Cash and JB Arrive

Brrrrr. It was cold this morning. I went out pretty early to get the herd in, as John and Sara were coming to trim feet today. I needed to be organised, as I was also expecting the arrival of Petra and Linda with their horses. I thought that I would be clever and lead both Bruce and Hunter in with halters and ropes. Wrong! This meant that the herd weren't walking in their "proper" order, and they all took great exception to this. So that was interesting.  I decided not to mess with that! They obviously have their own political system, and who am I to meddle? So I took Hunter's halter off, and everybody followed me and Bruce quite calmly.

Cash, Petra and JB

Petra is now a 1* Parelli Professional Instructor. She has taken a job in Pagosa Springs for the winter, working in the Parelli office, and she knows that with the high mountain weather and short days she won't have time to play with her horses, so she has decided to put them here for a few months.

Lucky me! They are lovely characters and very easy to handle so far, as I would expect. One of the duties Petra asked me to perform over the first week is to put some homeopathic spray stuff under their tails twice a day. "Sure," I said - hoping for the best. But when I went out to do it this evening, it was totally easy. I didn't even need halters. Just a quick friendly game, find the "up button", a quick spray and we were done.

So I had a very busy yard for a couple of hours this morning. Fells tied to the posts, Petra's horses in the big visitors' pen, Ducky in the small one, Dakota and Hunter in the round pen at the back, and John and Sara trimming while horses got unloaded and people got organised. The great thing was, that with all this going on, there were hardly any high heads, no whinnying or running up and down, just a lot of relaxed horses and people. Hunter even stood ground tied while Sara trimmed him. It really helped to confirm in my mind that I want to stick to my intention to.make this a place for PNH students and their horses, exclusively. Of course that doesn't guarantee that it will always be so peaceful, but it does tend to be the norm.

I am very pleased to have Cash (a little bay mare) and JB (a really cool Morgan gelding) coming into the herd for awhile. Even though it is winter, we are not short of grass, so perhaps it will help the Fells' waistlines a little. I am also glad to be helping Petra out with this. She has been a very dedicated PNH student for many years, and she has worked very hard to realise her dream of becoming and instructor. By the way - if you want to check out her website, here's the link: http://petrachristensen.com/

It will be interesting introducing Cash and JB into the herd. If today's vibe is anything to go by, it should go very smoothly. Apparantly Cash is pretty dominant. So is Iona,so that could be interesting, but both of them have experience in larger herds, so I think they will work out an agreement. I guess that I would be a little shocked if Iona got moved down from her 2nd In Command status, but time will tell. I will keep you updated here!