From: Katinka
I clipped my connemara in the middle of October, and by now she is an Icebear again, you can hardly see the traces from the clip at all. She still wears a Rambo rug blanket, because we have a very hard winter here in Sweden, with temperatures going down to 20 degrees below zero Celsius. And very little snow, but ice all over! I have two questions:
*Question nr 1:* She is out in the paddock all day, and keeps herself in good shape by walking and trotting and sometimes cantering a few strides, to and fro, to and fro, for hours! I realize that she does this because she misses the other horses, but I dont want her to be in the pasture with them, because Im afraid she will hurt her tendons on the icy mud. And she is sort of more fragile than the others, or accident prone maybe. In the paddock, the surface is much more even. She will walk 15 - 18 meters, turn to the right, walk back 15 - 18 meters, turn to the left, and so on. She will keep on walking/trotting until she is steaming with sweat. If a feed her hay she might eat it, or not. If I take her back to her stall, switch blankets and socialise for a while, she is content and calm down very quickly. It is all the motion and excercise she gets these days, and it really keeps her fit. As she is a jumper, we will trailer to an indoor arena for jumptraining once every fortnight. She loves it, and I dont think we could do that unless she was in such a good shape. Can this behaviour do her any harm?
From your description, this sounds like an anxious and lonely horse. Horses are social animals, and they are happiest when they are out with other horses, moving around freely as nature intended. Your mare may simply be frantic because she is alone -- or she may be getting too much food for the amount of exercise she is given, and she may have found this way to exercise herself. The bad news is that this CAN indeed do her harm. You are worried about her tendons if she goes out into a pasture, but running and making tight turns in a small paddock, over and over, is likely to cause much MORE stress to her tendons and ligaments. It's the equivalent of longeing her at speed on a very small circle, which is never recommended by anyone!
My advice would be that you put protective boots on her legs if you feel that she needs them, and let her go out with her friends. Is it a large pasture? If there is a lot of space, and your mare gets on well with the other horses, she may play and run for a few moments, but she will probably settle down quickly and spend most of her day walking around, which is much less stressful for her legs AND for her mind.
*Question nr 2:* Is it too late to giver her another clip now? I usually do a high trace clip. Some people say that clipping now, will do harm to her summer hair. But I cant see how that can happen? And when we watch the World Cup competitions in Scandinavium, Gothenburg in april, I have noticed that all the horses are clipped all over. Both the dressage horses and the jumpers.
Katinka -- you should be able to continue clipping a horse until mid-February without damage to the summer coat. Many people clip their horses later than that -- if you intend to keep her summer coat, I would say don't clip later than mid-February. If you intend to keep her clipped year-round, it doesn't matter when you do it! If you attend major competitions in the summer, you will see -- as you say -- that the horses are clipped all over. At the Olympics in Atlanta, I'm sure you will see the same thing -- the horses will be kept clipped, and probably clipped again just before they compete.
I'm not certain that you should clip your mare, though, as long as she is running herself into a heavy sweat! Why don't you see whether you can get her more quiet and settled, and then consider clipping her if she becomes calm? When she is sweating heavily and her coat is wet or icy, and you put your hand on her skin under her coat, is her skin wet, or dry? Many hard-working horses with long coats become sweaty in winter, and even have ice form on their coats, but that's because the hair wicks the moisture away from their bodies -- when you touch their skin, it is dry and warm. Is this the case with your mare?
-- Jessica
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