Sunny February Days
4 February 2007 22:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glenatronWe have had a fine and sunny couple of days and that has meant it's time for ponies to do some work. Yesterday we rode both of them for a while, but Lou noticed Joe was coming up lame in the trot, so poor old Patch didn't get to do as much as he would have. We'll get him checked out this week by various expensive specialists in the hope of a solution.
Meantimes Othello has been proving himself a very good little horse, working beautifully for Lou and helping me to learn which of my asks are utterly ineffectual and which are less so. Today he was a bit jumpy and he was most unimpressed when Joe got to go back to the field and eat hay while he had to go down to the school. In fact he was decidedly tetchy.
I figured we might as well get it out of his system because we weren't going to get much sense out of him until we had so we let him have a bit of a play on the line:
(With apologies for my crazy hair)
(Link, for if embedded video isn't behaving)
After that we was a lot more calm and mellow and very well behaved generally.
It was interesting that he seemed a lot more nervous than he has in the past and I think this goes alongside his new-found gentle behaviour. What I'm thinking - and hoping - is that he has realised that he can express himself around humans: He no longer feels that he needs to suppress everything that is worrying him or making him happy. He will always be quite an introverted personality anyway, but he seems to be finding it a little easier to express himself.
There were a couple of jumps up in the school and it was also interesting to notice how nervous of those he was, eyeing them suspiciously and at one point spooking away from them. I know he has been jumped fairly hard in the past- we think this was a cause of the lameness that he was suffering from when he came to us - so they probably have some fairly negative associations for him. Neither of us has any pressing need to jump anywhere - his career is more likely to be wandering about on bridleways and perhaps a bit of basic dressage if I can ever get my riding good enough for him, so that works out fine.
Meantimes Othello has been proving himself a very good little horse, working beautifully for Lou and helping me to learn which of my asks are utterly ineffectual and which are less so. Today he was a bit jumpy and he was most unimpressed when Joe got to go back to the field and eat hay while he had to go down to the school. In fact he was decidedly tetchy.
I figured we might as well get it out of his system because we weren't going to get much sense out of him until we had so we let him have a bit of a play on the line:
(With apologies for my crazy hair)
(Link, for if embedded video isn't behaving)
After that we was a lot more calm and mellow and very well behaved generally.
It was interesting that he seemed a lot more nervous than he has in the past and I think this goes alongside his new-found gentle behaviour. What I'm thinking - and hoping - is that he has realised that he can express himself around humans: He no longer feels that he needs to suppress everything that is worrying him or making him happy. He will always be quite an introverted personality anyway, but he seems to be finding it a little easier to express himself.
There were a couple of jumps up in the school and it was also interesting to notice how nervous of those he was, eyeing them suspiciously and at one point spooking away from them. I know he has been jumped fairly hard in the past- we think this was a cause of the lameness that he was suffering from when he came to us - so they probably have some fairly negative associations for him. Neither of us has any pressing need to jump anywhere - his career is more likely to be wandering about on bridleways and perhaps a bit of basic dressage if I can ever get my riding good enough for him, so that works out fine.
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Date: 7 Feb 2007 12:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 7 Feb 2007 14:58 (UTC)I find the way he comes back to me and gives me a little nose dot at the end is very bless indeed.
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Date: 7 Feb 2007 22:37 (UTC)