My first notes on Ambrose

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Ambrose

Ambrose is a 5 year old Arabian gelding who was raced on the fair circuit in Califonria.  He is a “No Limite” son out of a WiKing bred mare.  He is a chestnut with 3 while stockings and flaxen mane.  He is a solid 15-2 hands tall and an maybe 875 pounds, and rather ribby at the moment.  

First time I say Ambrose he was standing in at least 12” of mud, no kidding, the horses could hardly walk it was so mucky.  We pulled him out of the paddock and took him to the wash rack and washed his legs down.  His rear legs were swollen very badly, you could see that he had one shoe on the right rear, all of the others were gone.  I took a quick look at his feet and saw big chunks out of the quarters.  The bars were so overgrown that they were at ground level, this was on all four feet.  While he was tied to the wash rack he would react violently to almost any little thing that happened around him.  I asked if there was a place I could take him for a walk, so we walked through the mud to the big barn where some other horses were housed.

Ambrose legs were so bad at that time I chose to try anther gelding to try.  Well the other gelding went home with me for a couple of weeks.  After triming his horrible feet he was found to have very low heals with almost NO digital cushion.  So Ambrose 1 went back and I picked up Ambrose 2 “Go the Limite”

On Monday 12/27 the swelling was down in his legs but his feet were still horrible.  He loaded in the trailer and off we went for home.  I put him in MONK’s stall which has a small paddock and started pouring the feed to him.  Next day we tried to work on his feet, but he was not having any of that.  It took me half the day to get to where I could pick up his front feet working on them a little bit at a time.  I eventially got them trimmed up some.  Next day I worked on his rear feet, eventially getting them trimmed.  I wanted to get him used to the quad so I started to walk him around with the quad.  He did not take him too long to get used to the idea.  Next day we actually did some milage off of the quad, just walking at first and then some trotting, I had fitted him with boots so we actually did 5 miles with the boots and 2 miles when he was barefoot.

On Thursday we booted up for a real pony, he did 6.3 miles with mostly trotting and a little cantoring.  He has a very nice trot, fastest I have seen is 14mph so far.  I did check his recoveries and they were good.  I hope this horse works out, he has a great personality, still a little jumpy but learns quickly, travels nice, all in all a very nice horse.  Hopefully his feet will return to normal with some proper hoof care.