Weekend Update - Part 2

Well. I'm glad that I had such a good horse week last week while I was off on vacation. There was a reason that I left moving the horses to the new place until the end of the week.

I took my dad out with me on Saturday evening to move my big tack box and all of my stuff. Thankfully the tack box fit in the trailer in one of the stalls just perfectly. (Yeah, it's big.) When we arrived both of my guys were still stuck together, in a corner away from everyone else. They were still being shunned. We just unloaded my stuff, put it all back in it's places, parked the trailer, and then stopped on the way out to give the ponies an apple core and have a quick peek to make sure all their limbs were still hanging from the right spots.

Sunday I awoke (late) to a grey, overcast and cool day. I didn't have to teach any lessons so I had a rare Sunday of nothing scheduled. Which I took advantage of. And did very little for the first part of the day.

I finally decided that since it was starting to rain at about 2pm, it must be time to head out to check on the kids. So I drove out under a very grey sky (smoke blown in from wildfires in the neighbouring province).

My two kids are still being ostracized by the rest of the group. Specifically by the grey arab, who keeps chasing them away. But I know these things take time to get sorted out. Unfortunately, this means that my two are extra reliant on each other and are now BFF's. Who don't want to ever be apart.

Two grey blobs hanging out together.

I haltered Cisco first and brought him to the gate. Phantom followed. But she stayed in where she was supposed to. My plan for Cisco was to just get him in the barn and arena, and see how it went. He's still new to indoor places, and this would be only the second barn and arena he had ever been in, so I didn't have really high expectations for him other than walking sanely in those areas.

He walked straight into the barn, and since there were a couple of horses in the aisle getting tacked up I decided to just undress him and take him straight over to the arena. We went in with no issue, and waled around fairly civilized. Except for the screaming every 2 minutes (him, not me). But he wasn't spooky and didn't care about the pigeons that fly around above. So I let him loose to run around. I gave him a few minutes to be silly, then hooked up the lead again and did some leading and getting his attention on me. Which was quite good.

So after the other two horses came in to be ridden we went back to the barn. We walked through it a couple of times, then I tied him up to give him a quick grooming. He was good while I was brushing him, but did the idiot dance otherwise. Totally what I expected, and it will get better over the next few days.

When I took him out, Phantom came galloping to the gate. Totally out of character for her. This caused the other horses to come to the gate to see what the excitement was. Then the grey Arab put the run on Phantom and Cisco and chased them away. As much as I don't like to see this happen to my horses, I know that there is nothing I can do and it has to be sorted out amongst themselves. If things don't seem to be getting better by the end of the week I will look at other options, but I have to give it a chance.

Once the hubbub died down I went out to grab Phantom. I checked her feet first - she had managed to lose both brand new front shoes within 24 hours. I had even left her bell boots on as I had a feeling this would happen.  I have hoof boots for her, so I will be able to ride until I can get shoes put back on. And the ground out in the field is fairly soft so hopefully she won't get too sore.

She tiptoed in to the barn, with Cisco pacing the fence line behind us. I didn't have any concerns with Phantom going into a new barn or arena, and she proved me right. She internalizes her stress, so the only sign of stress on her part was that she didn't finish up the food I presented to her.

I just did a bit of clean-up on her. Her back-end was a bit poopy and stinky, so I did a quick wash job. During which she managed to step on the lead shank at some point and the clip broke in half. Sigh.

Phantom went back out and with Cisco they went off by themselves. The lady who does the feeding said that she has been giving them their hay away from the others, so I'm not worried about them starving.  I won't be back out until Tuesday evening, so hopefully they have made some progress by then.