Photos That Were Nearly Left Behind

I take many photos but in the scheme of things I use very few of them on my blog, so here are some of the photos that were nearly left behind.

So there you go some of the photo that nearly never appeared on my blog, hope you like them.

Third Time Lucky… Or Not

Today I had another go at plaiting Niko’s mane, so to start with the humiliating part and I mean humiliating for Niko, but I did such a poor job it is a bit for me too. Anyway as you can see I started by dividing the mane into sections, I was then going to put a product on the section I was plaiting to make it easier to plait, but my spraying head thingy on the bottle broke, so I had to do it without the help of Chestfields, not off to a good start.

But here is the finished result of my hard work and Niko’s patience, even if he did bite me, the polo made him do it. As you can quite clearly see it is far from neat which is sadly sort of the point of plaiting your horse, the plaits are mostly different sizes, they are meant to all be the same, and traditionally there should be an uneven number of plaits in the mane but I forgot about that at the time.

And here is his mane looking all curly and messy after I took the plaits out, so all in all not so successful, but I guess practice makes perfect, or hopefully it does. This was my third time plaiting a mane up so I have a lot of practising still to do.

New Blogs Report

Not too long ago one of my family members started two new blogs, the first is called Pip’s Pony Club, and yes that is our Pip that I have often posted about, Pip’s Pony Club is a good starting point for anyone interested in equines.

Next up we have New Horse Owners, this blog can be a lot of help to a new horse owner as it is full of useful information, and has plenty of links to helpful sites and sites you can buy some of the items shown on the blog from.

Please note I do not run these blogs.

Stopping a Cribber

Niko hurt himself recently, we think he must have pulled something in his shoulder, I don’t think it’s anything too serious, however he has been cribbing and making it worse so not long ago, we went to get something to stop him.

Yep that’s right Cribox, we have tried Cribox before with little success, but having said that Niko had not been living out before, when he is in a box he is surrounded by things he can crib on like the door and parts of the walls, but when he is in the paddock it is a much larger space, so he has longer to walk before he can crib.

So I set about applying the Cribox paint to the tops of the fence posts and a little of the way down the post, I really had to use a lot of Cribox for the first coat to give it a good covering and let some of it soak into the post. I now give them a quick do every day to make sure the post has a good covering of Cribox, if the posts are not repainted frequently the Cribox will not be strong enough to stop the horse cribbing.

And here is the finished result of all that painting, I have given the post a thick coat of Cribox on the top where he will grip the wood with his top set of teeth, and a slightly thinner coat down the side were he sometimes touches the wood with his bottom jaw, this has been working well so far.

It has been working so well that I haven’t see Niko crib once since we started this, and he looks to be pretty much sound, not quite right yet but almost there. He has also been spending more time searching for food and is getting a nicer shape to him, so all in all it is working out quite nicely.

Getting To the Root of It

If you were to walk though our paddock you would probably notice that lots of the ground has been dug up, but who or what is digging up the paddock, rabbits maybe, or a dog perhaps dogs dig holes right, but no it is none of those things, so what is it?

Oh why did I not think of the pony, yes that’s right little Murphy has been caught red handed digging up the paddock, but why would he do this you say, well I will explain, sometime ago I did a post about stinging nettles and how the horses enjoy them, well it seems they have a taste for the roots as well.

Murphy will spend lots of his time foraging and digging up stinging nettle roots, the roots contain lots of minerals that will benefit Murphy’s health, plus he seems to be very content wondering around digging up roots so I have no problem with it.

Here is a photo of Murphy with his prize, a tasty stinging nettle root, Murphy works hard digging and searching for the roots and I think this is a treat well earned.