Wow! Twenty days since I last posted and so much has already happened!

     Oh wow!! I last posted twenty days ago, and already worlds new of stuff has happened with Udex and I! For starters, a terrible farrier came and messed up his hooves! Ah yes, now my poor Udex's hooves are pretty much stone bruised terribly. He had his feet bandaged up and was on stall rest for a while. (Now the bandages are off, and he is outside with his friends!) However, the stone bruises are still there, and he still does walk with a limp. All we can do now is wait for the better farrier, and Udex's hooves to grow out. (Yes Udex, that does mean a mini holiday for you without any riding!) We are thinking Udex may need a corrective shoe to help his feet now. *Sigh* I'm really bummed about that and seriously hope that there is a better solution to this problem other then resulting to shoes!

walking a lame Udex

Anyways, long story short; Udex's hooves were getting extremely long and our regular farrier could not make it out. The owner of the barn told us his farrier was coming that day, and said if we would like we could use him too! After thinking about it we decided to go with it, because after all Udex's hooves were getting prettty bad. Anywho, the farrier was terrible with Udex. He was punching and hitting Udex the entire time! Udex is almost always a good boy for the farrier, but with this one Udex was trying to explain that taking out chunks so deep from his hooves that the color of it was red was not a very comfortable thing to go through! Enough about farriers; I'm getting angry just thinkin' 'bout them!

     So, since Udex has been lame for a week and a half now, I haven't been riding him! I am sure he is extremely happy about this! It means more time to play with his paddock buds! The only work he has been doing is free running in the hall, taking walks with me, and playing games with me! Yesterday Udex and I had a little beach party in the arena! We turned on the sprinklers in the arena, and ran around them like crazy! We were both a sandy, muddy, drippy mess afterwards -but we sure did have fun!!!-

Look at that back!

Lookin' good Udex!

    Udex got his first bath of the summer the other day! He was hosed down and lathered up with baby shampoo! In no time he was a happy go lucky, playful, lovely smelling, squeaky clean boy ready to join his palls back outside! Everything with him is alwaysss a surprise, so I do have to say, bathing him was especially fun! I almost peed myself when I put the hose on his haunches and he made his back exactly the way he should naturally hold it!!! [for those of you that don't know, Udex was trained with Rollkur (a terrible elite dressage training methood.) Holding his head in the rollkur position for so long resulted in the locking if his lumbar spine, causing him to trot in "two" parts, and giving him a sway appearance. I have been doing exercises and riding him properly to strengthen his back muscles to get them back to where they should be.] Anyways, Mr. Udex decided to keep his back perfectly for a few minutes at a time! I say out of our forty five minute bathing session, fifteen minutes of it went to his back being held great! Talk about a proud owner!! Already his back doesn't have such a sway appearance as it did when I first got him, and now he goes along and makes his back perfect!? Five months ago he could not even hold it right for a full second!

Not so skinny!

He is looking worlds better!

   Udex is looking a lot healthier! He is gaining muscle beautifully; not too fast, nor too slow, but just right. Too much weight too soon can result in sooooo many problems.! I am very pleased with the nice steady pace he is taking this at! His ewe neck is slowly fading away!! [Once again, the ewe neck is due to muscle growth on the bottom of his neck... Due to holding his head in the rollkur position so long.] Udex's haunches are looking a lot fuller with muscle and healthy fat! Also, as I mentioned before, he is getting the right abdominal muscles to carry himself correctly! His hips are no longer these extremely pointy, knife-like triangles, but rather round, nubby curves on his body! You can only see a faint outline of his ribs when you look at him now!!! Before you could count every rib and stick your fingers between them he was that skinny. To just see only a little rib right now is enough to make me the proudest person on earth!!

     If you haven't ever took in a horse that had mental/physical problems that classified him as worthless, done for, a failure, or a lost cause... Then my best, most important advice to you is to go right now and find a horse that needs help and give it all the love and time it deserves. As I'm writing in this blog with all the pride in the world, I can't begin to describe to you how amazing the feeling I get when I look at my horse. I look at him and think to myself. "Wow.. If it wasn't for me what would have been of this horse... Look how time and effort has really payed off!!! Look how happy he is right now, and how thankful he is!!!" I can't even tell you how amazing that feeling is. You feel like you changed someones life, because over all, you did. You changed your equine partners life, and you did it for the better! If we think about some of the best horses in history, we come to find that they usually were a rescue horse before it was their time to shine. The reason I think these horses went down in history is simple.. It was because they knew how bad off they were, and then that special person came a long and saved them. The horse forever gave himself to that special person, because the horse knew that without the special person; he wouldn't be the horse he was today.