Hard keeper.

He may not be grey but he is definitely NOT an easy keeper!

   A lot of people say how hard their horse is to keep. "My horse is grey, I have to rug him in the summer so he doesn't get skin cancer!" or, "My grey horse has a pink nose, I have to put sun cream on him so he doesn't burn!" or even "when my grey horse lays down he gets coated with manure stains!" I do have to say that it does make me a little upset when owners of greys consider their grey horse to be the hardest keeper of them all. Uhm, I have a chestnut, but he is just as hard to keep as a grey, if not worse! He is allergic to bees, so I too must keep a constant fly sheet on him PLUS check daily for any bee bites and anaphylaxis. Also, he has a pink nose too so I have to constantly re-apply sun cream on him as well. When my chestnut rolls, he rolls his white blaze in the mud. One too many times I have had to curry his face because it was coated inches deep in mud! I don't even know how many times his forelock had been invisible to due being buried in the mud! Udex is a pretty hard keeper if you ask me!!
  Udex was gaining weight and muscle left and right... Until. -Ah, how I despise that word until.- Until that terrible farrier damaged his hooves! For about a month in a half Udex had been in constant pain. It was a loose, or loose, situation for us. Our options were to turn him out with bad feet and every step be painful for him, but at least he would be happy with his friends... OR. We could keep him on stall rest where he would pace himself and work himself into a sweat everyday. We went with the first choice, of turning him out with his friends. Since then his bruises had turned into an abscess, resulting in even more pain. Every horseman knows that when a horse is in pain, they loose weight.

Skinny lil' thang

 Yes, that is exactly what happened to Udex. He was looking so great, with just a faint outline of his ribs showing. Now you can make out his ribs again. He looks nowhere near as bad as he did when he first got there, but then again he looks nowhere near like he did last month. I have to say, I am really, really, really angry and upset about all this. I worked SO hard to get him looking decent, and now have to re-do all my hard work. Ughh! Talk about upsetting! However, I do keep telling my self that this all happened for a reason. I am just thinking "okay, no problem! As soon as he can work again without a limp we are going to start our once to twice pessoa sessions every week!" I know this happened for a reason, it had to have. I have to stay positive about this, because being angry won't help anything at all.
   So, back to being a hard keeper. I swear, owning Udex is the most challenging thing I think I may ever have to do. Of course, it is too rewarding to regret any second of it all! As I write this, Udex is in a big paddock with just two other horses enjoying the sunshine and munching on delicious fresh grass scattered with miscellaneous juicy flowers! I am sure that in no time this grass will put the weight back on him! Until then, I'm just going to keep on having fun with him!