did I mention I’m suffering from Cabin Fever due to being snowed in? Well I am.<\/p>\n ‘Just wait until you can get up there to see things with your own eyes’, continued the honeyed tones. So I did. And what my eyes told me when I got up to the yard were (was?) (were?) (was?) (fuckit) and what my eyes showed me was Tom standing in his stable, looking bright-eyed and (almost) bushy-tailed and full of beans and mischief.<\/p>\n He looked very alert, his bright eyes looked keen, not dull, his coat was bright and shiny, not stale-looking, and he took the carrots out of my hand with a cheeky grin on his face. I also noticed that his bucket of water had been almost drained, and it would have been filled less than an hour previously. And there was absolutely no sign of sweating and that, my friend, is a major symptom of the dreaded condition. And there were poos in his stable.<\/p>\n So, not colic then.<\/p>\n I gave him some hay and he began eating that.<\/p>\n Hmm\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n Not eating breakfast or tea? Not eating haylage? Not kicking the door at mealtimes? Drinking healthily, snaffling carrots out of my hand (and coat pocket) and willing to eat hay? And the condition of his coat and eyes both perfect?<\/p>\n Definitely not colic.<\/p>\n But what?<\/p>\n I asked Sammi to change his tea\/breakfast combo; we decided to drop the sugarbeet and Alfa-A and instead include some pasture mix and upped the quantity of conditioning cubes. I also asked that we drop the haylage and gave him hay instead.<\/p>\n And yesterday I asked Sammi to give Tom some gentle work of a ‘long and low’ nature, because I was trapped at home in the snow.<\/p>\n She later reported that he’d eaten his breakfast and tea and before his tea he had worked, initially slightly stiff, and then he became relaxed and went *very nicely* for her. I think she’s more than a little in love with Tom.<\/p>\n Today I managed to get up to the stables. Tom’s coat looked in excellent condition, his eyes look bright and intelligent and he looked about ready to burst. He’d eaten all his breakfast and was tugging on his haynet when I arrived. He stopped the haynet tugging long enough to frisk me for carrots.<\/p>\n The unrugging, grooming and tacking-up was done very quickly because the temp was -3c; we schooled indoors and we worked quickly on loosening up and then got in to some fairly advanced flatwork. We finished by working on our walk-to-canter transitions which, surprisingly, Tom is very adept at.<\/p>\n Back in his stable he fell on his haynet like a starving person<\/span> horse;\u00c2\u00a0 while I untacked, groomed and rugged him up, I don’t think he gave me a moment’s thought \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but he gave the haynet plenty of thinking. And action.<\/p>\n So my diagnosis for Tom’s appetite loss and change in behaviour is that he’s not in the least afflicted with colic; he is bored. Tom is super-fit and he wants to be out, charging around in his new Tomproof paddock but, due to the weather, he’s stuck in his stable and getting\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 bored.<\/p>\n We were due to go up to Allenshill this Sunday to compete in their Eventers Training, but even if I could get the lorry out of the yard (and that’s majorly doubtful!) I wouldn’t want to drive it in these conditions. I’ve dropped them a line asking if we can move our entry to another date. Here’s hoping.<\/p>\n In the meantime, and in the continuing absence of daily turnout, I have to school Tom every day and make the schooling interesting and mentally challenging. I’m beginning to wonder which one of us is getting challenged here!<\/p>\n *<\/strong> The outdoor temperature at the stables dropped to -16c last night, and that’s three degrees warmer than it was at the South Pole. That, my friend, is bleedin’ cold!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, just before Christmas, Tom’s new ultra-high-fenced turnout (hereafter known as Colditz Turnout) was finished. Yay! And he loved it. He loved it so much<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}