Back to the basics

My foot is still sore from being thrown three months ago or whatever, so I am doing some ground work with the Beast.  I figured that I might as well start fresh on some simple stuff since she's been left alone for a long time.
Tuesday night, I went out after work and spent, oh... an hour trying to get all the dried mud and dust out of her coat.  After that cleaning the Augean stables doesn't seem such an impossible task.  My lungs will never be the same!

Since I haven't been doing much with her, I noticed she's been getting a bit silly on the line.  Not pulling or anything, but snorty, a little dancy.  Basically being a bored baby with not enough exercise.  So Wednesday and Tuesday nights I worked only on cleaning her basic manners from the ground. 

The Goal: polite, calm and responsive

The Current Horse: snorty, a bit pissy, and resistant

Tuesday night actually went a little better than Wednesday night since I think she was actually just excited to get out and do something.  I only worked on this for about fifteen minutes at the most since I don’t want her to get bored of it.  I worked on walk, halt, trot, and backing up.  At the start she was resistant, but after a few minutes and a few direction changes and transitions, she really started to relax into it. 

The End Result: Calm horse, responsive, still a little resistant on Wednesday night, but I think that was mostly due to the fact that I took her away from her dinner.  Not that that matters to me, but it explains why she wasn’t working with me so much as just waiting for me to be done.  Unfortunately for her, since the barn owner’s children (who are in their late teens / early twenties) lead her around, she isn’t allowed to misbehave on the line and this is not something she gets to cavil about.  I don’t want her bored, but if she isn’t behaving properly, we work on it in dribs and drabs until she does. 

Since we’ve gotten to that point, I am excited to move on to the next goals:

1.     Longeing without trying to rip the line out of my hands and take off politely and responsively.  This is a fairly new evasive behavior she’s picked up and unfortunately I wasn’t expecting it so she got away from me once, which means she thinks it is AWESOME, and keeps trying it.  L  Bad horse person over here.

2.     A walk along the busy street out front and then onto a quieter trail to get her leading manners down pat in a more fun environment.

3.     Better steering when ground driving.

4.     First ride after break.

I’ll keep you all posted and hopefully get a chance to post my video of her first (or second? can’t remember now) ride before my fall.