Love the One You're With

One amazing survival instinct of horses is their ability to love the one they're with - after all, your life may depend on them.

Fleur, who lost he soul mate last year and was pretty poorly herself took a little while to accept her new companion, Pickle, considering her to be a poor replica of her erstwhile friend. Not only was she a silly roan colour, she was young and frivolous too. However, Pickle knew how to be tactful and persistent and now look...

Even though they have two stables available, they have moved in together.

Meanwhile, Prince has a new best friend too. The two of them practically fell into each other's arms although Prince has to stand on his tiptoes to reach.

What makes you smile like you are trying to swallow a coathanger?

 

At least one third of my heart is always in Kenya and I miss seeing my lovely camels and the kind team that looks after the milking herd. Today I needed a camel fix, and they kindly obliged with this gorgeous picture. Tulip in the middle, Kukuman behind the camera, and from the left Ekomwa, Dayow, Mohammed and Nurr.

Brakes

Until now, Ruth and Prince have been bound together by the elasticity of clicker training but, as is often the case, that elastic was stretched to its limit and broken by the green carpet of temptation, known as grass. On their way up the track, Prince had started to get ahead of Ruth in order to thrust his head down to eat the long grass and tasty foliage along the way. By the time he was head of her, no amount of pulling him back with the lead rein worked, and circling him just made things worse. 

It was time to instal some rules  and so I went to see them to see if I could help. The first thing to do was to make sure that he never got more than a few inches ahead of Ruth, and that each time every time he did she needed to turn towards him and back him up until he was in the right place. Being such a sensitive and responsive pony it was easy to establish this with the lightest of touch and some clear body language. 

Once we got up to the - massive field - we let him eat for five minutes in what will become one of three designated places along a walking route, and then continued with some basic groundwork: forwards, backwards, turning left and right, asking him not to get ahead of her in any situation. All of this he accepted very easily and he seemed to enjoy the activity. 

In the last picture he stopped on a sixpence when Ruth came to a seering halt.

From Ruth: 

"I just wanted to let you know that I took Prince up the track to the field yesterday. There was no barging, walking ahead of me or trying to get grass on the way up! 😊 He was extremely well mannered, if anything a little on the laid back side!"

By George

My own horses are coming out of the winter well. We've been providing plenty of nesting materials to the local birds and their summer coats are emerging. Last weekend we were visited by sme Kenyan friends and Dave temporarily came out of retirement so that George could experience his first sit on a horse. 

Progress Reports

 For followers of Prince and Muli Bwanji, I have some videos for you to enjoy.

Zanzibar Safari ya Nje

Despite first appearances, my trip to Zanzibar was intended more to be an educational trip rather than a holiday, although it always helps to have a friend who has an apartment! My overriding mission was to practice my Swahili as much as possible and see whether I could get by. Zanzibar is the birth place of Swahili and the place where it is spoken the most purely. 

With the help of a few friends of Colin's, and a huge gulp of bravery, I was soon fairly independent, talking to anyone and everyone that I met. Muslims, Masai, and tourists, chatting away to shopkeepers in the spice market in Stone Town and the man who worked for the BBC who sold Kiswahili story books. I walked into town to change money, and go to the pharmacy (toothache!).

I didn't feel in the least bit worried. Even the people touting for customers on the beach understood a "La, asante" and left me along or chatted about other things, mainly my ability to talk to them. I had a happy afternoon with two wonderful ladies from the mainland of Tanzania, first having a massage and then, somehow, my hair braided; not so much cultural appropriation, but cultural appreciation. Like women everywhere, we put the world to rights.

I was invited to eat with a family of Muslim women as they broke their fast for the day during Ramadan. While the men were off praying at the local mosque, the ten women, who had twenty five children between them, made the food in massive, massive cauldrons on fires outside. The children, who were playing, soon came to investigate me, watching videos of horses and the post-banging in machine over and over again - shouting tena! tena! when one came to an end. One little girl tested her English out on me and I added in some new words to her collection of fruits and trees and food.

A visit to Jozani Forest, conducted entirely in Swahili, was extremely pleasant in the shade, looking at black and white Colobus monkeys and the rarer Red Colobus monkeys known as Kima.

Jozani also has mangroves which are crucially important to ecology. Thankfully they are protected, and like the Forest itself, no development can take place. Everywhere else hotels and apartment are being thrown up to satisfy the Blue Economy which is vital to the island.

My other mission, of course, was to see if I could find any camels, and I learned that there are only three remaining, all imported from the mainland. One is in a zoo at Stone Town but these two live at the hotel I went to last and they live on the surrounding trees and can get right down to the sea. 

Mission accomplished although the grinding poverty behind the party beaches is hard to witness and yet everyone remains friendly and polite, whatever they think of the tourists, their livelihoods depending on it.  Zanzibar has banned the plastic bag but the litter is mainly made up on single use plastic drinking water bottles - that will be down to the tourists too. 

The End

We are very lucky to live in a country where we have the ability - albeit at a cost - to have our animals put to sleep, without pain, by using drugs or a humane killer (gun). Indeed, we would be considered to be causing unnecessary suffering if we failed to do so and could be prosecuted.

