March 15th 2009: Manny and the Monster Ditch

Sara writes: Manny arrived in Idaho after several days on the shipper's van. He was a great traveller and ate and drank well. 

The next day he was perky and looking for something to do. He brought along some of his usual hay from Texas, but we would have to change him over to our local alfalfa hay. I thought that we could add a bit of alfalfa to his grass hay each day and make the change over a week or 10 days. Well, that didn't work. Once he tried out the alfalfa hay he just used the grass as a pillow. 

He was due for a re-shoe and since we had the farrier at our farm the next day, I asked him to take a look at Manny's feet. He said, "we need to get some rads of these feet". We like to get radiographs of all the horses feet sooner or later anyway, so we arranged for that to happen asap. The vet and farrier consulted and Manny got new shoes and reshaped feet. He had too much heel on one front and not enough on the other. He will have a wedge pad for a few weeks and then another reset will hopefully do the trick.

We needed to give him some time to adjust to the new angles of his front feet, so he was just hacking for the first week. This did give him some time to get to know the lay of the land, ie: which hiding places go with which cat and where the dogs sleep. He also got a close up look at the Canada Geese that roost on the hay barn.

We are finally off and running with his training. He must have been absent when the dressage teacher taught "whoa" because he doesn't have that skill set. It's getting better day by day.

Last week he was a demo horse for a USEA Instuctor certification workshop. He got to do some show jumping and some cross country jumping. He was introduced to his first ditch and after giving it a good looking over he gave it a huge jump. 

It seems like we are off to a good start and I want Manny to have a good experience with me, so we take our time and build his skill and confidence. I am looking forward to taking him on the road with my other two horses!