So after months of anticipation Kelsall Hill horse trials has been and gone, fabulous for friends, not so good for me. Back to the drawing board for me and Caltastic.
My friends had a wonderful weekend, Carrie won her section, perfect prep for Badminton Grass Roots championships next week, David Llewellyn, a local trainer won, there were lots of other local placings, big smiles, happy days, glorious weather, fabulous course.
My gorgeous Cal by contrast felt flat and underpowered and we got eliminated in the showjumping.
The sad fact of being barefoot is that everyone automatically looks at his feet and blames the lack of shoes for every dip in performance. I can honestly say his feet felt fine, the ground was perfect, he is thrush free, sound on everything except sharp stones and didn’t slip once in the dressage, despite morning frost and dew, and was also not slipping in the showjumping warm up.
He did feel a bit flat practising at Carrie’s house and had a couple of stops there, always at oxers.
The same thing happened last year and I blamed myself. I thought I had Oxer Fear. I spent a couple of months getting extra lessons, getting my butt kicked to be braver and more positive. We did much better until one day he really couldn’t breathe during a jumping lesson. Bronchoscopy showed his lungs to be really inflamed with grade 4 inflammation and mucous.
Poor boy is quite stoic really and does generally try his little heart out for me.
So he’s being bronchoscoped next week by the lovely Georgie of Brownmoss Equine.
Trimmer John of Barely Roadworthy has been for his routine appointment- Cal’s feet are looking good. He is shedding a load of false sole. Hopefully there will be a more concave foot underneath.
There is still some bruising growing out from the fun ride over Rivington Pike at Christmas but he doesn’t seem to be too sore. There are discs and plaques of shedding sole with discolouration underneath suggesting old abscess and or thrush but a few week of applying the Westgate Labs toxic looking green frog oil seems to have worked nicely.
Talking of Westgate Labs I cannot speak highly enough of their services. Friendly efficient and reasonably priced- all 4 horses have negative Faecal Egg Counts and Equisal tapeworm saliva tests so no wormers at all required this spring. We will egg count all summer and then test for tapeworm again in Autumn- if all testing negative they will only need one worming dose for encysted red worm in winter 2016/2017.
There is work going on to develop an ELISA test for encysted red worm too. Once that is in the public domain we may be able to reserve chemical wormers only for those horses with proven infestations- and no a moment too soon with the resistance developing globally to chemical wormers.
So back to Cal and our back to the drawing board strategy- If his lungs are clear we will invest in some kick ass jumping lessons and do more show jumping over summer, aiming to do some events later on when the showjumping bogey has been firmly eliminated.
If his lungs are all clogged up again he will need treating obviously and sympathetic working.
So frustrating that a horse that loves to jump and eats up big cross country courses presents so many challenges in the husbandry stakes.
If his lungs are clogged up though, at least we will know it’s not his blooming feet slowing him down! ?
