We arrived in Barton St David and the cute and quirky Barton Inn on Wednesday morning, ready to start Trim 2 which will finish on Sunday with our stage 2 exam and clearance to start our std case studies.
The day began with a recap of the stages of the trim and practice trimming on cadavers. As is often the way with cadaver legs, its very hard to find straight forward, non pathological feet, which mine demonstrated nicely with excessive flare and atrophied frog.
After this, we all moved on to Denise Powell's yard, 5 minutes down the road to practice farrier holds. Denise had a mix of horses for us, including the delightful little Paddington. Needless to say you cannot put a mini shetland into a full farrier hold - it would be verging on rugby tackling the poor things
After lunch we made a start on actually trimming live horses (other than our own) for the first time. I was paired with Naomi and our horse was Heidi - a rescue pony who suffers with sweet itch, which was very appropriate as we both have sweet itch ponies at home.
We took it in turn to trim a front whilst the other acted as handler, either standing by or holding as needed.
Once we had all trimmed the fronts all round (we are coming back here tomorrow to do their hinds), we watched them walking and where appropriate, trotting up to do some gait analysis. Thankfully all horses were still just as they were prior to us trimming them with no changes to gait, so I think that must count as a successful first day
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