Long overdue Dino update!

Been a while, huh? Sorry about that! Things have been a little hectic and I did not keep up with all Dino’s news!

The last time I remembered to update here he had just moved…and since then he’s moved again! The short version is: we had a great summer at Hunters Hall! The hacking was amazing, he and Poppy settled really well into the field and everything was great. So obviously what happens next is the lease gets bought out by developers and the farmer gives us all notice. Some horses were offered spaces at a different farm, operated by the same people, just down the road and initially we were told we were on the list to go. But after weeks and weeks of stress and people being difficult and not really telling us what was going on we found out that they weren’t willing to take us to the new yard as they didn’t want horses on 24/7 turnout all year round.

Bugger.

This was a really stressful thing to happen. There are very very few yards that will keep horses in work on grass livery in our area. It’s not really economic and although you can get grass livery for retired horses those setups don’t allow for horses coming in and out of the fields to be exercised. We have been extremely lucky however to get some space on some land only a few minutes walk (although a much longer drive!) from Hunters hall. We literally have a corner of a field sectioned off using electric fencing and a garden shed we put up in a field but it’s lovely!

The day they moved in

It’s been a challenge to settle them, and they’ve understandably got a lot of separation anxiety so we can’t easily take one out of the field and leave the other in at the moment . We can work to improve this but at the moment we’re taking them out together to do stuff and get the lay of the land. The weather being completely terrible hasn’t exactly helped so they’ve been taking it easy over this worst part of the winter.

Hacking out together!

We have made progress this week though and got them out for a hack together! They were so good. We were expecting they might be a bit stressed but actually once we’d got on them they were great. We also had the trimmer out this week. I was expecting this to be a challenge as well as they had to come up to the hard standing where we park the cars but they both stood patiently and were generally well behaved about handing their feet over when needed!

A Very Good Pony having his feet trimmed.

Agility and clicker training in general has taken a bit of a back seat but we’re hoping to get back to this very soon! I’m going to start trying to get him to relax and do some clicker outside the field to start to get them used to being temporarily separated.

So here’s hoping 2020 will be a more settled year for them, and they can be in this new home forever! It’s really beautiful. There’s lots of deer and rabbits and muntjac and all sorts of stuff and it’s still on the same hacking routes as Hunters so once we’ve got them used to being apart briefly we should be back to lots of hacking again!