Wildwych Oleander

Some of you guys may have wondered if Ole and I were going to the M & M Show at Brookside in September. Unfortunately you won’t see us there. I hoped I could make it but forgot I had sent my entries for a show with Ember (the horse I ride while Ole is growing up) at Pebble Beach the same weekend. Plus I had a transportation issue, too. So in the end I just gave up and thought we would do something next year. Time flies by and I just have to decide between so many choices. 

But I am updating the gallery today with the photos Leo and I took today so you can forgive me. I thought that since I was not going to go to the M & M Show, I would just do my own show at home. Ole is dusty and all on the pictures (even though she is still so shiny and I can’t figure, for the life of me, WHY) but you can at least see how she is evolving. I have to say I am in a middle of a big brag time because I just love how she is maturing so far… So screw all of you that don’t think the same thing, I just don’t care!

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Yep, she did it again! I had to call the vet on Monday because this little girl had a sore mouth (hyper salivation, she was dropping food and eating slowly). I had a look in it this weekend and couldn’t see anything wrong except a couple of Fox tails I took off her mouth. On Monday she wasn’t feeling really better so the vet came on Tuesday to have a look. At the beginning I was confused because she was eating so much better. I asked the vet to sedate her and have a look anyway, just to make sure. She couldn’t see anything wrong until she looked under her tongue. It was FULL of fox tails and it was lacerating her tongue. No wonder why she was not feeling great. So we took off everything and she went back to her pasture. Hopefully she’s learnt from her mistake and won’t try to eat that again… But I doubt that. 

Anyway, I have updated the gallery, if you want to go ahead and have a look, you are welcome!

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Here we go, Ole is home, and I am so glad I picked this place. The pasture is HUGE and there is not too many horses in it. 
The trip went great, she got in the trailer in a heartbeat, traveled nicely even when we had to stop to grab a lunch: no crying, no stepping in the trailer,… She was a reaaaally good girl. 

We arrived at the pasture around 1:45pm. The other horses were busy eating their hay, so I could safely put her in there. She first met the 1yo mule and was not really sure about him. Then she met a huuuuge Quarter Horse who fell in love with her. She was chased around a little bit by the alpha, but quite frankly not as much as I thought it would be. When we left (after 2 hours, I was anxious about leaving her alone right away) she was sharing her pile of hay with the big chestnut QH. 
The funny thing is that she never panicked, she was clearly wondering what was going on, but she wasn’t cantering around crying and panicking.

So that’s good news, I’ll go have a look on her tomorrow morning before going to the show I am supposed to photograph (well maybe after, it is not really on my way). But so far she seemed great. 

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I went today to Livermore to deworm Ole and pick up her stuff (I won’t have the time to do that on Saturday). We worked a little bit in Hand in the arena… The beast was hot! But she was listening and watching out to not step on me. It feels good to have a yearling that actually doesn’t step on you every there is a sound. She is very respectful. 

Ok and I uploaded a couple of pictures in the gallery: enjoy!

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This is finally decided. I am bringing Oleander down to the peninsula this weekend, on Saturday afternoon. It is going to be a big change for both of us but I can’t handle the gas prices anymore and the fact that she is so far away: I will be able to go there and feed her every single day, she will have new pasture mates (way more than what she had so far) of every ages. They are mostly old horses but there is also 2 other 1yo. It is going to be the biggest pasture she has ever been in. With 30 acres she will have some room to go crazy (hopefully not too much, I said no more huge vet bills for at least 3 years!). 

It is exciting in one hand because she will be so much closer from me than where she is right now and she will have some adults to teach her how to behave… But in the other hand I am pretty anxious, she is my little baby and the first hours in there will be stressful for me, she will have to find her place in the herd. 

I am glad I finally made that decision, plus she should stay there for a while now. So here we are! Wish us luck, you guys will have some more news on Saturday night!

Oh and by the way, the DNA results came back! She is definitely a Gunsmoke x Amelia filly!

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The gallery is online with old and new photos… This way! 

It’s been pretty long since I posted here. But the good news is that the new website is finally online. It looks better, doesn’t it? I sure hope so because it was a lot of work!

What about Ole? Well, Ole is doing awesome, she is growing up, getting bigger and bigger, larger and larger, shinier and shinier… She is now 13 mo, almost 13HH, a very sooty buckskin (so far), she knows most of the basics: standing for the farrier and the vet, being brushed, walking and trotting (uhhh… almost) in hand, and uh… That’s it. I should introduce her to the clippers pretty soon though, so I won’t have to struggle with that later on. Other than that, she loves to go out of the pasture and to walk around the property and she has a new pasture mate: an arabian mare.
Oh actually there is something new! She is moving out of the pasture by the end of this month so she can be closer from me.

I’m supposed to go to the see her today and I have a new camera… You know what that means!

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She is back to the pasture. Finally! The friends, the grass and the dirt (well I should say mud) are still here. She’s a happy camper! About her foot, everything is just fine. She only has a little souvenir from the surgery: a little bump on the exterior of her leg. But it doesn’t seem to bother her at all. 

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For this christmas I asked Santa to have a sound horse! Yep, nothing less…
Last Thursday I took Ole to the vet to see what we could do about Ole’s club foot. That was her first trip alone in the trailer and she did awesome. She was pretty scared at the beginning but went into the trailer in a heart beat. Once at the clinic the vet took some x-rays and we looked at it together. And it didn’t look good at all… The coffin bone was at almost 90 degrees. Since we trimmed her a couple of times before, and there was no improvement, the vet told me that my best chance to have a sound pony would be to do the check ligament surgery. Basically, this surgery consists in cutting the check ligament so the tendon relaxes and the coffin bone can go back to its normal place. Beside the cut of that ligament, they trim the heel and put on a shoe with an extension toe. In 2 weeks this ligament grows back longer (and tougher).
So after accepting the surgery, Ole had it the next day and she was back on the third day. She is now home, resting in her box stall. The pattern looks very good now, it is quite amazing how everything changed in only one hour. I need to change the bandages every 3 days and she needs to be trimmed and re-shod every 3 weeks for a couple of times until her foot goes back to a normal pattern. And, of course, I have to walk her 10 minutes twice a day every day for 2 weeks. And then she can go into a small paddock.
I have to say that I am very proud of her. She has been so good about everything! The trailer, the stall rest, the bandaging, the walking every single day… She is amazing. She trusts me more than even!
And hopefully she won’t be neither sick nor lame for the next 5 years!!!!!!

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So yeah, everything went really quickly but Ole is here. She is now at 45 mins from home. Pretty far away but it is the only boarding facility I found that was adapted for a weanling. Safe fencing, irrigated pasture, and friends! She is now with a 2yo Quarter Horse mare, a 1yo Arab filly and a lipizzan weanling (her BFF now).

At the beginning it was tough. The weaning, the trip, the new place… It is a LOT for a 6ms old filly. But it has been almost one week that she has been there and she is already doing better.

Even with me. Well I have to say that she went through a lot with the vet, the farrier, the vet again and her medicines… She was kind of mad at the two legged human. Eheh. So she kept her halter on when she arrived and she’ll keep it a little bit more. But she trusts me more and more. She lets me catch her in the pasture to pet her. So yeah, she has improved a lot.

The only issue I have with her is her foot. She has been developing a club foot for a couple of months now and I have to take care of it. We are going to take some X-rays and ask the vet about it. But it might need a check ligament surgery to fix it since it is pretty severe. As always, I’ll let you guys know!

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