Sit down Nikki

I think Nikki may need to sit down before she reads this one. Campo had hay left in his hayrack when I went out this morning :-0000000   !! OK I had made it very difficult for him to get much out at a time, but he simply wasn't hungry enough to make it worth his while to pull at the strands that he could get hold of. On the night he arrived I gave him a double haynet (one inside the other to make the holes even smaller, though both were already small-hole) at about 6 o'clock and it was gone in about an hour. I watched him and he savaged it. This morning I left him in the barn with one haynet, with less in it than the first one. Four hours later I have come home and he still has some left in the net. His eating has changed and he now chews a bit before going for the next mouthful. Not for long, but nothing like the conveyor belt act that he was doing on Sunday. He is sound walking around in the barn and on flat/slightly roughened hard surfaces. Only actual stones are an issue for him at the moment, though as Tracey says, sensitivity can increase later on. I think it's very much in his favour, though, that he spent time less than a year ago without shoes on. Sometimes it takes weeks for that "nerve waking up" thing to happen, but I'm sure he went through that on Monday night.

I'm also convinced that allowing him to feel the cold (that's feel THE cold, not "feel cold" himself) has kick-started his metabolism to mobilise his fat reserves to keep him warm. He is shedding coat, so he's not cold, but since he is more than half clipped he has to be using massively more energy to keep himself warm than he was in a rug.

I understand too, that stress has a considerable affect on these IR horses, and I wonder if other things are going on. For example, Nikki has told us that he took responsibility for his sisters, and I am struck by how calm he has been here after being separated from them. SH has suggested to me that he has a personality which stresses over being responsible, and that would have raised his cortisol levels which would have raised his insulin too. I think it's entirely possible, because he seems incredibly calm for a horse who is not used to being alone, (never mind one that kicked the stable if left in without his sisters) that he is actually relieved to only have himself to think about. He's not "shut down", he's just "soft" and  gentle while being very alert and bright and interested. I don't think I have ever had a horse who has made such an immediate impact on me, and I'm not saying that to make Nikki feel happy, because I don't do that kind of thing! He is just a very lovable horse. 

Anyway, some words for Jazz. We've had a great lesson. Shoulder in, much improved travers, improved again flying changes, a much better idea of medium trot and all with better submission than ever before.   So much so that when two youngsters came dancing over to the fence saying "come play, come play" he looked down his nose at them and said "do you mind! I'm working!!".  Who would have imagined that a couple of years ago?

Then Radar. Sigh. I only had half an hour and the only way I could get a back-up-head-down walk was to do 5 metre circles. So that's what we did. Any time I let him out of that, he just marched off. Sigh. Leave him a week and he forgets everything he knew. Sigh. :-)))) (I love him really!) What a good job I have two other dressage divas!

C

PS I think I ought to make it clear that there is no way that Campero was short of food the day he arrived to make him appear so ravenous. It's just a feature of IR.  Over Sunday night he did almost three times the volume of poo that I would have expected. I was shocked on Monday morning to take as much out from just him as I normally do from ALL THREE of the others.  He is now down to a normal volume. So he's eating a lot less, and using it a lot more.  He is also drinking less. Nikki said he drinks 2 - 2.5 buckets a night and he is only drinking 1  or a little bit more.