Today is a day of minor victories…and some amusing silliness from the baby horse.
I decided to stick him out for an hour whilst I mucked out. It’s been raining here and the fields are soaked again and I hadn’t looked at his legs properly (cream obscures the view!) but I figured he needed the run and I could hose him off and stuff when he came in. So I put him out. He stood by the gate for a minute until I waved a rope at him whereupon he SHOT to the crest of the hill in flat out gallop, paused, galloped down the hill round the bottom of the field and landed back up at the gate. And then called to me in the most pathetic little whinny ‘done now! Can I come back in?’ I said ‘No, you muppet, you’ve only got an hour, make the most of it’ and got on with my yard work. So he stood and SHOUTED for me for about 15 mins and then gave up shouting and stood at the gate whinnying at me every time I came into view. Daft b****r. You’d think he’d be pleased to be out! When I did go to fetch him I paused about 10m away from the gate to chat with another owner and he was *furious* – stood calling and shouting at me until I bought him in! He makes me laugh so much :rofl:
Anyway, after hosing I can say that most of the mud fever is gone!! :yahoo: Very pleased with how it looks – there are a couple of tiny scabs but I think we can think about him going out again properly on Wednesday :party: Very pleased about that even if he does want to be an indoor horse :doh:
This week has been about two things: pole work and contact. We’re progressing him from luring him over poles with treats to properly consistently working him across them and it’s going quite well – after riding him over poles for the first time on Wednesday to have him grind to halt the instant he was over the last pole and DEMAND a treat. Um, no, darling baby that’s not how this works. Bit of work on the lunge on Thursday sorted that out though and he’s now ‘got’ trotting poles, lifts his legs up beautifully so I’m pleased with that! 🙂
To solve his contact issues M hit on a brilliant idea of working him in hand with reins on the side rings on the lunge cavesson *and* on the bit – he’s very comfortable in a cavesson and responds well to the pressure but we need to get him working on a proper contact now and not resisting it. Sessions yesterday and today went very well with him already accepting more contact on the reins but giving us a good fallback option that’s not pulling on his mouth. I was super brave as well and hopped on him bareback for about 5 mins! I’m very pleased with myself ‘cos I’m not very brave about that sort of thing and although he was momentarily confused about having a rider but no saddle he was fine 🙂 We’ve almost got rein back back again – fine on the ground and we managed a step or two with me sitting on him but that was hard as I was in the ‘wrong’ place and too close to his shoulders for him to be comfortable. But we’ve made good progress with it in a very short space of time. I will try riding him like this in the week and hopefully in a week or two we’ll be back to where we were a while ago – which was just thinking about starting canter under saddle. Maybe spring will be kind to us 🙂
