Why Horses Are Battling with their Condition At The Moment:

Our horses are battling with condition, because we have recently moved onto a property that had a large amount of Black Wattle trees on it. (The property from which we have worked for the last 15 years had been sold and we were given notice to move).

For some strange reason some of the horses decided that these trees tasted really good, and the result was, the horses showed the strangest paralysed almost cramping painful stringhalt type of gait lasting about 2 weeks. Followed by a loss in condition, which we suspect is as a result of the destruction of the absorption rate and flora within the gut.

We have now chopped the trees down and we have burnt them because the horses were still eating the leaves even though they had dried out. The healing process and reversing of the resulting effects has taken long, with some of the horses still having some difficulties. This process has been aggravated by the fact that our grazing is now used up and we don't have the finances to fence the bottom 6 acres. We are currently hand grazing our difficult horses, on a half hour rotation and hand cutting of this grass for supplementary feed through the rest of the day. The rest of our herd is taken over the road to AB Ceramics in the morning to graze until about 3 in the afternoon during the week. In some respects its not ideal, but its all we can do at the moment - until a sponsor can be found for us to purchase round bales of grass.

We have included 2 photos of the horses grazing near these trees and after the trees inside our fence have been chopped down and burnt. The trees in the back ground is on the outside of the property and therefore holds no threat to the horses. A close eye is kept on them to insure that the branches doesn't hang over the fence.

"They told me that when I bought a horse I would meet lots of new people. I did, and every one of them is holding out their hands for money... the farrier, the vet... "