As you can see I've been very good at keeping up with my blog here on the website. Uh. Yah. Sorry. I'm going to try and get better about it because I still want this site and my newsletter to be the home base.
News from the Barn - My Horse Yggdrasil
Alright, so if you follow me on social media, you may have seen me post pictures and videos of a beautiful bay horse named Yggdrasil. Yep. (He used to have a different name, but we renamed him after it felt, and seemed like, the barn we were at at the time, still treated him as if he was theirs). He got to pick between some different names and Yggdrasil was the one he picked.
His registered name is still his registered name if that makes sense. It's just the name he goes by on a daily basis.
My gorgeous horse is a 13 year old OTTB. He's pretty much the stereotypical thoroughbred. I hear stories about people's thoroughbreds being calm, laid back and well, lucky if you get them into a trot. That's nice...
Weight Loss - and not the good kind
My horse had started losing weight at the previous barn. Plus he got a stall door injury there that no one knew anything about supposedly. Yet we found out later that some people did ask if owner knew about it. They were told that don't worry about it. Yeah he had a gnarly injury from it and they didn't bother telling us.
At the new barn, he started to lose more weight. At first, we thought it was probably just the move since that apparently happens to a lot of horses when moving barns. Except. He kept losing weight.
New, Better Feed - Not Included in Board Of Course
As soon as we could we switched him to a different feed (they were feeding sweet feed at the new barn), gave him fat supplement and alfalfa pellets. He's now starting to slowly put on weight again. We also have him on Gut X for now. I figured it was worth trying after reading all the good reviews about it.
I'm told he get 5-6 flakes (good quality hay but small flakes) a day.
As you can probably gather, I've been worried about my horse, and not so much about the blog/newsletter. If you have followed me for a bit, you'll know that I'm not new to horses. I'm new to horse ownership technically (did use to lease horses in the past).
My amazing hubby got me my horse this year. I waited many years to be able to have my own horse and get back into horses (other than just the occasional trail ride every couple of years). It wasn't until this year we were financially able to buy a horse and the cost of upkeep.
My horse is amazing. It did turn out that he has very thin hoof walls (yep, beginning white line disease...), he had had chiropractor visits on a regular basis (not cheap) and that he had some back issues. So, of course that adds to the cost for upkeep.
Mhm . Okay Then.
When we first got him, he had white hairs all over from ill-fitting saddles and also healed up scabs. I was told that the only saddle they ever had had problems with was English saddles, they used almost exclusively Western saddles. Okay then, how all those white marks?Since I've been mostly trained in English, they included an English saddle with purchase. Well I noticed the saddle didn't fit well at all. They were basically telling me they didn't understand what my problem was, the saddle fit. No, it didn't. It was way too wide for him for one thing, and panels was uneven, the saddle sat crooked etc., and it sat way too close to his withers.
The Quest for a Saddle That Actually Fit
So, we refused to put the saddle back on him and went to groundwork instead. Measured for saddle, bought a western saddle, and... didn't fit either. His withers were too high. Eventually were able to get saddle fitter out (not cheap), and he had to come back a second time because he was not expecting the withers to be as high as they were. This wasn't too long after we got to the new barn.I've not been riding him for some time now because he got so skinny and needs to build his weight back up. We do some groundwork and a whole lot of just chill' time while he eats grass.
Hopefully that explains some of why my blog hasn't been as active for a while. Thank you all for your support. If you want to follow Yggdrasil's and my journey, you can check out his TikTok.