A chilled Filly

Friday 26 September 2014

Another visit to Filly




I went to see Filly again yesterday. Due to a mix up with messages Nic had already worked Filly and put her out. We brought her back so I could have a look at her in comfort.
She initially walked a bit lame with the right hind. As this soon cleared up I tend to think that was probably muscular. She has had another abscess in the right hind foot however, which apparently came out at the same time as the left front. I guess this is the price to pay when you first take horses out of shoes. As the feet haven't been stimulated they have gone soft and are more prone to damage until they harden off again. After all she spent the first few years of life without shoes with no ill effects other than the split hoof. She certainly never had an abscess in that time.
Hopefully these problems will sort themselves out over the next few months, patience required.
As a result of these issues she has not been able to load her feet as much as we would like, so whilst progress is still good it's not as fast as Nic would like. However now she is able to walk more she can be worked a little harder and hopefully progress will accelerate.
We took Filly to the arena Nic has so I could see her moving. The first thing I noticed was that the odd little swing her front right used to have has diminished a lot. It hasn't gone but is less attention grabbing. I also noticed that she was tracking up at walk pretty well with around 1/2 hoof print overtrack. Not great but better than it used to be without asking for effort.
Nic worked her for a while but was having trouble getting her to work from behind. She suggested I tried. So we switched to my equipment (rope halter, 22 foot line and carrot stick) and I started to play with her. Very soon she was doing ok ish circles around me and I started to ask for 3 track work. That caused her to flex nicely and start to work from behind.
Nic commented that it looked much better than she had been able to achieve. Nothing to do with Nics' ability as I've seen her working with a traditionally trained horse and it looked good, but Filly is not a traditionally trained horse.
I think that part of the problem is that Nic has seen several folks using Parelli to train their horses. But many many Parelli folks get stuck for a while with just playing the games, but not using the games to produce a performance horse. So many traditional folks who see parelli horse tend to assume that they are never worked in an outline online and then assume that they can't work in an outline online.
We are intending to go back there next Thursday and spend a few days with Filly and Nic. Then around a week or so later she comes home :) :) .

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