#i have to get her back to working undersaddle

[thehackneypony]

hard to believe she’s only four years old sometimes

#might start introducing small jumps soon #we’ll see #i have to get her back to working undersaddle #chalk #friesian cross #my horse

[bluarabian]

Happening on the farm lately...

Ember is doing really well. She had her feet done about two weeks ago and the farrier noticed swelling on the front right. No heat, no pain, no limp. I decided to put her on break until the swelling is gone. It is about 99% gone so I am thinking to start some easy arena work starting this weekend. She may end up with front shoes to help prevent this from happening again.

Taasha is officially retired! Though she doesn't want to the ol girl is spending a lot of time laying down and napping. Her body is tired, and she deserves full retirement. Last year she was on a partial, but this year she gets to enjoy the glorious life of being brushed, pampered, and feed. Riding down to a very minimum and plenty of hand walking.

Epona weight is fantastic, energy on par, and a very happy horse. Her legs though - despite daily medical treatments I just can't beat this stupid infection. I am frustrated and feel bad. Though we have gotten it cured all the way down to the Pastren area I can't seem to fully get rid of it. When I think I do I stop medicating and in a few days the greesy heel is back. I'm open to suggestions for treatment. Vets around here are outta ideas. It's just.. rough.

Luke is *chef kiss* I don't deserve him. He is just perfect. Good health, good attitude, and does 'dressage' all on his own. He makes me look good. I am unworthy.

Scipeo has had her ups and downs. Health is good, attitude good. But typical hot Arab. She took quite a bit of work after a winter break to get her brain back. She is starting to listen to cues and not be so reactive. She came from very hard-core rough old school cowboy training so she will be doing really well undersaddle, get too stimulate and just fall apart. Brace on bit, unwilling to listen to leg, drop inside shoulder, trip all over herself and high head. Lately my training method is doing a lot of random things in a session to engage the brain. Even if we jump.. we jump, but canter to the corner, stop, and back up two steps and go do something else. So far so good, working a lot on saddle cues and softness on the bit.

All around the 5 horses are doing well. Suggestions for Ember swelling and Eponas infection are always welcomed.

Cheers!

#horse update #health #mental #always something at the farm

[theruby-redmare]

Wed/Fri combo post

The only days I don’t have time to make it out to the barn are Tues/Thurs. The rain has not let up, we are drowning, and the horses still have not been able to go out. It’s also been pretty chilly. All in all, I was not feeling it Wednesday, so I decided to play around with lunging. I’ve only lunged her twice before, and she can be a bit tricky and reactive. 

W/t/c was fine. She was a bit fresh and enjoyed fooling around at the canter. However, when I say “woah” to ask her to down transition, she sometimes decides she’s done and just stops. This requires me to “get behind her” and step towards her to usher her forward...however she almost always jumps out of her skin, runs around panicked, then suddenly decides she’s done and stops and turns toward me... rinse and repeat. I tried to stay calm and continue on. We eventually get a couple consecutive circles both directions, so I decide to move on. In retrospect, I should have stopped there. I thought, since I’m mostly lunging, and we’ve been doing so much handwalking and undersaddle work over the 1′ cavaletti, lets try lunging over the cavaletti. She willingly went over it the first time (rocket launched across), but then was like “I did it, I’m done”, stopped and turned towards me. So we had round 2 of that battle, complicated by the fact that I wanted her to continuously go over the cavaletti (and ideally not jump it like a square 2′6 oxer...but I had to let that one go for the day). We kind of reached a mutual agreement where if I clucked, she would eventually move forward on her own without me having to “chase” her. This resulted in some funny moments of her trying to wiggle out of the cavaletti, me preventing her, her stopping and turning towards me in protest right in front of the cavaletti, me clucking like an idiot, and her sighing and reluctantly walking over the cavaletti like it’s a chore (I imagine she would roll her eyes if she could lol).

 I cut my losses there and decided to hop on for a couple of minutes. I was in for a surprise when my usually-perfect-ground-manners pony decided she did not want to stand close to the mounting block. Another version of “I did the thing, I’m done”. Seems to be a theme? Honestly I got mad but I had to swallow it and keep asking calmly until she gave in. Once I got on, she was great w/t. We were able to trot over the cavaletti a couple times again (successful on first attempt to boot), which begs the question: why is the cavaletti trot-able when in hand or undersaddle, but on the lunge it MUST be jumped with extra clearance? Insecurity maybe?

