My Pets’ October 2010 Update

OK, so I know I’m publishing this a month too late, but I just haven’t had that much time recently to do their update. You’ll also notice that this post is entitled ‘My Pets’, not ‘Velvet and the Guinea Pigs’ – this is because I’ve decided to change it to suit all my animals, and now I can include all the happenings of the ponies and my giant land snails too!

Ok, so I have 7 guinea pigs (Aurea, Gerty, Hazel, Orchid, Pixie, Charcoal and Star), a rabbit (Velvet), three giant african land snails (Felicity, Claire and Shelley) and two Shetland ponies (Goldsytch Gradbach and Morjoy Tulip). We also have a farm cat called Mr Tiggins, although we don’t see him very often.

Every morning before I go out, I go around to the shed, at about 7am, and feed all the guinea pigs and Velvet (giving them their dried food and changing their water, and providing fresh hay). I then go down to my ponies’ field to check them over before I go out for work. In the afternoon when I get home, I go back to all my animals, and give them fresh food and vegetables, and give my guinea pigs and Velvet the option to run around the shed, if it’s too late or dark for them to go outside.

On 27th October 2010 the farrier came out to trim Gradbach and Tulip’s hooves. It is important that all ponies’ hooves are regularly trimmed as they can become broken and painful for the ponies if they are not trimmed or clipped.

At the beginning of the month, the family who put some of their cattle on our spare land moved some of the cows and a bull into the field that’s adjoining my ponies’ fields. Gradbach didn’t like the constant mooing going on! It also meant that on my walks down to the ponies, a couple of times a day, I had to walk through a field full of cows! They really are adorable animals – especially the calves. On the last couple of days the farmer who rents our land, took his cattle off so they could go into their winter accomodation.