The Tick Whisperer

Having dreamt of owning a horse since I was a young child, I was filled with anticipation at the arrival of our first piece of the smallholding puzzle, a 15 year old cheval de trait. Pepito was led down our ridiculously steep drive to the meadow below and installed in what we now laughingly refer to as the lower field, due to it's tendency to flood every time it rains. (But that's another story altogether, suffice it to say he's now been moved to drier ground.)

I spent the first week being quite nervous whilst grooming and feeding him, he's quite a big horse after all, and my previous contact with horses has been rather limited.

But all that has changed over the last few days. I wish I could say that this was to do with having discovered some latent talent for handling horses. Or having a sense of bonding with this beautiful, placid creature. But alas the truth is far less prosaic. It was the discovery that Pepito was plagued with ticks which changed all that.

I hate ticks. I have only been bitten once in my life by a tick, but I'd rather not repeat the experience, and that one was tiny compared to the monsters that I'm finding on Pepito. After picking off nearly twenty of varying sizes and thoroughly pissing off the horse, I returned home demanding that the grass be cut short in his field. The other half dutifully went out first thing the next morning with the tractor, bless him, possibly due to my graphic descriptions of the alien bloodsucking lifeforms.

It has now become a part of my daily horse routine. Armed with my handy tick-removing tweezers, I mutter darkly to myself, as I sweep my hand over Pepito's head and neck, uncovering the little bastards skulking under his thick coat. The combination of damp weather, long grass and the presence of deer has ensured that it will remain a part of my horse care routine from now on I fear.

The other delight of horse ownership I'm discovering is shit.

Quite literally. Mountains of the stuff!

This daily horse care routine I find far less offensive, bizarrely enough. Shoveling shit is, contrary to popular belief, quite an enjoyable activity. It doesn't smell bad, the activity is aerobic and warming, even on the coldest of mornings. And I look at my growing mountain of steaming shit and I see compost manifesting itself before my eyes. I see the future pumpkin patch. I see potatoes happily multiplying deep under ground nestled in their nutrient rich bed of horse excrement. I see all this possibility and I smile.

In order to contain and shield the sight of the pile from more easily offended sensibilities I have surrounded it with a rather lovely coppice fence, finding a use for the undergrowth we've cleared out but not got around to burning (what with all this damp weather we've been having).
I'm so pleased with my new creation I might have to find some other things to surround with fencing. Thus ensuring that we need to burn less waste wood, which gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Something I definitely can't say about the ticks.