Breaking From the Barrels

Saturdays are always busy around here, whether we're at a competition through show season, or having a day full of lessons during the winter.  It's great for the young horses like Dewey to be around the commotion, and it's always fun to see how they react.  Some get nervous because they don't know what to make of the busy-ness, others like Dewey are just super interested in everything that is going on.  I've found that horses who were on the track often do quite well in hectic environments, because the track is such a busy place they are already used to it.

First Dewey and I went to the round pen to lunge.  He was wearing his saddle and his leather halter.  While we were lunging my friend took Cosmo, the pony they are leasing, past the round pen to the arena to do a little bit of leadline stuff with her daughter who is five.  Her husband also came down to take photos, and he brought their one year old daughter.  Mahzi the dog was running around "helping".  This was really something for Dewey to see, so I changed my plan for the session and took Dewey down to the arena so he could watch everything.

Dewey's eyes were glued to Cosmo, who had such a small human ON TOP OF HIM.  I don't think Dewey had seen children before, those small humans were really perplexing.  I led Dewey around the arena and over the poles to keep him thinking, and he did his best to pay attention to me while also staring at the kids.  I wish I had gotten a photo of the expression on his face, it was really entertaining to watch him watching them.  He was particularly interested in the one year old human, who made such funny noises, moved so erratically (she's just learning to walk) and squealed randomly.  So that it wouldn't be scary, I led Dewey so that we were following behind Cosmo.  That way it felt like Dewey was chasing him rather than being chased.  The first few times my friend trotted the pony with her daughter aboard, Dewey wanted to run with them and tugged on my lead rope in an effort to frolic alongside!

When they were done with Cosmo, Phoenix got on and rode for a while.  Dewey and I worked on obstacles some more.  I set up the barrels so that they were lined up as two rows, and Dewey had to walk in between them through the channel.  I make this fairly narrow, so that the horse will accidentally brush his body against the barrels, the stirrups will hit them and make noise, and the horse can get used to that sort of stimuli.  With horses who have no riding experience this can be one way to gauge how they will react to someone's legs on either side of them doing unexpected things like bumping the horse's sides.  It was fun to see Dewey's reaction.  Since he never actually raced and we don't know exactly how much "riding" training he had, I was interested to see what he thought.  When I sent him into the chute he went in carefully and stopped.  Then as I quietly asked him to come out the other end, he LEAPED out of the barrels bursting into a gallop!  I was using a fairly long rope, so it wasn't a big deal to get him to come back down to a walk and he came right back to me when I asked.  I realized that this wasn't anxiety about being in a confined space, but a trained behavior to break fast out of the starting gate at the track.  My barrels were similar enough to the starting gate that he put two and two together and thought that I wanted a fast start. 

We repeated the barrels exercise several more times until Dewey figured out I didn't need him to break from the barrels quite like that!  I only needed him to walk slowly through and it was less work to do it that way, so he was all for doing it the easy way.  Then he was quite content to amble around in circles on the long line, passing through the chute periodically.  We also revisited the tires and the poles, even adding in a little cross rail.  I like to introduce jumping this way, with very small obstacles and doing it slowly so the horse always feels confident.  This allows me to sort out how much the horse has been exposed to before coming to me, or in Dewey's case how similar my barrel chute is to a starting gate!