Riding is off

I couldn't ride today. It was bitterly cold with a blistering wind and it was just impossible to be outside for long. This last couple of weeks have actually been worse than most of the winter. I hope it will end soon and we can have some spring weather before the summer rain starts. 
 
Meanwhile, something odd is happening with the boys. Radar and Ace have rejected Woody and he is often on his own. I thought I was imagining it, but without mentioning it at all to SH, he asked me today whether I had noticed. I know that it is common for a herd to reject a damaged or weak horse. I wonder if they know more than we do?

I am building a list of the things we knew about him that were warning signs before he arrived, and in the first few weeks and more recently. So far, the list of "before I had ridden him" is:

He has history of not staying in the field he is put in.
I was told that he was "a little" anxious if left in a stable on his own.
He was hacked in a market harborough.
I was told he had a very sensitive mouth and was ridden in a nathe bit.
He has a scar on a front leg that can only have been caused by a very serious incident of a "leg trapped in a gate" type.
A dealer thought that a plausible explanation of where he had disappeared to was to say that he had been put down because he had behaved dangerously.

And from the early days of riding him:

In the stable, when his food is gone, he turns his back to the door and sticks his head in the darkest corner. He has always done this and continues to do it.
When asked to go forward out on our early hacks he reared and backed up into walls and up steep banks.
He hyperventilated for no apparent reason on a very frequent basis, initially several times each time he was out, and, less often, on the arena.
If thwarted about going home at the speed he wanted, he stood and smacked his front feet into the floor so hard I thought he could actually break a pedal bone and turned him to stop him doing it.
When asked to leg yield left to get out of the way of cars, he got very angry and refused to do it, running backwards into whatever was behind him, so I was forced to turn him to face cars coming up from behind.
He ran backwards at high speed when asked to work to a contact on the arena, completely oblivious as to what might be behind him.
On the arena, he would frequently be working nicely and then suddenly rush out from under me, with no apparent cause.


And at a later stage, when the problems above appeared to be largely in the past:

He backed into a wall and then jumped a non-existant jump when out on a hack when he was trying to jog home and I wanted him to walk.
He was difficult and others thought he was dangerous on our first hunt.
He was outright dangerous to both of us and people around us on our second hunt, and completely insane in the lorry.
He has had an inexplicable panic attack in the field.


It's not a good list, is it :-( ?

C