A good day

The horses head off across the paddock. I pick up the feed buckets and begin walking back to the car. The sound of a splash causes me to pause and turn around. Dante and Floss have walked to the dam to drink, then waded in, the water covering their fetlocks. They stand there and splash, pawing at the water with their front legs. The water splashes up onto their bellies. Floss stops, walks a few steps deeper, water now up to her knees, and proceeds to splash again. One foot and then the other. Dante does the same.

I stand and watch, feeling the smile play on my lips. The sight of it lifts my heart. Their joy is evident. It is good to see. Floss isn’t a natural water baby but the warm spring day has clearly brought something out in her. Dante loves water, but, like Floss, has had health challenges this year. His mood has been dour, not joyful.

Floss is getting on in years (long in the tooth, literally) and struggled to keep weight on over the cold, wet winter. I put her on special senior horse food (and fed her a lot!). I bought her a warm, waterproof rug. It has cartoon turtles all over it (only one available at the time), so I apologised to Floss for the indignity of it every night as I diligently put it on her. When the daytime weather was foul, I left it on during the day, but raced out and took it off as soon as the sun was shining. Floss bounced back. She now looks terrific. She is shedding her winter coat and her silky summer coat is coming through. The shed hair rolls like tumble weeds across the paddock as I scrape it off. Great clumps of it. I imagine birds picking it up to line their nests, eggs and chicks hunkered in warm chestnut fur.

Dante is a different story. He has not fully recovered from the acute asthma attack he had months ago. These days his breathing is always too fast, too ragged, too effortful. I recently moved him and Floss to a new paddock to see if it would make a difference. My vet thought it was worth a try. The paddock they had been in was surrounded by forest, dense with wildflowers and pollen. There was not enough grass there to fully support the horses so I was feeding a lot of hay. We thought perhaps there was dust or mould in the hay or that the pollens were affecting him, triggering his asthma. I moved all of the horses to knew agistment: Dante and Floss to this large grass-filled paddock with a dam, and Panache to another friend’s place. Floss is thriving in the new paddock. She comes up to me to eat her daily bucket feed (which is how I ensure the horses get their minerals and prevent them from going totally feral; Floss also gets anti-inflammatories for her arthritis), but she is always keen to get going back to the grass. Serious business this eating of grass.

Dante, for whom the move was really designed, hasn’t changed much at all. He’s put on a bit of weight and his winter coat has given way to a shiny summer coat, but his breathing hasn’t improved. I count his respiration rate as he eats. Watch it increase with the effort of walking. I can see in his face that he is pained, lips pursed, eyes clouded, nostrils tight, grimace lines along the side of his head. His diaphragm heaves with the effort of breathing. Some people call this condition in horses ‘heaves.’  It’s a descriptive term. His belly heaves with the effort of drawing breath. Sadly, I slowly accept that the move has made no appreciable difference to his health. I continue to give him steroids, to help keep his airways open. But it’s not looking good.