Patsy has a look.
Ears pinned just enough to make the point. Bottom lip doing something close to a sulk. An expression that needs no translation: I would like to be eating, please, and instead you are asking me to walk in a circle.
I get it. I really do.
We're several weeks into rehabbing Patsy back into work after her surgery, and everything about it is supposed to be slow, careful, almost boringly unremarkable. Fifteen minutes of groundwork. Nothing dramatic. Except nobody warned me the hardest part of rehab wouldn't be the joints or the ligaments. It would be the food.
Britain's Best Desert Impression
Because right now, Britain is doing its best impression of a desert. Weeks of heat with barely a drop of rain, and our paddocks have gone from green to something closer to biscuit-coloured dust. The horses are, genuinely, on dust at this point. There's nothing out there worth grazing, which means we're supplementing hard with soaked hay just to keep everyone properly fed. Which is fine, except Patsy has never in her life turned down a meal, and a horse recovering from a joint and ligament injury is exactly the horse who cannot afford to be carrying extra weight while she does it. So we're threading a genuinely fine needle: enough food to keep her happy and well, not so much that her joints end up doing more work than they should.
Patsy, unfortunately, does not care about needle-threading. Patsy cares about breakfast.
Never Before Breakfast
Early on I made the entirely reasonable assumption that I could work her gently in the morning, straight after breakfast and a bit of hay. Turns out that's the exact worst time to ask a food-motivated pony recovering from injury to do literally anything else. She'd plant. Pull faces at me. Nudge me with her nose in a gesture that translates roughly to please no, not now, I am busy standing near my hay net.
Our New Personal Best
And then last week, we hit a new personal best.
I asked for a steady 15m circle. Gentle. Nothing more than a walk. Patsy's response was to launch into canter, throw in a genuinely enormous buck, tear round the rest of the circle like she was being timed, then skid to an emergency stop directly in front of me and rear. Not far. Not dangerous. Just enough to make her point, before landing and giving me a look I can only describe as there's your bloody circle, now let me get back to my hay.
I laughed. I couldn't not.
Rehab Isn't A Tidy Progress Bar
Here's the bit nobody tells you about rehab: it isn't a tidy progress bar. There's no neat weekly percentage creeping upward. It's centimetres of progress you have to actively go looking for, on a horse who used to gallop flat out across a field and is now confined to fifteen minutes and a small circle, clearly aware that both of those things are an insult. Some days that's genuinely hard to watch. You want to rush it. You want her sound and strong and cantering round that paddock properly, today, now. And you can't, because rushing is exactly how you end up back at square one, or worse.
So instead we've moved her sessions to later in the day, well clear of breakfast and haynet o'clock, and it's made a real difference. She's still a food-obsessed diva about the whole thing, just a slightly more cooperative one. We're keeping things simple for these sessions with her rope halter, nothing fussy, nothing that needs anything from her except attention.
I don't have a neat lesson to wrap this up with. We're not fixed. She's not transformed. We're just going steadily, working with what she actually needs rather than what would be convenient for me, and taking the fifteen minutes we can get. Most days that's a patch of dry paddock, a bit of quiet groundwork, and a pony who'd still rather be anywhere near her hay net.
Some days it's a proper circle. Most days it's a negotiation. All days, it's worth it.