Cows, injections, and fun times

Hello All,
 
Last week was quite harsh in WI for weather so I didn't get out much during the week but Saturday was the Ranch Show at the barn and I was determined to at least ride one class with Abby.  Well we ended up doing 3 which went "all right".  Abby has been very stiff lately but per the vet  I needed to keep working her so we set out to do some reining.  I tend to mess up any sort of pattern call it a curse and memorized the wrong one. Had I known the right one required flying lead changes I wouldn't have signed up but oh well it was practice right!  Did I mention Abby was really stiff?  Yeah we did "flying lead changes" several times but it was only in her hind legs...cross firing is never fun...
I kept her moving in between classes and decided to try out Working Cow Horse... Abby has only tracked a cow once for about 1 minute but the show was for fun so why not.  I learned allot in that 3 minutes about Abby.  She likes to chase cows!  Oh my I almost fell off twice because she stopped so short to cut off the cow without me even steering her.  I was so caught off guard.  Everybody was hooting and hollering for her cause she was such a natural.  No more stiffness issues after that she was fired up and ready to go.
The last class was trail and Abby was a rock star.  She was one of the only ones to do all the obstacles and only sniffed at the bridge cause it wasn't there the 100 times she passed that spot.  All in all a great learning day but it made me even more sure that I was going to pursue doing whatever was needed to help her stifles.

Abby on Saturday taking notes on how it's done...

Enter Monday... Today was the day the vet was going to prescribe our next steps with Abby's stifles.  If I haven't mentioned it before Abby suffers from locking stifles.  Some times it's a fitness issue and you can work them enough to fix the it but after several months of focused conditioning they just don't seem to be improving.  So we decided to hold off on surgery as a last resort but did inject her joints with Legend and then injected a solution into the ligament to stiffen it.  She has a few days off but I'm suppose to continue to ride her slowly at first but within a week back to normal.  I'm really excited and hope this helps Abby feel 100%

Poor Abby very sleepy getting ready to be injected.

I've also been riding Mr. Theo and it's been really great.  The trainer rode him in a boxing class which is where you do a reining pattern and then work a cow on one end of the arena.  He did pretty good but the cow came running into the arena which kind of spooked him and he took off...silly horse he's done quite a bit of cow work in the last 6 weeks so I was puzzled as to why he would be scared now. My only guess is there have been whispers of  a Sasquatch around these parts and perhaps Theo had an encounter with it and maybe thought the cow was Sasquatch.  I'll be keeping my eye out for tracks now.

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  Today I have a lesson with a 3 day eventing coach and I'm super excited.  I hope to get some video and post some pictures of us.  We are just working on flat work I have no intentions of pursuing 3 day eventing with Theo he is on the path to being an endurance horse but a little dressage work is always a good thing.

That's it for now sorry about my limited photos I hope to have more for the next post!