Let me explain a bit about where we live. We have 4 acres of fields to play in and the Lady’s house is slap bang in the middle of it, at the end of a long driveway. There’s 14 of us at the moment so she has us divided into 2 herds because we don’t all get along and she can’t have 14 ponies running batshit crazy all over the place.
The Lady has us on a track that goes all the way around the fields with paddocks in the middle. The number of paddocks varies according to how many fences we break every week. We’re supposed to walk on the track around the outside to stop us getting fat and the Lady opens one paddock at a time for a few days. That’s the theory anyway.
It’s called rotation but we like to do our own rotation so sometimes we walk through the fencing. The very small ponies like Monkeyskin can go under the fencing and the bigger ponies like Reginald Goatpony just lean on it till it breaks and then we have one big paddock instead of 2 small ones which suits us better because we can get up a good burst of speed.
This winter she started a new system called Equicentral, I don’t think she’s done it right because we’re all up around the house now and whenever she leaves a door open Lorenzo and Pamela Anderson walk inside. Sometimes they go into the sitting room to watch a bit of telly and leave muddy hoof prints all over. I’m pretty sure that’s not part of the Equicentral system but there’s no talking to the Lady, she thinks she knows everything and she’ll just start roaring.
In the summer she’ll open the track again because it forces us to exercise if we want to get anything to eat. Be easier if she let us in the paddocks, I can’t be arsed walking for hours to find 2 blades of grass, but then we might get too fat and get laminitis. Laminitis is very serious and very painful and you can die from it.
We’ve got 2 ponies here with laminitis, Ernie and Sinbad. They’ve been here about a year. They didn’t get it here, they came like that when their own people gave up on them. The Lady put special boots on their feet and got them trimmed properly and gave them painkillers and they’re getting better but it’s taking a very long time. When Ernie first came here he lay down alot and he got abscesses in both his front feet for months but now not so much. I’m glad I’ve never had laminitis, it’s a dose.
