Bacon-flavoured peril

[glenatron]

For the last few weeks Zorro has been absolutely brilliant, just as much of a gentle reliable riding horse as you could possibly wish to meet. A few Zorro moments out on the trail but I'm pretty wise to them these days and we have been bumping along pretty well. In the school he is a total rock star and really showing what he can do. A very awesome pony.

Today I got home in time to go off on the shortest local loop down the valley and around the fields on the other side, so I tacked up fast and we dashed off down up the road. Half way down the hill, Zorro stopped, properly and could not go on. This was just ahead of a fork in the path so I turned us around and we went along the top and down the other side of the path to approach the fork from the other direction. Again we jammed up. I couldn't see what was bothering Zorro so I got off to lead him. Usually he'll stick with me pretty well in that situation but not today- however after a few steps down the trail I saw the probem - the long unoccupied pig sty beside the path had residents once again and they were clearly bothering Zorro a lot. He gets very anxious about the little kuni-kuni pigs at the yard still, although less than he was, and these are proper regular size ones. Carefully I asked Zorro to approach a little closer, just a step at a time. He did pretty well until the pig clocked us and trotted a couple of steps towards us. Zorro left, pulling the rope out of my hand and the bosal clear off his head and headed for the road at a powerful trot, pausing to turn and snarp loud warnings towards the pigs.

Fortunately it was pretty quiet, but he wasn't going to stop for any reason until he was way out of sight of his porcine nemesis. Then, spotting a verdant bank at the side of the road, his stomach took over and he stopped to munch. As he hadn't gone that fast, I was pretty close behind him and able put the bosal back on ( happily not damaged by bouncing around his neck for a while ) and bring him back to the yard a hundred metres further down the road.

We went into the arena and with the adrenaline running through him and a lot of life in his feet he offered me some really beautiful work before we were done. It almost felt like he was apologising for his previous morale failure.

I totally understand his concern and although we're going to look at working through this gently, pigs are something that a lot of horses just never get to be alright with and if that's how it ends up being for Zorro, I'm kind of okay with that. He's doing so well in every other respect that if he really can't do it I'll know that it's genuinely beyond him, because I know I can trust him now to try and to keep trying.

Comments

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

He's just doing so well at the moment that I figure he really means it about pigs. We'll try and set things up so we can go past them because it would be convenient to use that trail, but I'm going to trust him if he says he can't because these days he mostly can.