glenatron | Day one (Reply)

The morning began with us heading out to the barn and being assigned our chores, to be performed morning and evening. Any ideas I may have had that this course would give me a holiday from mucking out evapourated immediately as it transpired I'm to be mucking out stalls morning and evening along with having the additional role of goat-wrangler. The latter task may well be beyond my skills as the goat in question is an irresistable force as far as I can tell and goes where it wishes. Which is mostly wherever there are people to talk to.

I call this "Scene with goat and Burro."

Chores completed we retired to the living room of the bunkhouse to talk through the basics of the course and what is going to be going on. This week is going to be interesting in terms of having various professionals talking us through their special areas. Also on Wednesday we're probably going to be helping move some cattle for someone, so that will be interesting.

We spent most of the morning talking, establishing how the course will work and learning about Martin's approach to training young horses. There's quite a lot about this, but I think it will probably come out more informatively as the course goes on so I'm not going to go into too much detail here.

After a tasty lunch ( a half-size salad in my case that made me very nervous about the magnitude of a full-sized one ) we came home and collected our horses.

Ahem. Guess who couldn't catch their horse?

Turns out muggins here hasn't really needed to retrieve a vaguely reluctant horse from a herd before and managed to get it wrong in about nineteen different ways. Go me! Martin had to talk me through several attempts to collect Chewie my partner for the afternoon before I managed to actually persuade him I'm not entirely a bad person and he probably could deal with me. This was a great way to set low expectations for myself, I guess, but I hayoung horses. There's quite a lot about this, but I think it will probably come out more informatively as the course goes on so I'm not going to go into too much detail here.

After a tasty lunch ( a half-size salad in my case that made me very nervous about the magnitude of a full-sized one ) we came home and collected our horses.

Ahem. Guess who couldn't catch their horse?

Turns out muggins here hasn't really needed to retrieve a vaguely reluctant horse from a herd before and managed to get it wrong in about nineteen different ways. Go me! Martin had to talk me through several attempts to collect Chewie my partner for the afternoon before I managed to actually persuade him I'm not entirely a bad person and he probably could deal with me. This was a great way to set low expectations for myself, though I had kind of hoped I would leave it a little longer.

Once the horses were caught ( the other person riding one of Martin's horses, my roommate Fred, had no problem at all ) we headed in, got saddled and bridled and started riding. Having established a walk and trot in each direction Martin had us do left and right-hand circles. After watching this for a while he brought us round and explained how to lean to help the horse steer- justby leaning to the outside on a turn it becomes amazingly more easy for the horse to make the turn because of the way their muscles and movement work. It brings the horse onto a correct bend and helps them to turn easily. He had us experiment with this and sure enough it makes a really big difference. Really big. Once you're aware of it you can make the weighting very subtle, but it's well worth exploring.

After a bit more work with that Martin suggested we go out to the pasture - they had a cow that needed medicating so we all moved the cattle down and then held them in place while Martin sorted out the cow in question and he and Jake ( one of two students who is with us carrying on from last month) roped it so that Jennifer could administer some medication. Then he had us divide into pairs and take it in turns with each pair supporting and holding the cattle in place while he sorted one out and then to make sure that only his chosen horse actually came out. After that( which was easy first time round then harder afterwards ) we split into threes and took it in turns with two people supporting and one person sorting out the cow. I was having some problems with Chewie's controls at this point - he's a very responsive horse, but my hyperactive hands were confusing to him, and although I knew the right cues for him I thought his cues may be different so I was applying them without commitment, so he really didn't see any point in paying much attention to them. Once I realised this things were going a little better, then it was time for us to sort our cow. Fortunately Chewie knew his job pretty well, because I was clueless. A very good little horse ( western horses are small ) and we scampered cheerfully off to the gate, although I lost steering right at the end as Chewie noticed a cow at that end of the field and thought our job was to chase it.

So far, I've shown myself to be pretty clueless, but I'm already learning a lot and I've ridden a horse to cattle for the first time.