Nelly and Juma have settled well into their holiday apartment and even made a new friend out of old Sprout who lives out on the Forest still at the age of twenty-nine.
Anna was less happy, crotchety even, as I delicately removed all of the burdock seeds from her tangled mane and made sure they couldn't go into her eyes. The art is not to pull on the seeds but to pull gently on the mane above the seeds, separating it out hair by hair, until the seeds fall out.
Coming back out to her having spent an hour with her elderly owners she was even crosser and displayed behaviour I haven't seen for some four years or so, screaming at me, wrinkling her nostrils at me, and threatening to bite me or kick. I don't know whether she was just annoyed that I wasn't hand feeding her like all of her other visitors, whether she is really hungry as there is little grass in her field at the moment and she struggles with her hay because she had COPD. Whether it was because I was wearing a coat or because Matt had arrived already to do her feet and she felt outnumbered by the two of us even though Matt retreated to his car. After a little while she did calm down and I was able to rub her with my hand, then touch her with the crown piece and then gently put her headcollar on. Matt was suitably deferential as he did her feet and all was well with the world. Sometimes horses do regress to or just revisit old behaviour patterns when they pull the wrong video out of their collection. Let's hope it is a little blip.
