🥶 🥶 🥶 but the sunshine helps ☀️ As Buck says, you don't have to kick up a bunch of dust to get things accomplished with your horse. Here, I'm working on getting Pip to step her hind end a step back and forth, the front end to step back and forth, back up and turn around all with my seat and legs. When you can get your horse to operate well from seat and legs only, you can refine so much more as you incorporate your hands with seat and legs.
Staying centered, soft and adjustable.
To recount the words of Buck Brannaman, "when I'm old (or broken), it might take me half an hour to get over there. My horse should go at my speed and I ought not have to beg him."
I had a trimming accident on Sunday. I'm available for haul in lessons/coaching for the time being.
Manners when cleaning stalls
This is one of the things I do in my training program. There's not a moment that goes by where I'm not working on something when I'm with a horse. Every interaction is important.
Pip does not have much experienced being stalled, so I haven't worked on this much until now. I need to be able to safely move around the stall to clean and feed. I expect them to be able to be attentive to me and move without being troubled. Towards the end of the video, she was offering a behavior that I've taught her in my groundwork, which is to sidepass to me. I just held my position and tapped with the flag to send her back to the wall.
Can your office chair pick you up?
Fancy Office Chair!
Bridleless roping and body control
Playing around with some bridleless fun!
Ignore the wrong answer
One thing I get excited about is finding sticky spots! This is one of my personal horses. She is very long bodied and struggles to really engage her hind end PROPERLY.....which involves elevating the shoulders and keeping all of her feet light. I'd say she really wasn't a fan of me asking her to step her hind feet under her a little more.
The important thing to do when a horse offers this answer is to ignore the outburst and keep asking the same question until they try another answer that you are looking for. If you increase the tension of the situation by reprimanding the horse, the horse will go into self preservation mode and not be in an effective learning frame of mind. Hershey pretty quickly offered the behavior that I was looking for and got her full release, a praise and a good scratch.
Helping a Mustang gelding follow a feel
I love being able to do groundwork with the help of a bridle horse. Hershey does a fantastic job adding 1200 pounds to my weight, extra height and leverage when needed. It gives her a job to do. It helps me learn how to be effective at communicating with her separately from the horse on the ground. This little black Mustang has a bad habit of sucking back, not holding forward movement for long. He also does not follow the feel of the lead rope or unlock his shoulders well. He is notorious for running off with his shoulder...dragging people around on the ground and under saddle. This was later in my session with him, but I felt like he would benefit more doing groundwork with the help of my horse.
I also was not using reins to direct Hershey at all during this video. She was going all off seat and leg cues. Hopefully that inspires someone to see how good they can get partnered up with their horse.
Back to work!
After a 2 week vacation, my horses are back to work!
Reassuring a troubled, bracey horse
Today was a big light bulb moment for me. I live by the saying "do the best you know how. When you know better, do better." I discovered that my 7 year old mare, Pip, has been fighting me a lot because she doesn't know if she can trust whoever is on her back. I've been riding this mare for almost 4 years now. She's always been a tight wad. Some days are worse than others. Now that I am prepping to show her in some ranch classes this summer, she has to show in a shanked bit. The last month she has been fighting contact pretty bad because she doesn't want to give up her need to protect herself. She had a rough start under saddle as a 2 year old and it has taken me this long to get things going really good.
My light bulb moment was that I failed to reassure her enough when I started riding her, as a 3 year old, that everything was OK. I did it a little bit on the first few rides, but not a lot.
I failed to continue doing that throughout her riding career. What I mean by reassure is to rub gently but firmly.
A friend of mine was riding her today and I saw him reach down to rub her at one point. It hit me....instead of trying to let her fight against the very light feel I was offering her in the bit, I decided I was going to try rubbing her every time she got tight and felt the need to brace. Wow, she LOVED it! Her whole body softened and her cadence got better. She wasn't perfect but it will take some time to get her conditioned to it. Once I started rubbing her, I could pick up on up the reins and she softened like I have wanted her to all along.
