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Whoops! The moment rider realises her mare has decided to bed herself down for the night…


  • Have you ever got to your yard and found that your horses have decided to put themselves to bed? Well, show horse specialist Michelle Jones did one leisurely Sunday afternoon.

    Michelle, who is known on the showing circuit for her talent at scouting out show horses of the future, had asked her son to go and check on the horses at her small yard in Carnforth in Lancashire.

    “The horses were out in the field,” explains Michelle. “I got a text from my son and he said that there was a pile of shavings on the floor. He sent me a picture and I got the shock of my life. The funny thing is that it was much worse in real life!”

    When Michelle got to the yard she found that her four-year-old Irish Draught mare had escaped from the field and cause chaos.

    “She is a very big, very cheeky middleweight hunter type and she’s got a big personality,” continues Michelle. “In the space of a couple of hours she’d pushed the gate off, gone under the electric tape and decided to make herself a bed. There were 30 bags of shavings in total and she’d ripped every single one of them. It was absolutely pouring it down, too, so I couldn’t save much bedding and it took me a good few hours to clean it all up.”

    Continued below…



    “My gelding would have definitely just ripped up the one bag, but being the type of mare she is she went all out; all I kept thinking was thank god it wasn’t my haylage!”

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