It's hard as anything to get weight on him and keep it on! The vet insists that his weight was ok when we first got him a little more than a year ago. You could see his ribs but he was otherwise well fleshed and muscled. In the above picture you can still see his ribs a smidge and that picture was taken after we'd put a little weight on him but not a whole lot. And since that picture he's put on even a tiny bit more so that at times I can still make out his ribs barely but only at the right angle. He's got free choice, good hay and we're putting a ton of Strategy into him but the weight comes on in teeeeeeny little bits S-L-O-W-L-Y then drops off of him all at once if something so much as startles him!
I think he also has some minor problems with his skin and coat. After last winter his winter coat just wouldn't shed out when it got warmer. Brother was sweating and miserable a long time after Nugget had dropped her extra hair! Finally we started adding a supplement of some kind to his feed, an oil of some sort that I can't remember the name of just now, and along with some diligent brushing he finally shed. Now with summer almost at it's end his coat looks fried! It kind of looks like the very tip of each hair has been somehow frizzed or something. It might seem like something minor but I'm not concerned with how it looks. I look at it as one symptom of a larger overall problem, a clue to what is going on inside of him.
Which leads us to his biggest obstacle to training, his feet. When he first came to us he had four, lightweight racing shoes on but lost two of them very quickly. Since our place is mostly very hard dirt with loads of rocks and his feet had been babied for racing we kept shoes on him at first to help him transition to this rougher ground. After a few visits the farrier thought it'd be ok to try to get him used to going barefoot. He was understandably a little tender footed for awhile so we didn't ask anything out of him except that he get to his foot bucket under his own power. Since then it's been a very on and off again thing, he'll seem perfectly sound for a few days then start limping for a little bit in one leg or another then be ok then not really limp but walk a little "ouchy"... It's really starting to worry me. I thought in time with routine farrier visits he'd be ok but he really doesn't seem to be breaking out of this cycle.
Until we can figure out how to fix him up I just can't bring myself to work him. The answer to his weight and hair should be completely controllable with diet if I can hit upon the right mix for him. I believe his weight is simply because of his genes, he has a very high metabolism. His feet would probably improve at least some extent with diet too but I just know it's going to take a lot more than that to fix it. I'm trying to learn everything I can about their feet but it's such a huge, controversial subject! It's easily as bad, and probably worse, than learning about training! I'll keep pluggin away at it though in the hopes that one day we can amble on down the trail together, both grinnin our butts off.
