Another early morning and the Forest was absolutely glorious. My first stop was with Anna and due to a massive traffic jam on the M27 I only had ten minutes in which to catch her before Matt the Farrier arrived. Today is the first time that I haven't had to create a corral out of electric fence tape in order to ask her to engage with me and, as last time, today she came up to me to be caught. you might not think that this is much progress in all the time that has gone by since I first met her but, given that I only see her every 10 weeks and only then for about an hour, and each time she has her feet done too, it certainly is. Save for people who hand feed her over the fence, I am the only person with whom she has physical contact and the only person who goes into her field to be with her. Progress might have been a lot faster if I had been able to use clicker training with her but she can be very aggressive to people who go into the field especially when food is involved.
Anna is terribly fat and I whilst I have urged the owners to do something to restrict what she eats, it is very difficult for them when neither of them is physically fit enough to do anything about the fence. Annie is adept at taking the electric fence down even when it is connected and they say that she takes it down faster than their handyman can put it up. Thankfully the winter is ahead of us and hopefully they will use that against her a little bit. It's hard not to take pity on even the fattest pony when it is windy and rainy even when they have a field shelter and of course the vets point to the lack of hard feed as a potential factor in atypical myopathy and feed manufacturers say that horses must have a feed balancer to make sure they get sufficient protein along with vitamins and minerals. The good news is that she was perfect to have her feet done and they are now perfectly normal.