Last week I was in Zanzibar where the cultural and religious rules, or at least the interpretation of them, forbids the killing of an animal unless it is going to be eaten. The Quran also states that it is forbidden to be cruel towards any animal, a rule that we know is ignored in many countries and by people of every religion and those with none. The Masai and Samburu are generally Christian now but their way of life is very pragmatic - where you have livestock, you have deadstock and that's it.

Moving to a hotel near the end of my visit, I was welcomed to 'Paradise' and it was lovely to see donkeys, camels, chickens and a turkey with their chicks, running around the well-tended grounds. The female donkey had been unlucky in the past when someone had cut off the tops of her ears, a 'traditional medicine' of the cruellest kind. However, she was happy and well now and had a filly foal at foot called Bonita.

At the top of a hill within the grounds, I spotted some more long ears, flickering in silhouette. I climbed the hill to a shady area where a donkey was just about standing, cleary shaking and extremely hot. There was no water that he could reach and the only food provided was dried banana leaves which were long and fibrous. His genital area was covered in blue spray and swollen with infection and every so often he tried to stretch his back legs to ease the pain or attempt to pee. There were no droppings in the area. It was clear to me that he was in agony and that he was dying.

The Masai men who work at the hotel for an Indian owner, quickly came up and we talked in Swahili about what had happened. Apparently, three weeks ago, the donkey was attacked by the other donkey jack and had been badly bitten in the genital area. I gathered that the vet had been and later I was told by the owner that the donkey had had an operation and later contracted tetanus. I asked the men to bring clean water, and I offered the donkey a drink which he took eagerly but not for very long. I asked them to leave the water close to the donkey.

An hour later, I went up again by which time the donkey was recumbent. I wiped him over with a damp cloth which I borrowed from one of the Masai, and offered him water from my hand which he sucked from my fingers. We placed the dried leaves under his head to prevent sand getting into his eye but they insisted he was just sleeping when I knew that he was dying. By the following morning he had gone.

The owner wasn't prepared to talk to me properly about what had happened but in later messages told me that it was against the culture and religion of Zanzibar which has a very high proportion of Muslims, to put any animal to sleep. This seems to have overridden the religious rule about not being cruel to an animal and I am struggling to reconcile the two. Even at law school we discussed the fact that rights are great until they rub against the rights of others - in this case an animal - and we know that religious books were written long before we had choices about how to kill an animal for welfare reasons. 

I have no doubt whatsoever that this donkey was loved, and shown love, and treated well by his owner to this point. His owner was definitely sad when his donkey died. I wish he could see, even if it is just to keep tourists happy about welfare standards, that it was unfair to leave this donkey struggling and in pain. Rest in peace Punda.

Sunny

The weather was absolutely perfect today to take Blue's ashes and 'turn her out' again in the valley of Howen Bottom where Juma was born, and where his ashes were placed. It was a reminder of that glorious summer when Tracey and I say on the hummocks watching out little herd, Nelly, Juma, my Blue, White Blue and Nanny. It is so peaceful down there, just a few walkers and no road nearby. 

Sleep tight my girl.

Bothered?

You might wonder why anyone would be particuarly bothered about the death of a 'fairly ordinary' New Forest mare who spent seventeen years of her life on the open Forest, another on a SSSI conservation site, and the occasional winter holiday, and the final years of her life, at home catching up on eating and self-care. 

Apart from loving her with the whole of my heart, and admiring her beautiful qualities of calmness, trust, and care, I loved to watch the whole herd together, their reactions and interactions, loyalties and duties to one another. Blue was a wonderful mother to the one foal that she had, and a brilliant Auntie to those that Nelly had. She would lead, follow, and protect as needed. And occasionally she would come out of her natural retirement to work with me, the Firemen or people with addictions when a spare pony was required.

Blue, Blue, my world is Blue.

Sunday, was the most beautiful day for a very long time. The sky was a proper sky blue, heralding the spring ahead, and as dusk fell there were striations of pastel colours, baby blue and pink, like watercolours streaked across the valley.

 

This was to be my beautiful Blue's last day on earth and I have known it was coming, fought if off for several months knowing that the end was inevitable. Last August, when she should have been at her best weight, Blue started to look slim - a nice racing-weight the vet would have said - but a vast array of tests followed up by cartons of supplements did no good. She seemed very happy, galloping up for her two decent feeds a day, rolling her neck like the distant Arab in her New Forest ancestry, and she held her own. She didn't really fancy any hay even though there was nothing wrong with her teeth and after a feed she would stand contemplatively while digesting her food. She wore her first rug and kept it straight and undamaged, seeming to be grateful for the extra warmth but she didn't spend long in the open barn despite a really deep bed and the company of Pie an Patsy.

When I looked under her nightie on Friday evening it was a shock to see that she had suddenly dropped even more weight and now she was a shadow of the pony that she had been. Still cheerful at the front end, she didn't like me pressing into her flanks. The time had come.

  

She has spent the weekend eating her way through carrots, minty treats and Stud Muffins hopefully thinking it must be Christmas, and today, at 3 p.m., her light went out. How I loved my Bluesy pony, my beautiful girl, you have been an angel for the twenty one years that I have owned you.