A very sad goodbye, but exciting hellos!

Firstly, some very sad news I'm afraid.... it seems we have an awful lot of sad news lately....
We had to have Melody, our 2 year old home bred filly put to sleep yesterday morning. Melody had been on the farm since she was a week old (she was born at our vets), and was our pride and joy. She lived in the hill field with her mum Belinda, and was always a happy, sweet and well behaved youngster. For some reason, on Friday morning, she decided to jump out of her field - she had been happily munching her hay with Belinda at 8.00 a.m. when Sally drove past to check the new horses, and by 10 past 8 she was standing on the track outside her field with a sore back leg. She was uncomfortable walking, so we called the vet immediately, who diagnosed a fractured tuber coxae (pelvic bone). These fractures have a fairly good prognosis, so Melody was given painkillers and taken down to her stable, given a deep bed and was happy in herself and eating well. She did well through Friday and Saturday, but lay down on Sunday morning and was sore when she tried to get up. We called the vet right away, and discussed her options - in order to get her up, we would have had to roll her over on her back onto her good hip, give her a lot of painkillers and then if we were successful in getting her up, she would have to be tied up for 4 - 6 weeks to prevent her lying down again. We decided that this would be too painful and too stressful for a 2 year old horse and that the best thing to do was to put her to sleep peacefully whilst she was lying down. Belinda is doing well, is in a stable for a few days and will hopefully go back out with some of the mares soon. It was a very sad day, as it is particularly difficult with a younger horse, but these horrible things happen if you work with horses for long enough.
Onto the more exciting news - Sally came back from Ireland last week having made 2 purchases for the school. She bought Henry, a 16.1h.h. chestnut 9 year old gelding, who has done a bit of everything and will be the new jumping horse for the staff/advanced riders to replace Timone. She also bought KoKo, an appalloosa 5 year old mare, who Apache was very excited to see walking up the farm! He is delighted that there is another spotty horse on the farm - particularly a lady!
KoKo will do quite a bit of training with the staff before she joins lessons, but she is a 15.3h.h. cob type, so will be useful for both adults and kids.
The new ones are currently in strict isolation as coming from a horse sale is high risk for diseases, and they have had a blood test taken already to test for strangles. They will have another blood test taken a week on Monday and if these are all clear, they will slowly be introduced to the farm.
We look forward to seeing them progress soon!