13th March, 2010 Horse Agility

I spent all day Thursday with Vanessa Bee who has started the new horse sport of Horse Agility. http://www.horseagilitygb.com/ if you want to go and have a look. She brought a truck full of obstacles so that we could test them all out and look at them from a health and safety and scoring point of view. I am hoping that this sport will give marks for horsemanship rather than the results of training if it is to be a true test of the relationship between horse and human. I would rather see a horse and human working together than a horse drilled to perform in a certain way. Lots of things to discuss. Petra tackled some of the obstacles and stood, for example, with her feet in a hoop while I stood in another and she also walked through some door strip thingummies (there's probably a proper name for them) before walking through a tunnel covered in a green sheet. It was fun to see how Jack would do - he doesn't understand that he is not supposed to step over the poles in the labyrinth and was gaily marching over them. He had us all in fits when rather than going through the tunnel he would canter round the outside and down to the other end to see if I was there. By halving the length of the tunnel we persuaded that he could in fact walk through nicely although he did have a little surge forward when Vanessa shouted "yipee!" There is a practical application to all of these obstacles and I don't see it as tricks at all.

I have taken my eye off Chancer over the last couple of weeks while I have been organising Tony's funeral and although he has been receiving the same amount of feed throughout, he has suddenly dropped weight; I was mortified. There is still no grass in the field and I think Theoden has been keeping him on the move. He is now on ad lib hay and more feed and I have taken the precaution of getting him some Pink Powders to see if this will help. He already looked better today. Come on spring.......