Fall is here!!

The weather is great! Not too cool and not too hot. I will enjoy it while it lasts, but soon it will be way too cold for my taste, brr! I'm definitely a summer girl.

Shorty has been great! He spent a few days without his left shoe because it came off during a ride last week. He trotted a bit off because of having one wedge and shoe on and one off, but otherwise it didn't bother him at all! He walked briskly and normally around and down the barn isle. That makes me so glad because I had feared him not being able to ever be barefoot again after all of this due to pain or discomfort. Losing the shoe sucked, but I was glad to find out he is not tender footed, yay!

Luckily, the farrier was scheduled to come out at the end of the week and he said he has REALLY good looking feet. The left hoof used to be wider from bearing more weight, and now his feet look more identical. This means he has been bearing equal weight for a while now and it shows!

We only did a 1 degree wedge this time. The pad doesn't even go all the way around - it's just on the back of his hoof. If he stays well, we will go to only bar shoes without the wedge, and then the next step is to try regular shoes!! I am crossing my fingers. A bit of normalcy would be so nice.

I will get some Pentosan joint supplement (injected into muscle) from my vet soon to replace the Previcox. Previcox is an NSAID so it is like taking aspirin every single day. I really want him to be able to get a way from that. Pentosan has a lot of super reviews and would be an alternative to purchasing a feed through joint supplement, which, we all know the controversy on that for how much horses actually benefit from eating glucosamine, chondroitin, and HA. Pentosan will help with any inflammation and is known to actually prevent and improve arthritis.

I've added Omega Horseshine (flaxseed) to his grain and I think he is happy to have his flax back! He thinks it is very tasty. He is still getting 8,000 IU of vitamin E per day and since it is just a super good value I will probably continue that until someone tells me to stop ha ha. He looks soooo good right now so I must be doing something right!

I am so glad that I have my riding horse back, but now we are having those normal issues with being one-sided and not wanting to jump into the canter correctly to the right - left is good! He is majorly falling into the circle during trot-canter transitions and trot work, especially where there is not a fence to guide off of. He can be quite rushy at the trot still, but he takes half halts well, so as long as I keep communicating with him he is still very responsive even though he obviously feels really good. It feels like we are on our way to working those types of things out, though (again!!). Right now it is walk, canter, and some circles of trot each ride. Not too much collection or anything now, but I have started asking for shoulder-fore quite often at the walk the last few rides to kind of get back into things. As soon as we go up to trot/canter, he kind of falls apart! We have a lot of conditioning work ahead, but I am looking forward to it :)