Munchkin's Move

Munch checking out the lorry

Today was supposed to be the day when Munchkin, who is one of the original p4p ponies, came back to us from his loan home in Chulmleigh.  His loanees are moving, and sadly are not able to take Munch with them.  I say "supposed" to be the day because things didn't go quite to plan!

We hired the lorry that we have used so many times to transport ponies, so that we could take Munch back to our main base.

He loaded really nicely, but when the lorry was moving he became very agitated.  On the lorry CCTV, we could see that he was about to try to jump the back partition.  We stopped the lorry immediately to sort the situation out.  We thought that he might feel happier if someone travelled with him, but although he would settle for very short periods of time, he continually tried to jump the back partition of the lorry.

This is a dangerous situation, as on the other side of the partition is a groom's compartment - if Munch jumped into it, there is no way out for him, and he would most likely suffer a life threatening injury by jumping into the area.  It's certainly the type of situation that the Animal Rescue firefighters get called out to. 

Without the means to fill and block off the groom's compartment (nor the option to tether him at the other end of the lorry), and with Munch being so stressed, we decided the best thing to do was offload him (after his 2 mile journey) and walk him back home.  This meant walking him back through Chulmleigh high street - there were buses, milk tankers, scaffolding, flags etc and he was brilliant, really quite bombproof!  Munch has travelled OK before, but that was in a trailer - for some reason he found the lorry distressing so we needed a plan B!

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