Horses in the bottom Paddock

A couple of years ago, my wife was approached by a couple of girls who had a horse that they needed to agist for a while. We were assured that the arrangement would be short term as this was just while they sorted out selling their horse, Jack.

The girls were both pretty hard up and had children to feed as well as the horse to look after. So I was annoyed, but not surprised, when they more or less abandoned Jack on our property. Oh, sure, they came around once in a long while with a bag of carrots, but the paddock was pretty quickly reduced to dust by his rapacious appetite. I decided that the horse had to go and that the girls were being more than a bit irresponsible. I contacted the RSPCA and asked for advice. I was told, to my surprise, that they couldn’t do anything about Jack unless he was being starved. Obviously, I couldn’t starve the beast, so, with the help of one of my horsey friends, I started to feed him and get him into shape.

In the meanwhile, the girls were told that they had to do something with him or I would give him away. Oh, yeah, that got a lot of action. Anyway, long story short, I gave Jack to a friend of mine who is now using Jack as a paddock pal for his other horses. Jack is happy, the other horses are happy and the girls (and their children) are well off my property.

Well … we miss Jack. He was a cantankerous horse with an attitude and poor feet (turned out right front hoof) that made him, more or less, unrideable, and he terrified my youngest daughter. But, we miss him.

My neighbour has recently got himself a couple of horses. His property is about the same size as ours, so the horses eat all of his pasture in about four months. A while back, being right neighbourly, we offered the bottom paddock to our neighbour as a place where they could keep their horses on a rotation basis. The limit that we set to this arrangement was that we would want to use the bottom paddock again when we get sheep (not an immediate goal, but certainly there on the horizon).

The neighbour is a very nice bloke and he graciously allows our daughters to visit him and be shown around his parrot cages (he breeds rare and exotic parrots for the pet industry). His partner is a lovely woman who is always very nice to us and to the girls too. So, over the fence we decided, we’d have horses in the bottom paddock again, I wouldn’t have to mow it and my neighbours pasture has time to regrow.

By the way, this isn’t one of those, “you wouldn’t believe how my neighbour took me for a ride” stories.

As you can see from the picture, they are very picturesque in the bottom paddock.

Horses, in my opinion, are nice for someone else to have close to me, without me having any responsibility for. Yay!