No clinic today

[glenatron]

We were supposed to go and see Chris Irwin teaching today but he cancelled. One of the things that made us excited about this clinic, apart from it being the first one of the year, was that we it was a chance to meet up with oifonly and her charming pony Staro.


This is Staro, who is a fan of scratchies and snacking whenever possible, he's a very friendly little guy.


He took us for a walk in the woods and up and down the hillside. The Cotswolds are steep!


When we got back oifonly hopped on bareback. Staro was very sweet about it.

After our walk we had a little play in the field and set up some trotting poles in the "school" corner of the field, which he needs to be using to build up his hindquarters. Carrying the polls was not so great because the one I was carrying was coated in slugs and while I carried it somehow it got twisted and squashed a bunch of slugs on my shoulder. Bleh! Slug juice!


A groundwork classic- could he cross a plastic sheet for me?


Of course he could. He mostly wanted to stop so he could eat it rather than because he was nervous about crossing it.


Walking over ground poles was fine, but trotting he thought he might need to be jumping them. He got the idea pretty quickly though.


Staro is another small pony with a big trot- when he started picking his feet up going over the poles it was really something to see. Lovely stuff.

When I was going over the poles with him Staro did share some rather strongly-held opinions about how I was doing it wrong. Years of keeping company with Zorro have rather honed my debating skills however and we concluded in the end that he could work even with me in his right eye. That revelation seemed a pretty good place to stop.

It was a really nice day and well worth the long drive there ( the drive back was quite short- we got to about Cirencester and then I blinked and suddenly we were coming up to Reading ) for such good company, both human and equine.

Not sure about the squashed slugs though, they weren't so great actually.

Comments

[life-of-tom.livejournal.com]

That last picture is really interesting- am I imagining things, or is that horse copying your body language?

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

That's not me, that's oifonly, who owns him. But yes, he will be copying her body language.

Horses are reflective animals, it's how life works when you live in herds, so they are very quick to pick up on any body language cues you present to them.


If you look at my feet and his hindfeet there I was working on this there and you can see they're pretty closely in time. In that work if my feet change speed his should change to match them. It's pretty cool when you get that connection.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

I appear to have used the word "there" far too frequently in that last paragraph. Apologies.

[life-of-tom.livejournal.com]

Err, yes, of course, that isn't you. What kind of idiot would make that sort of mistake?

Damn, I need to come visit you.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

You do indeed.