My mare has had a ‘misalliance’ with a pint-sized stallion

My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem.

Dusk was falling when he climbed out of his battered 4×4 in khaki shorts and crumpled T-shirt, sun-burned, muddy and sweaty from the day’s call-outs. He is a victim of his own brilliance, and the decades of experience that have made him invaluable. Everyone asks for him, and he tries to get to his favourite clients even though he ought to be retired.

It was 7.45 p.m. and after me he was heading for a traveller site in Croydon. He does not discriminate. He’s my kind of hero.

We had Darcy standing ready by the gate and immediately he dismissed the graze on her knee which was the only reason for the lameness I could find. He ran his hand down her back leg from one end to the other as I held her and the builder boyfriend watched. Within five seconds he found an almost imperceptible slit on her heel and announced: ‘She’s not happy about that.’

Right where the flesh of her foot met the back of her hoof, a shallow half-inch cut was opening and closing as she moved, which was why the poor girl was holding her foot in the air and only putting it down to walk by balancing on her toe.

Chattering on about events in the news, the vet sprayed the foot with antibiotic.

By the look of the place, the stallion had been kicked from one end of the field to the other

Straightening up, he said the cut would heal. But it did suggest the small stallion who got into her field had stood on her back feet as he did what stallions do. A misalliance, is what he called it.