the horse interlude is ending...for now

we've put the girls up for sale. it's sad that they just stand out in the pasture, swishing their tails at flies and aren't being used. we don't really have a place to properly ride and with the child away at efterskole, and the fact that she lost interest anyway, it just doesn't make sense to keep them. i made an ad with both of them in it, hoping to find someone who wants both of them, as they are good buddies and would miss one another. i'm hopeful that we found that today, but we'll see. if there's one thing i've learned, it's that danish horse people are much crazier than american ones. or maybe just crazy in a different way. i feel a little wistful about it, but there are other horses and someday, we'll have time and a proper arena to ride in and we'll get horses again.

kittens make everything better

there's a lot of crazy out there in the world. some of it is messing about in the ukraine. some of it controls an area of iraq. closer to home, some of it runs the local school. and some of it apparently buys horses for its children in denmark without putting an acceptable amount of investigation and thought into it until it's too late and then they panic and spew all that crazy in your general direction.

we sold sabin's horse matilde several months ago and apparently the new owners didn't get along with her, so they sold her on (that's their prerogative, tho' i'd have preferred to be left out of her madness). i talked to the new owner a couple of weeks ago and answered some questions she had. then today, it became apparent that that new owner didn't really get along with her either, as i was contacted by yet another new owner who apparently passed a whole new level of madness test (seriously, this horse never attracted madness before to our knowledge), tho' i didn't pick up on that at first. for one, i spell way better than she does in danish (which doesn't say all that much for her) and for another, she's a stark raving mad lunatic who, i suspect, is illiterate, because she doesn't seem to have understood a word that i wrote to her. she has morphed a one-time hoof abscess into asthma (really?) and regular massage sessions into undisclosed issues (possibly related to asthma?). unbelievable what desperate, illiterate morons with too much disposable income will get up to. and subject total strangers to.  i can only hope that this too will pass. and that i will learn from it that i should not try to help people, even when they ask for help.

thankfully, i have kittens to play with. because despite what the cat trolls say, it's ok to live in a first world country, have kittens, take good care of them, find good homes for them in the end, but love and photograph them like crazy in the meantime. kittens really can right a whole lot of what's wrong with the world.

horse people are crazy

oh the joys of crazy horse people...

at the end of june, we found a buyer for matilde the wonder horse, as sabin has outgrown her and it was time for her to go to another family. the people seemed very nice and thus we agreed to an arrangement where they got to take matilde home for one week to try her out, whereafter they would make a first payment on her and then the second payment august 1. they wanted to see if she would get along with their other horses and if they liked her, which was ok with us if it meant finding the right home for her.

after one week, they had had shoes put on her and had nothing but gushing praise for her. she fit them like a glove, got along with their other two horses and was just their very dream of a pony. we were happy and they were happy. we truly thought we'd found a great home for her and that's what we had most hoped for. then, the time for the second payment rolled around and lo and behold there were suddenly a whole lot of very insurmountable problems with her hooves. we've always had shoes on her, but took them off last december when we brought her home and weren't going to be riding her. her hooves have a tendency to flake off around the edges, so she's a horse that rather needs shoes on. but there's not really anything wrong with them per se and she's never been lame. they needed work when they took her home and we recognized that, so i reduced the price by the cost of one shoeing.

now, i'm being bombarded with texts filled with ridiculous lengthy statements on how there are long-term problems with her hooves and one has a big bump on the side and how it will be months and months and perhaps never be able to be fixed. funny how the farrier she had there during that trial week never mentioned any of that when he put the shoes on her.

turns out they're using a vet that we know from sad experience is a real piece of work. misleading people into having unneeded x-rays and diagnosing dire problems that require loads and loads of veterinary visits on horses that don't actually have a problem. all for their own gain, because they know that horse people are gullible are completely batshit crazy will do anything for their animals. she also tried to tell me that matilde so badly needed her teeth floated that it cost extra (she had had it done by this vet), despite the fact that she'd had her teeth floated by a trustworthy vet less than a year ago and there was simply no way it could have been as bad as they told her.

luckily, at the beginning, before they took her home, we both signed a written contract which states that we know of no problems with the horse (which is the truth), but that there is no guarantee, as she is 15 and a living animal. so they will have to cough up the rest of the money or we will go get her. i really don't want to do that, as we'll just have to start this process all over again and chances are the next person will have just as much of a crazy horse person brain.

i'm still hopeful we'll work it out and that we can be happy that matilde found a good home (because it genuinely did seem like a good home). i just think it really sucks when a dishonest vet intervenes and causes trouble.

sometimes you just have to photograph a pony

my facebook feed has been rife with dire warnings of late among my horse-oriented, danish friends. they are all concerned about some woman who has been seen stopping her car and photographing horses in pastures, surely with untoward motives. worst of all is that she looks...gasp...foreign!  and as i stopped to photograph this fetching little thelwellian pony along a country road the other day, i realized that maybe they're all talking about me! and my motive is nothing more than to capture a pretty pony in a green pasture filled with golden yellow dandelions on a sunny day. i do not wish to stuff said pony into the back of my stationwagon (together with a sack of grain, some bottles that need recycling and a horse blanket that needs washing) and speed off. nor do i wish to harm the pony or eat it (tho' sabin did recently suggest that this pony ate the others, as there used to be a whole flock of them in this field and this one does look a bit fat). all i want to do is take a picture of it in all of its fetching, photogenic ponyness. i do wish sometimes that people would worry about something important.

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do you realize that what we see and know adds up to a measly 4%?