Wychwell Eventing Blog

....Dougal!


Yes this France and France likes making rules and regulations, it likes making so many that most french people don't seem to be that bothered about breaking them. Especially road rules like speed limits and solid white lines or private property and no hunting/shooting/fishing signs. I'm with them on this, I hate rules and restrictions so I find it particularly galling that one of the rules that can't be bent if I wish to have Dougal registered with the Haras Nationaux  as Origine Constatee (of known origin) is that his name must begin with the letter D since he was born this year. last year it was a C and so on, that's why poor old kevin got labelled 'Chocolate Teapot'.
My gripe ends there because I do think the idea of being able to register a horse OC ( origine constatee) is a fantastically good idea. It allows people like me to breed foals from my own stock without the need for the stallion to be graded. There are penalties, the registration is not cheap, blood tests need to be taken of mum, dad and baby and despite being allowed to compete in the young horse classes they won't be eligible to win money.
With everyone getting more and more hung up on breeding ( which personally I don't agree with for an eventer as there seems a lot to go into the pot besides pedigree and ability) it means I can chug away making the odd baby here and there that isn't just restricted to competing in the amateur classes. I have yet to see if BE are going to allow them to enter young horse classes, their DOB is recorded and blood tested etc, but it won't be a graded a stallion- we shall hopefully see in due course.

.....Dad.



Yep this is Dougal meeting his dad for the first time.

........... DONT' TOUCH MY KID


Dougal has to have a little chat with his dad every morning on the way to the field now and Charlie, bless him, is always delighted to have a little chat and  be very gentle besides , which I think is kind of cute. Does Charlie know he's the dad? That's the thing.
I make an admission here that the making of Dougal is quite the most amateur, red neck undertaking of my life. I'd had Charlie here since he was three but the opportunity for him to make babies never really arose since Peral had a foal and I had no idea how to go about it.
With previous foals the dads were small and young so they ran with the mare and it seemed to work okay, but Charlie was a bit big for Pearl and by last Spring pretty old,6, and pretty macho. ( He was beginning to behave like a bloke and it seemed right that he should be gelded but having had him for such a long time it seemed an awful shame to miss out on his Contender bloodline. Pearl might be small but she's old, experienced and she serves a mean double barrel so I kept my fingers crossed she'd be able to look after herself.
Don't think I didn't have fears about how it was going to work or how I was going to separate them. I did, for sure I did and quite rightly so.
Charlie went in with his woman about three in the afternoon a nd there followed an excruciating few hours of him  chasing her round the field, licking her boobies and dripping with excitement from you know where. A ghastly spectator sport and Pearl was doing  her best to cut the fore play short and make him get along with it. Charlie wasn't really sure how or where to get on though, so it was rather long winded.Eventually he got the gist of it but it wasn't the most romantic coupling as Pearl was rather squashed by him and made it rather clear she wasn't going to tolerate being sat on by a big fat slob for more than a few moments. Having witnessed the deed and seeing that Pearl wasn't particularly enjoying the experience I decided to rermove Pearl from the equation and get chubby Charlie back in.
NO BLOODY WAY was Charlie's amswer to that.
So I then chased Charlie round the field until about half past ten at night while he herded Pearl away, away and away some more. Poor little Pearl, she was quite exhausted and I was quite concerned for her welfare when suddenly Charlie must have been overcome by the grumbles coming from his  fat belly and came to me for the bucket of feed. We grabbed him, grabbed he,r brought them in together, slammed the door on Charlie and whisked Pearl away to a secret hidden location.
Poor heartbroken Charlie, he shook, sweated and worried all night but by the morning he was back on  topic - FOOD!

There were two worries I was left with after this romantic encounter, the small one was that it seemd pretty unlikely Pearl would be pregnant ( but there was no way I was going through that procedure again) and the second was that it would have alerted Charlie to what being a stallion was all about. I'd be lying if I told you it didn't affect him, it definitely tuned him into what a mare was meant for but the longterm good news it that it hasn't affected him in the least. He was gelded last summer and I would challenge anyone to know that he was kept entire until the age of six or that he had produced an heir. He is just the most gentle, laid back kind of fellow, he can travel in the trailer beside a mare who's fully in season.
She can be bellowing,squirting and cocking her tail and he'll look at her with appealing eyes and say," Please love can you stop being so disgusting, you absolutely stink and it's quite putting me off the promise of supper."

So all's well that ends well, we made a little Dougal and sometimes  it seems you can just get away with being clueless if you shut your eyes, cross your fingers and pray!