An interesting day

[glenatron]

Today has been hectic but really good fun. A month or so back life_of_tom and I visited allezbleu's yard on the way back from the Jackals event so I could have a bit of a play with her little cute pony Jess. She seemed quite happy with what I did that day because when one of her friends at the yard was having trouble with her mare allezbleu suggested sleepsy_mouse and I could maybe come over and visit with them to see if we could help. We chose this afternoon as a good time to go over so I've been checking the met office every five minutes for the last few days because I'm always excited to go and meet new horses and I was hoping someone would forecast some not rain for the afternoon.

As we knew we were busy in the afternoon we ended up trying to cram most of a day into the morning, so I did a bit of work with Zorro and we did a bit of riding bareback in the halter. We also did a little bit of playing at liberty, which sleepsy_mouse got on video. It wasn't textbook but with him snapping at me, grabbing at moutfuls of grass on the go and me swinging away with the halter to try and persuade him forward it is pretty funny. I swear I have the most insubordinate horse ever. He's a pleasure to ride though, always a pleasure to ride.

After that we went to fetch our lorry back from the repair place. Oh yes! After only four months the horsebox is back on the road. In a day or two it will be back on eBay. That is enough of that!

Then sleepsy_mouse brought in her Small pony and they did a bit of riding in the school. Just ten minutes, but it's great to see him able to work again and to see the smile on her face when he is.

Then it was off around the M25 to visit a mare.

So we got to meet Coco, a really nice Dun Quarter-horse/Thoroughbred cross. Very sweet and friendly and nosy. She had been started under saddle for a while and going nicely but then increasingly starting to take over, especially since a couple of yard moves. By this point she was tending to show up some fairly awkward behaviour, very spooky when riding out and tending to worry about people dismounting and to pick arbitrary things to get anxious about.

We took her out to do a little groundwork and it would be fair to say that this was a good time for them to get help- she was really quite feisty. I asked her to walk on a circle and she offered me quite a few things that weren't walking on a circle, including rearing, striking out and generally being a bit of a menace. Very often when you meet behaviour like this it's something the horse has learned from their handler as a way of getting them to back down and stop bothering them, but in this case I'm confident that Coco is growing into herself and that when she changed yard she went from being bottom of the tree as a baby horse in a herd of mares to a fairly bossy role with the horses she is out with now. She doesn't see why that should change just because she's with humans and as she is growing into her own strength she is testing those boundaries pretty hard.

I went to working with the flag so we could have a bit more distance...

Making sure she was alright with the flag when I wasn't putting any intention behind it. She's wearing my tack because ( assuming of course that it's a reasonable fit ) if there is something dodgy going on with a horse I'm sat on, goodness knows I'd rather be sat on my saddle when it happens.


Asking for a change of direction is another matter. She is a very sensitive horse, really very sensitive but she'll sort of try and blank things out and ignore them, then when they become harder to ignore ( as my flag is liable to do ) suddenly it all comes out and it's the end of the world...


After maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes ( I don't really keep time if I'm working with a horse, I just do what I need to in order to get the job done ) she was starting to offer me her attention - I've got an ear here but she's still happy to run into my pressure on the rope.


When she goes she has a really beautiful movement and that trot is ever so springy.

We don't have a lot of pictures as she settled down further because it was grey and rainy and the light was rubbish so most of them came out a little bit blurry, but I'm very happy to say that we managed to find the attentive horse in there and once she stopped trying to zone out the person on the other end of the rope we could start using that sensitivity to offer her more subtle cues, at which point her transitions smoothed out beautifully and everything started to look more the way I would like things to look between a horse and a human. I showed how to ask for backup and turns on the forehand and hindquarters and how I work horses on the circle and hopefully it made sense.

Because I knew that they would be riding and there were problems there I hopped on her for a couple of minutes, pausing on the way up to check the scenery and make sure nothing too hectic happened. She was really solid to get on, but although she was happy to steer she needed to move her feet when I was riding her. I worked to illustrate the one-rein stop and how getting the horse bent and getting control of the hind feet is such an important safety skill- Coco bends pretty well so this is not hard to do with her at all. I also talked through how one would approach something bothering the horse in the way that I learned with Martin. Coco was really nice with all this and I finished up by doing a bit of trotting ( so bouncy and springy! ) to see if we could carry those delightful transitions into the saddle and a little back-up to try and put a foundation in for the kind of backup I like a horse to have. Because we had sorted out most of the stuff on the ground, she was really sweet about everything I asked her for in the saddle and it was a pleasure to ride her. Also, relative to Zorro, she is so ickle! It reminded me a lot of the quarter horses I rode back in Texas.

I'll be honest here, I don't want to crow but I'm really happy about the work we did today. We made a big difference for Coco and I think that with her owner they've got a direction they can start moving in that can really help them become more confident in each other again. It was great for me as well because I got to do the thing I enjoy doing most, working with an interesting young horse and showing her a way to get along with people a little better.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/blitzen_/]

haha, she looks like she has a lot to say & is not impressed that you had an answer for her either.

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

She really did have a lot to say. It was very interesting to work with her. Once we got on the same page she was so sensitive too, really nice to work with. We just had to spend quite a while going through all the other pages before we found it.

[penella22.livejournal.com]

Reminds me a bit of working with Thea...that blanking things out until it all comes out...interesting dynamic isn't it?

It sounds like you had a great time...and there really is some sort of magic in helping a horse see how they can do as you ask and not find it burdensome too, isn't there? Things like this still get my adrenaline up a bit too much to be good for me, but I know how happy I feel after a session with a bit of drama in the beginning turns into a really nice cooperative collaboration, and it's really neat you got to help the human too. :-)

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

In the long run it's her human who needs to be working with her every day, so although I can make some big changes quite quickly I need to help her to make the tougher and smaller changes that we have to make every day as horse owners. It's often easier to come in when a horse doesn't know what you're about and make a good impression, harder when they see you every day...