Hello my friends! Firstly let me apologise for my lack of posts recently - I have been popping in early in the morning each day to read through the threads though. After all the gales and driving rain we experienced here in January, we suddenly got snow - not much but enough to cause trouble for a couple of days. But worse it suddenly decided to do a big freeze. This did cause a problem as, due to all the building work and sale of part of the farm last year, I only have the one water pipe running to our side of the farm, proividing the water for me in my caravan and travelling on to fill the automatic tanks across the horses fields. This pipe runs above ground and therefore froze! Most days with the sun it thawed itself around 5pm for an hour or so before it froze again. Have spent the last two weeks madly filling containers to provide water to last myself each 24 hours and then walking the fields to check that the tanks have also filled. Also ran a hose to the field close to the buildings to fill an old bath and as many bins as we could find as an emergency supply for the minis should the pipe not thaw on a daily basis.
The mare herd are running their winter 23 acres and during the awful rain we did run them out some hay just to warm them up. Once the freeze came we had the big round bales of hay run out to them - they are munching their way through their third bale at the moment and will get another in the next couple of days. We did have a couple of days when the water supply did not thaw out so had to open up the gates for the girls and let them wander through the fields to come up to the buildings to use the 'emergency' supplies - certainly kept them fit coming all the way across for their water and then making their way all the way back to get to their hay!!
On top of all this we had two emergencies. Firstly Mrs Nest (JR terrier) poisoned herself with something. Neither we or our new neighbours use poison of any sort, but I think that she may have picked up and eaten some of the raisins that were mixed in with a batch of bird food that I had put out on the bird table - they could have got flicked off on to the floor by the birds. its the only thing I can think of and raisins are poisonous to dogs. She was very poorly for a couple of days and pretty weak for several more, but she's a tough little customer and thankfully made a full recovery.
Then we had another emergency and this time sadly itwas not a successful outcome. I'm sorry to tell you that we have lost our little Ferret (for 'newcomers here Ferret was a mini colt not a Ferret!). Over the course of week he showed mild colic symptoms and not showing any real improvement by the second day he went off to our wonderful vets at their fab hospital. As thispost is getting rather long I will post another one a bit later on today (got to go do the horses now) as his symptoms and up's and down's are very interesting and educational, but for now, suffice to say that after another 4 days his condition suddenly worsened and they put him down. The vets and their nurses were so upset at not being able to find exactly what was wrong with him they kindly offered to do a PM for us free of charge. He was suffering from a rare Caecal Intussusception - look that up folks!! Even if they could possibly have known this on the first day, it is highly unlikely that operating would have been successful, and with recovery costs could well have cost us around £7000, which I'm afraid we simply couldn't have afforded. As I said, I will post more details in anoher post.
RIP little Ferret - you touched many hearts in your short life. (2012-2015)
