Bad Week

Firstly, my apologies for not updating for a while, it's been a busy few weeks.

This last week has been a very sad one for me, on Monday I found a foal laying dead in the field.
She was a lovely 6 week old filly, very strong and even a bit chubby.
The vet did a post-mortem and discovered she died from poisoning, so off I went to search 30 acres of grassland to find out what had killed her. With the vets help I managed to identify an area in a ditch where some plants were trampled and broken - one of the plants turned out to be Hemlock Water Dropwert sometimes known as "dead man's fingers" - the killer of my little filly,
a plant very difficult to remove, so the area has to be fenced off.

Then two days later, a beautiful Blue Roan mare called Bethan who has been ill for 4 months suddenly died.
She had liver fluke ( a liver infection caused by worms, possibly contracted from sheep).
We had been nursing/treating her for all this time and thought she was on the road to recovery when she just lay down and died - such a sad thing - even this old horse farmer had a lump in his throat when he found her!
Having so many horses (216), the chances of some fatal injury or illness is quite high but make no mistake - it doesnt get any easier each time you lose one!
It is the one side of the horsefarm life that I just don't like.

Hopefully my next update will be more cheerful.