{"id":525,"date":"2008-05-08T09:08:35","date_gmt":"2008-05-08T09:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=525"},"modified":"2012-05-03T19:59:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T18:59:48","slug":"equine-news-and-the-wrong-kind-of-scent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=525","title":{"rendered":"Equine news and the wrong kind of scent?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday evening Big Vin and I hacked around the headlands of a bunch of fields with the girls (Tracey and her chestnut mare Charlie).<\/p>\n

It was a beautiful evening, the Worcestershire countryside really opened itself up; the view was terrific, the sights (landscape and animal wildlife) was brilliant and even the rich, flavourful bouquet was more heady than usual.<\/p>\n

The trouble is Vin thought so too.<\/p>\n

He started headshaking part-way through the hack.<\/p>\n

Headshaking is one of those \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcknown unknowns’ (as that nice Mr Rumsfeld would probably put it).<\/p>\n

If you’re interested there’s a page of info here on the condition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So the process of elimination begins.<\/p>\n

I’ve ordered a nose net as the first step.<\/p>\n

If the nose net reduces the symptoms then (hooray!) we know where we are.<\/p>\n

If the nose net doesn’t change things then we shall look for other probable causes to eliminate.<\/p>\n

Potentially Vin’s headshaking affects our competition schedule.<\/p>\n

From a practical angle alone, you really don’t want to be sitting on a horse that’s so busy shaking its head the horse hasn’t seen the 3′ solid fence you’re galloping towards!<\/p>\n

And ethically and morally one wouldn’t want to be working a horse during a headshaking bout.<\/p>\n

We shall see.<\/p>\n

Ho hum.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in other news…<\/p>\n

I seem to be continuing in my role as the object of (reasonably good-natured) yard-based humour.<\/p>\n

It’s down to being the only male; I know the females are ganging up on me but I also know that it’s only in a gentle display of the competitive gene masking a level of affection.<\/p>\n

Young Laura went XC schooling at Bissell Wood last night; I haven’t heard how things went but I hope everything was successful (especially after the fall she had in the arena last week).<\/p>\n

Vin and I are competing in a Mercian Teams two-phase (show jumping then cross country) competition at Sapey, Herefordshire on Sunday.<\/p>\n

It’s only a low-level competition, a precursor to full-on Eventing.<\/p>\n

I want to take this opportunity to establish his pace and have both of us comfortable about putting everything we’ve learned over SJ and XC fences over the last four months in to jumping actual tracks.<\/p>\n

We know he’s capable of jumping far higher, but jumping grids and one-off XC fences in schooling sessions requires a different mental attitude to jumping a course of fences.<\/p>\n

Fingers crossed.<\/p>\n

Anyway, things to do before the competition:
\n* Find out where Sapey is
\n* Determine the best route for the lorry
\n* Estimate how long it will take to make the trip
\n* Find out what our SJ and XC times are
\n* Plan the yard time of departure to include sufficient ‘working in’ before we compete
\n* Walk the course on Saturday afternoon
\n* Find a nice venue for Saturday lunch (as a treat for the ‘in-laws’ and Soph) not too far from Sapey – see course walk point above!
\n* Clean tack
\n* Panic, stress and generally worry about it and everything that might be related to the competition, my riding ability and Vin’s general wellbeing.<\/p>\n

B<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday evening Big Vin and I hacked around the headlands of a bunch of fields with the girls (Tracey and her chestnut mare Charlie). It<\/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-525","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\/525","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=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}