Something, nothing, everything. Mostly horses.
This one’s just for the laughs. Logan loved sucking on his people. He gave big slobbery, wet kisses, and he gave tongue baths like a cat mum to her kittens. I always returned from the barn with my coat soaked and chewed on. And yet, I was never worried that those big teeth might get too close to my nose. He was a careful, gentle old boy.
Throwing this one up here since I am still working so hard on getting Pilar in shape. She’s a bit of both, although mostly undermuscled, and she is making steady improvements. It’s been interesting to observe, though — and Logan certainly looked like the picture of the thin horse when we acquired him a year and a half ago.
Note the different head positions in the two picture. The thin horse’s posture is tired and indifferent, the neck entirely straight. The undermuscled horse, comparatively, has ears perked up and is carrying his head rather than just let it hang off the end of his neck.
Letting go is the hardest thing a horse owner ever faces. Scheduling the vetenarian and the disposal of the carcass makes you feel like you’re plotting to murder a beloved family member. It’s the hardest decision to make, and make it I must. The inside of Logan’s right front hoof looks like an angry, spiky cactus on the x-rays, due to aggressive arthritis. He’s had a long and sometimes difficult life.
Logan started his working life as a coal mine horse in Poland. From there, he somehow ended up in Fredericia as a riding school pony for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years. And finally, he’s had a year now with us at Caroline Frandsen’s RideCare barn near Fredericia, and we have done our best to spoil him rotten. We speculate that he’s a crossbreed between a Jutland horse and heaven above knows what only, because he has the colour and build of one, though he is not quite tall enough. His age is guesstimated to be between 26 and 30 plus.
Over the last six months his arthritis has gradually worsened. At first he was no longer able to carry a rider in trot and gallop — but I could still ride him on quiet walks. As of two weeks ago, though, that too came to an end. Last night the vetenarian and I made the decision, and he will be put down come Monday. Until then, he’s being kept on pain relief medication.
I am going to miss him terribly, and so are a lot of other people. During the short 14 months he was in Taulov, he’s made himself so very much at home that everybody knew him, and he was everybody’s big cuddlebear. Going to be a a hole in reality the shape of a little red draft horse that’s going to take some effort to fill out.
Here in Denmark we have one day every year that marks the transition from late winter to full-fledged spring. Today is that day: Yesterday the grass peeked timidly up between yesteryear’s dry remains — today, the dandelions exploded out of the ground like so many shining suns, and the first trees are coming into bloom, just like that!
Me, I’ve spent the last two weeks more or less hibernating on the sofa with a broken tooth, but today I got out in the sunshine in the afternoon. I got on Logan bareback and we grazed our way fifty metres down the road and back again. Grass was consumed. A few dandelions died too, but the first shoots of wild carrot were the bestest.
For him, lazy grazing time that does not place much strain on his arthritic hoof. For me, bloody hard work since my lower spine is notoriously out of whack, and keeping my balance on him without a saddle is a lot easier said than done. Perfect for us both, really.
Today I shall simply share Lucia Baumann’s excellent picture of Gossip grazing and Logan scratching his back most adorably. Sometimes, a picture says more than a thousand words.
