Case Study: Cocoa

Cocoa has been having some saddle fit and soundness issues recently and his owner wanted to check in with him about how he was feeling about his work. Note: I’m neither a vet nor a saddle fitter, so I don’t (and cannot by law) diagnose animals nor offer advice on things like how a saddle fits, and I will turn people away for a communication appointment with me when they’d be better suited to work with a qualified vet/saddle fitter/trainer/behaviourist etc. What I can offer instead is to have a chat with the animal to see what they think of things and how they are feeling, so this is the nature of the chat I had with Cocoa.

The first thing Cocoa said to me was how pleased he was that his field was bigger than usual. He pointed out three patches of dirt, and seemed weirdly pleased about them! His owner laughed and confirmed that his field had been previously fenced off into into paddocks that had had bare earth tracks worn along the fence lines where horses had fence-walked, but had recently been opened up and he had access to it all - evidently this met his approval!

We chatted about how he was feeling, and he complained of a numbness in his lower tricep muscle on one side. His owner had known him for a while under his previous owner and noticed that his previous owner had tended to do his girth up very tightly on that side, so we wonder if this is nerve damage from that - again, I’m not here to diagnose, but it was an interesting coincidence between what he was telling me and what she had observed. As somebody who has ridden some very round native ponies I know I have been guilty of over tightening girths, and it’s sobering to wonder if repeatedly doing this could have caused not just discomfort but longer term damage.

Did he still enjoy work? Why yes he certainly did, but he (politely) complained that he hadn’t been into the woods next to his field (where the badgers live, apparently!) in ages, and requested to go for a hack again there soon. Alas he’s out of luck on that one as apparently the landowner has had to remove permission for anybody to cross their land after too many incidents involving hikers (so please behave respectfully and safely in the countryside folks, lest you cause permissive paths to be lost to everybody). He wanted to do more hacking in general though, and it was agreed that his rehab and strengthening programme could be done as hacks rather than in the school. One request came out of the blue though - Cocoa asked for ABSOLUTELY NO POLEWORK WHATSOEVER in his rehab programe! Yes he wanted to go back to jumping poles when he could, but poles on the ground were boring and hard work. Happily, his wishes in this area can be accommodated!