Bringing him back from the brink
Samantha named her new Friesian horse Moyjse – the Dutch for ‘Beauty’ – but his full beauty didn’t become apparent until the close of 2006.
Samantha Elmhurst’s tale is one that begins on a note of sorrow, but which quickly evolves into an inspiring story about the things you can accomplish with a winning balance of good exercise and good feeding.
Moyjse was bred in the wintery wilderness of Inverness, as a great many Friesians are. He later moved to Hull, where he had the good fortune to cross paths with Samantha. When Samantha first travelled from Norfolk to Hull to see him, she saw that Moyjse sorely lacked in condition, and had highly visible bony projections.
She took him on a week’s trial in the middle of June 2006, and thankfully her love of the breed, combined with the inconvenient travelling distances involved, sealed the horse’s fate for the better.
“To be honest,” she said, “if we’d seen him somewhere close to home, we probably wouldn’t have taken him. He was frightfully skinny, and something about him just didn’t seem right.”
Although Moysje passed his initial veterinary assessment with flying colours, the vet remarked that a Herculean effort involving conditioning with the right feedstuffs and correct schooling was needed to bring him to form. Samantha accepted the challenge, and quickly put a programme into practise.
“He’s a young horse, so we wanted to bring him on in condition, without heating him up. We started him off on Quiet Mix, but over five weeks put him on Calm & Condition, and he came on leaps and bounds. Now he’s twice the horse he was: sleeker, covered in muscle and fat, his mane and tail have grown and his coat is amazing. You don’t get that from exercise alone.”
Moysje improved so quickly that when he entered his first Pony Club D Test dressage competition at Blackborough End Equestrian Centre, he won. Samantha’s dressage instructor, who has charted Moysje’s progress from start to finish, describes the horse as unrecognisable from their first encounter.
“You see all of these weight loss adverts for people, and sometimes you get a bit cynical and think, ‘Is that even the real person?’ But you have to believe your eyes on this one. Moysje is the genuine article, and Calm & Condition is the real stuff.”
“His nature has totally changed. He’s happier, enjoys his work and seems to have gone through a spiritual as well as a physical change.”
Calm & Condition is tailor-made for horses or ponies that ‘hot up’ or ‘go off their heads’ on normal conditioning feeds, or anything with barley in it. Formulated without barley or oats, Calm & Condition is a pelleted diet for horses who need to put on condition, even those with a true intolerance to barley. Low in starch and cereal, but high in fibre and oil, a careful high-oil balance of linseed and soya oil helps to produce fantastic skin and coat condition.
