Another wet ride – but progress!

Another wet ride to and from the grounds for the Perfect Practice Playgroup. The rains let up just long enough for the ride there and  to allow us some time to play in the sodden arena and round pen. Liberty sideways towards!! Wheee! Fun was had, and then Kathleen and I rode home in the rain. Thanks for the company, Kathleen!

The ride out went better than any so far – it keeps improving so that’s a good thing. I decided not to have the driveway battle tonight and ground drove Maya up the road a-ways before mounting. That went quite well. We’ve started a bit of driving fom Zone 4/5. I didn’t have to get off tonight. The spooky spot was pretty easy – less than five minutes all told and the grassy field… she went for it, wouldn’t come out towards the road, so we rode towards the driveway that leads back to the road! That worked. Heheh. Watch out lateral thinking, here I come. When she got “sticky” and didn’t want to continue down 49 creek road at one junction, I started to ask her to go and then whoa right away. A little mini-million transistions LBI style. Go…. now STOP! (before she wanted to stop) it made her want to keep going!! =-)

Today I started working on teaching Maya an “it’s okay to graze now” head-down cue when riding. I think I’ll work on it when there isn’t any grass for a bit, like in the arena! She just dives for it at this point and I want to get our communication around it better. She was ouchy with her front feet on the way there, so I put her boots on for the ride home. They made quite a difference, though she stumbled a bit at the steep part of Kays road near our driveway, so I got off and let her walk home. Sharon Edgar is coming out on Thursday to see her back… hope she can help and give me some advice around it. I wonder if it’s bugging her.

After leaving Kathleen on Turner road, we rode quietly through the woods, grazed a bit at the end of Verigin and then did lots of HQ disengagment to FQ turns all the way home both sides.  We also did lots of transitions to whoa – with lots of backups. Funny how she whoas soooo easily on the way out and not very easily at all on the way home. We’ll get that evened up with time, I’m sure of it.

My one complaint… could we get a little sunny summer kootenay weather, please?

Do you savvy Savvy?

It sometimes surprises me how much people who know a lot of stuff about horses don’t know about horses.

Things like:

Horses are always present, living in the moment and being honest about how they feel. If a horse is acting scared, he’s not acting. He’s scared. For his life. Attacking him ( growling at him, grabbing, smacking, kicking or hitting him) probably won’t help him overcome his fear, or build any trust in you as a leader.

Horses are amazingly forgiving animals. Good news for me as I struggle through my horsemanship journey and make mistakes that might otherwise cost me my relationship with my horse. Bad news for those horses who live with people who refuse to learn to understand them.

Horses are incredibly fast learners. They’re like computers in that they only do what you tell them to do or what you program them to do. Mostly people program them to be sensitive to things that they don’t want them to be sensitive to (stumps, plastic bags, tarps, dogs, etc) and desensitize them to things that they want them to be sensitive to (legs, hands, weight, body language, etc.)

Horses are looking for good leadership. Either you have to be the leader or  they will. There has to be a leader in their world. They know that their safety depends on it. They’ll check you out every day, every MOMENT, some of them… to be sure you’re up to the task. Good leaders offer safety, understanding, consistency, variety, motivation and fun (to name a few qualities). Do you? People and horses want to be around good leaders.

There are more… but these are the ones that I’ve been aware of lately.