Rainy Tuesday

I thought maybe I'd ride tonight but it started raining pretty good on my way to the barn. Cody was standing near the fence visiting with Amigo and hiding from the mud. Axel was right up by the gate. Luckily I have my muck boots back so I was able to wade out to Cody and work on convincing him to cross the mud. He wasn't too happy with that, he's not too keen on walking through mud. When I got him out of the pasture I walked him down the driveway nearly to the road to get him to walk through some puddles and clean off his hooves.

I was going to groom him in the crossties but as I tied him up he just stood there shaking. The rain was pretty loud in the roof and after walking down the drive way past the other horses Cody was a little worked up. He wouldn't calm down so I finally brought him into the arena so he could move around and hopefully calm himself down. It was probably even louder in there but moving around seemed to do the trick. I thought maybe he'd want to roll since he was wet from the rain but he just wanted to sniff the ground. I let him run around loose for quite a while, he kicked up his heels a bit. He didn't seem afraid of the rain any more so that was good. We did a little work at liberty and a bit of ground work on the leadline.

I brought Cody back outside and grabbed Axel and walked him through the same puddles. I really wanted to get his feet clean so I could see if he's got any mud fever starting. I groomed him for a few seconds in the aisle but he was pretty wet and I knew he'd roll so I put him in the arena. He was feeling pretty frisky after rolling and ran around quite a bit. There were a few moves he pulled that I wondered if he'd actually land on his feet. In the end he was just running around like an idiot ignoring the fact that I was there, but he was moving and stretching and I think since they've been stuck in the snow and ice and now mud, that's probably a nice treat to just move. He would flail about for a while and then come to the middle to see me. I groomed him a bit and got as much mud off his feet as possible. So far his legs are looking good and I didn't get out the betadine yet. We'll see how he does after it rains for several days.