The horse body parts activity was fun, I had stickers made from address labels with different words written on them. The husband and wife took turns sticking various labels on Cole. I like this activity because it addresses all three learning styles: auditory (they talk themselves through placement of labels), visual (they can see different parts and where the label goes), and kinesthetic (physically palpating body parts and putting labels on them). Plus it's fun to have the discussion about "who NAMED these parts?!" when words like stifle, gaskin, poll, coronet, and cannon come up. My husband insists that it was Dr. Seuss who came up with the names for horse parts.
After the labeling, we went to the round pen and worked on how to handle a horse safely for the vet and farrier. When we were done Cole did a riding lesson with Phoenix, who is learning to canter. I lunged him first since he was full of beans and to get goofiness out of his system. When she got on to ride and felt how slow he was, she said maybe we should have left a couple beans in!
The next lesson was with a client and her five year old mare who hauled in. The lunging went well, the riding went well, and the untacking went well. Then when she was asked to load into the horse trailer, she declined. We asked nicely, offered her grain and hay in the manger, but she still didn't want to get in. There are a lot of reasons horses decide not to get into a trailer, but today this mare had no reason to be concerned for safety, she was just tired and didn't want to do it. This smart mare had developed an evasion that consisted of running backwards as fast as possible so I couldn't keep up to tap her on the haunches and send her forwards. We worked with a butt rope, her response was to rear up and land on the other side of it. We tried a rope halter when she kept pulling away while wearing the nylon web one, and she still tried to pull away. Finally I decided to back the rig up to the fence. After being aimed at the trailer, if she ran backwards she would only have about 15 feet between the trailer and the fence to do so, and then she would just bump into the solid metal and wood fence. Her owner held her rope through the front window to keep her aimed the right direction but not pulling on her since horses just pull back if they feel trapped. I tapped on her haunches, and my working student stood on the horse's other side so she couldn't turn and leave sideways. This made it so her only option to escape my incessant tapping was to go into the trailer. After much praise for putting her head, then her front feet in the trailer, and after much tapping on her haunches she finally got in after having a great temper tantrum. She's a thinker, though, so I think each successive time to load will be easier.
It's very important to note that we were careful to not let her injure herself even when rearing and striking out. We never held her face solid by leveraging her rope or the halter because that's when she would have gotten into trouble with tipping over backwards when resisting. I never lost my temper with her because then it would have become an actual fight, and nothing good comes of a puny human fighting with a 1000 lb animal. Better to send her in by making her irritated with my tapping. Even one pesky fly can get a horse to run across the pasture, so I became the fly that only quit when she would go in the trailer. When she eventually got in, there were treats and hay in the manger as well as praise, and of course all of the tapping stopped. She was so stubborn partly because she is at the beginning of her training and hasn't really been asked to do things she didn't want to before, and a five year old horse who always does as she pleases can be quite a creature to convince.
I then got on Beauty bareback for a relaxing afternoon ride. I suspect she hasn't been ridden bareback before, because when I climbed on she curled her head around and snurffled my leg saying, "Uh, Kim, I think you forgot the saddle....?" Beauty is a tolerant soul, and figured I'm a strange human but so far my oddities haven't resulted in anything bad, so she humored me and went along with it. We rode all over the property, with a client and her horse as well as Mahzi.
A good day to be out riding, and lots of progress made for several horses and humans. What Saturday would be complete without some photos of Highboy messing around in turnout?
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