Mr Rafferty

“Mr Rafferty was born in Ireland in 1984; a 15 2” chestnut horse with a distinctive white star. He was shipped over 4 years later as just been hunted and proved to be incredibly easy to train; he just wanted to please. His first owner died of cancer in 2005 and he was left to me although I’d always ridden him from when he was about 7 years old. He has continued to win at dressage up to Medium level and he is now 29 years old. He also came 2nd at Royal Windsor in the Veteran Plus class in 2012, qualifying for the Regionals. A couple of years ago he began to have problems with irritation of his sheath. This became increasingly sensitive and he used to go down on his knees to try to rub himself; resulting in bloody scarred knees. We began to suspect the sugar in his diet and insulin imbalance. A few years ago I tried him on Glucosamine on two occasions and each time he developed pus in the foot which he had never contracted before. I began to think that the Glucosamine had an effect on his Insulin levels. So obviously there was a potential problem here and I paid out 1000s of pounds in bladder washes and antibiotics from the vet to absolutely no avail. We decided cut out all sugar from his diet, so no carrots and soaked his hay well. This had some effect, but it wasn’t until my instructor recommended Simple System that there was a big improvement. He has been on Lucie Nuts, Total Eclipse and Timothy Chop for a couple of months. His sheath is still sensitive and I need to clean it regularly as it is smelly but he is not going down to rub which is a huge improvement. Interestingly as a post script while being clipped recently he was given a large scoop of ordinary horse cubes so that his head could be clipped. About 7 days later he was going down again and the sheath was very sensitive. This lasted a couple of days and he is now back to normal.”