So we had planned to go to combined training tomorrow but plans don’t always go…well…according to plan!
This past week Dustry has been getting increasingly more and more badly behaved when ridden. He is a hot blooded creature at the best of times, but these past few days he’s been verging on dangerous. During one particular mid-week hack I got to the point where I thought, maybe I should get off and walk home for my own safety’s sake, and that is a very rare thought for me!
I was initially baffled by this rapid and extreme change in behaviour and then the penny dropped……….mares! Dustry (for the first time ever) has ended up by accident with mares on both sides of his field and they were all coming into season and making it very clear to him that they were ‘single and ready to mingle’
So…the mares were moved to some mares only paddocks and Dustry’s tasty neighbours were replaced with geldings much to his disgust. He called out to the mares (which he never does) he galloped about like a loony (which is fairly typical) and he generally sulked and scanned the horizon on a regular basis to see if he could spot where all the feisty fillies had gone to.
Looking back over the last week the tell tales signs were there in non typical behaviour, he has been snorting and sniffing the air frequently, when tied up he insisted on sticking his head over the stable door of a mare’s box the whole time I was grooming and tacking him up, he bit things on 3 different occasions, biting a rug hanging over a door and holding on to it (like a stallion would bite on a mare’s neck).
With temptation now out of reach I am hoping that he will calm down, but I feel that it has disrupted his behaviour to such an extent, and that I haven’t had time to get him ‘back on track’ with some consistent, obedient and relaxed work yet so I’m going to give tomorrow’s competition a miss. I have put so much hard work, time and effort into carefully producing him because he can be tricky, and he went so well at his first event, being impeccably behaved I don’t want to jeopardise our progress for the sake of a local combined training competition.
I know him, and I know that we wouldn’t gain anything by going into a buzzy competition environment tomorrow with his current state of mind and potentially it could result in us taking a step back instead. So fingers crossed the horny little dirt bag will have cooled his passions in a few days and normal service can resume. Love hurts!