The end of the road may be in sight

I don't really know whether to share this with you all today, but since I have always been honest and open I think I must. Also, I guess I need some support. I have been suspicious about Smartie's sight again for a few days. Several days ago he turned to go into his stable and smacked his head on the door and door frame, taking a stripe of hair off diagonally across his nose as he went. Today he has another mark on his face suggesting he has hit it on something. And of course he is turning on the lights in the barn every single night. And he has gone back to using the floodlights, which are much brighter than the sodium lights (and incidentally, harder to turn on!) And my sister-in-law said "what if the behaviour at new moon is because of there being no light?" - talk about "out of the mouths....."

So I redid the tests that we did on his eyes in January. And he is much, much worse. I cannot get him to blink at all until my finger is extremely close to his eye. If I wave all my fingers in front of his eye he does not react at all, even though they are only 4-6 inches away. If I do that to Tetley he blinks like crazy and Tia either closes her eye completely or turns her head away. I have spoken to the vet, and basically there is nothing that can really be done. It is possible that we might be able to stop him losing any more vision, but the cost of even finding out would be huge and the likelihood of it working would be small. And temperamentally he is, of course, not the sort of horse who can happily live half blind, as we have already found out.

Since there was nothing structurally wrong with his eye or the nerve when she looked at them in January, I can only guess that he has something going on in his brain which is preventing him from processing sight signals.

I have invested so much time and emotion into him that I am pretty gutted by this. I will obviously stop making any more effort to get him rideable, since that now looks like a complete waste of time. I shall give him some more time, possibly a summer in the sun doing nothing in the field, and then if I am sure that he cannot see I will have him shot (sorry, I don't mean to offend but I really need to face the truth of what I am saying :-( ). What a crying shame that will be if it comes to that.

Anyway, on a better note, Tetley was sound out on a very very very cold hack today. He is happier if I trot on one diagonal than the other for teh first trot after we start out, but he isn't unsound in any way I can tell.

And Tia is learning to walk :-) - she had a tight little walk where she had her head in a "nice" place but was not using her back at all. By constantly making her go forwards but without hurrying,(either by sending her on into a few strides of jog, or by turning very small circles), I am managing to get her to release her back and swing, which also lifts her shoulders, frees her rigid neck and makes her much lighter in the hand. Once she is doing that, her bend is wonderful, really wrapped around your inside leg. And as if that wasn't success enough, it carried through into a little light and rounded trotting too, which I was delighted with.

I have to say that the Happy Mouth straight bar plastic bit is a huge, huge success. She has totally given up ALL the messing around that she had been doing with her mouth and head. The poor girlie just hated that thin jointed bit that they had her in. She is now as quiet in the mouth as you could possibly wish for.

Anyway, enough, I must let you all tell me what you think of this latest development.

C.