Anyways, so fast-forward to today. I came in with a game plan. Lunge again, but easier: no cavaletti, just w/t/c and focus on kindly keeping her going. I have to earn her trust here, not just in the saddle. Cricket was an angel (clever girl learns fast), so we were able to move on to riding quickly. No problems with mounting, back to normal. Our usual cavaletti was set up. I had decided to lay off some of the babying/prepping (I didn’t hand walk/trot her over the cavaletti, I didn’t trot up to it and then ask for a down transition/walk over it under saddle...things I’ve been doing a lot before I attempt to trot it u/s). I simply walked over it and then asked her to trot over it. She couldn’t really find her footwork today, so she jumped more often than just trotting over it. However, she did not try to kill me, which I appreciate. She mostly landed in trot even if she jumped it; only once did she kind of rush in at the last minute, jump, and landed in canter, but was surprisingly polite (I did think we were going to break our streak and braced lol). I just kept trotting around and asking her to do it again until I got 2 consecutive trots over the cavaletti. It took a while, but on the bright-side, we basically did a whole course’s worth of cavaletti “jumps” without any behavioral problems.

The goal is to wake up early enough to ride before the group lesson craziness starts tomorrow lol. I don’t really have a plan, because I’m worried there will be a lot going on to work around, so I think the main idea will be low key and not introducing anything new. Just sort of reviewing what we’ve been working on, whatever we’re able to do. Then I can experiment more on Sun/Mon if things go well.

#enjoy these play by plays because once things get busy at school I'll dwindle off #me #cricket

[phonypony]

Bruh it's an animal that outweighs you by a thousand pounds. It can kill you ACCIDENTALLY. Every fucking time I walk away from my horse alive, it's because she has "consented" (to use that stupid human word) to me being in her vicinity. Trust me, if a horse doesn't consent, you end up seriously injured or dead.

So while I agree that you don’t need “”””””consent”””” from a horse to ride it, I really don’t fully agree with the rhetoric that “these animals are so large that if they didn’t want to work with you they wouldn’t.” There is quite a bit of truth to it and I’ve witnessed horses hit their breaking point and lash out, and there’s really isn’t much you can do at that point (not without hurting the animal at least). But there are plenty of horses who will take any abuse because they have been taught to think that the alternative is much worse. Take notorious horse abuser Clinton Anderson’s horse Titian. This stallion could easily kick, drag, bite, and strike Anderson. Many other horses have lashed out at Anderson and he’s had lots of close calls with client horses reaching their breaking point. Titian is an extremely unhappy horse when Anderson is around. He’s listless, tense, and flinches every time CL moves his hand. Titian is clearly not enjoying working with CL but he listens to every cue that he’s given and has totally submitted. Because Titian has been taught that if he does something “wrong” he’ll get beaten. The horse not understand that he can inflict much more damage much quicker. This is an EXTREAME example. A lot of horses unhappily work out of fear of punishment that isn’t nearly as bad as what CL dishes out. But it is an very clear example of a horse that works loyally and obediently despite absolutely suffering.

THAT BEING SAID. Most horses DO enjoy working! Most equestrians train in a way that makes working enjoyable or at least tolerable for a horse. There’s no need to beat horses into submission to ride them. Also, imagine the life of a horse. It’s pretty boring. Doing stuff with humans is the most interesting thing that happens to them! They are gonna enjoy it if you make it not miserable.

I ride a particularly difficult horse named Apollo that KNOWS he can throw his rider or flip over backwards if he’s not enjoying being ridden. But I can climb onto his back with no saddle or bridle and he will stand perfectly still and let me do gymnastics or whatever on him. I can only imagine he enjoys the attention and doesn’t mind being ridden, he just doesn’t like actually working undersaddle because he expects to get punished and treated unfairly (Apollo’s owner was very unskilled and harsh with him). But he loves people anyways, he’s always the first to run up to me from the pasture despite not even being my horse.

Tdlr; the “horses can kill you and would do so if they didn’t consent to being ridden” isn’t a totally fool-proof argument and can be used by horse abusers to justify abusing their horses. But most horses don’t mind letting humans ride them and many enjoy it because it’s interesting and stimulating activity.

[spiffypony]

Had my lesson today. The goal kind of started with getting more energy at the trot from Nuno. I was floundering with this, trying to ask for more but not really getting anything so I asked for canter, thinking that if I could get her thinking beyond the trot she might get a little more energy in the trot (not an unreasonable thought, it had worked this way in the past). Of course, we have not worked on canter on the lunge line in months, albeit I'd asked her to pick it up on the lunge today, and certainly not undersaddle and so, a lot of unhappiness ensued as canter is a gait which Nuno tolerates, but, like fly spray, is offended by its sudden reintroduction without the appropriate acclimatization exercises. This ended with trainer using a lunge whip to help get a continuous canter on a circle of smaller size than I'd have liked although Nuno chose that. I actually suggested this end thing to work on my canter skills and I had some very nice improvements on that front. That being said, Nuno then became quite cross and suspicious of any gait faster than a walk which led to its own issues. I feel like this was a lesson I very much needed even though it likely was not necessarily what Nuno needed. It does feel a little selfish to say that, but I have put myself on the back burner for her for a very long time and I think that wasn't really very efficient because I've ended up letting a lot of mental things get in the way that could have been nipped in the bud if I'd devoted the time to them? Anyways, this is already and monster of a post and has served its purpose as a reflection so that's it.

#nouveau #lesson #my riding #me #dressage #riding journal