Clipping Michigan

We were warned when he arrived that Michigan would be difficult to Clip. As he is starting to do a bit more work now and is a complete 16.3hh fluff ball he really needs some coat off. Jess held him on the yard a few days ago and I turned the clippers on and yes they were right we weren’t going to get anywhere near him. So today we sedated him with 6mls of sedalin paste and left him an hour for it to take effect. He looked a little dopey but not as much as I would have liked, after another half hour I was wondering if we should have given him the whole syringe but as I was running out of time we decided to give it a go. Jess put a head collar and lead rein on and held him in a stable the door was closed but not bolted in case he went nuts. When I turned the clippers on he wasn’t too bad and I managed to clip a 2inch square off his shoulder when he decided he wasn’t having it at all, He lunged at the door knocking me sideways and nearly knocking Jess out. Leigh took over from Jess and we decided to twitch him as well. By this time Michigan had broken out in a sweat and although we managed to get a low chaser clip off him (only being thrown into the walls about half a dozen times) the clippers were now struggling to get to get through the coat so he looks a little patchy. At one point Leigh held him complete with twitch over the door whilst I was in the stable on my own with him as when he threw himself around we were getting in each others way. The funniest bit is the hairy armpits when he did stand still and wasn’t throwing us against the walls he planted himself to the floor and refused to move a leg so I couldn’t get under the forlegs with the clippers. At one point he also jumped on Leigh’s foot. Some horses don’t bat an eyelid at being clipped and others seem to think your about to kill them. It is a dangerous situation to be in a stable with a large animal and electric clippers in your hand. This horse is 16yr old now and has jumped and hunted so he must have been clipped many a time, he has either never liked it or possibly he has had a bad experience, they don’t forget.

Posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 12:29 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.