Works In Progress

Somehow I had assumed that not eventing this year would mean weekends kept free.

Ha!

The second weekend in May, I'm planning to join Amanda in fence-judging at the King Oak HT.  The first weekend in May, I'm laying track for our club's TDX test.  And the weekend before that...I am apparently heading up to GMHA for a crash-course in pulse and respiration.  Very exciting.  Skills I need (and am embarrassed to admit that I don't already have...) and I am a big believer in learning from the inside.  Half of what I know about eventing, I learned while volunteering at events -- and GMHA is my favorite place on earth.

 

I think I should probably take a week off from scheduling anything else.

Closer to home, I am slowly working through my to-do list.  I've scheduled Tucker's first meeting with a new farrier  (I liked our previous farrier very much but we have moved out of his range), which is the first of my two Things That I Have Been Pondering...

Tuck was happily and successfully barefoot for the first half of his life.  He got shoes all around and pads up front when he moved into a new state and job in a region that, as they say, "grows rocks."  And that's been, for better or for worse, his shoeing package ever since.

Now he's on a much less rocky property (albeit in the Granite State...) and in somewhat different (albeit overlapping) work, and I've been thinking about seeing whether he can go barefoot again.

The pros.  I am minimalist by philosophy; I like to keep things simple where I can, keep equipment minimal, and overall this seems to serve me well.  Tucker has (knock wood!) good feet and a history of doing fine sans shoes.  They can always go back on if need be, and I'm intrigued by what I've heard about the improvements in hoof boots.  We don't have any hard timeframe or pressure right now; if I want to experiment, this coming year would be the time.  Paying for trims rather than shoes would not suck.

The cons.  He's been in shoes for a long time.  I'm confident he could go barefoot again on at least average surfaces, but no idea how long it would take to get him there. I want very much to be riding this spring.  I don't want him to be sore.  His barefoot history doesn't extend to rocky trails; there is a non-zero chance that he'll need foot protection for that, and investigating boot options would violate my "minimal fussing" rule for this season.  I really do not want him to be sore.

So, tentative plan is to be conservative.  Meet new farrier.  Have him do his thing.  Get his take.  My thought it to leave the shoes on (though I would like to get the pads off) for this spring/summer/early fall, ride ride ride while the weather is lovely, and then try pulling them while the ground is still soft and see how it goes.

The other thing I've looking at is food.  Tuck is currently on a minimal amount of a basic pellet and doing fine, though I am not loving the quality of his summer coat as it grows in.  He'll need a bit more once he's back in full work.  But he is a pretty easy keeper, that pony of mine, and even in his three-day year, he does well on not much.  So what to do?  I'm checking out the grain options at the new place and I'm checking out options for a multi-vitamin supplement.  Talk about choice paralysis!  Too many options and too much hype, and everything I learn makes me feel like I need to learn another three things to make sense of it all, with the added fun of a horse who can be a picky eater sometimes about funny things.

But he had dapples one year, and I want 'em back.