Free Jumping Highboy

Highboy was turned out with his buddies and wouldn't stop harassing the ponies, so I took him to the round pen to mess around.  I had set up some obstacles in the round pen for working with horses at liberty, one of which was a cross rail on the perimeter of the round pen.  Highboy went directly to the cross rail and checked it out from both sides, then started running and jumping it all on his own!

Once he figured out how to canter over the cross rail I set it up as a 3' vertical, and he didn't hesitate but leaped over that, too!  I also had a modified gate set up by tying a lunge line to another jump standard.  Highboy got cocky and jumped just the rope, the height of the 4' jump standard!  He was doing it all on his own with no cues from me (what can I say, the horse loves to jump!), so I was able to get some video of him being super athletic.  Then I got an app for my phone so I could take stills from the video.

His first jumps over the cross rail were very cute, he wasn't sure how high or wide he had to leap to make it over, so he over-jumped quite a bit in the beginning.  It was awfully cute as he thought through the process of "how big do I need to go?"

 

Then I changed the jump to be a vertical, so the top pole went straight across, about 3' high.  He just kept running and playing, leaping over the jump as he went!  

Just for fun, he slid to a stop, spun around, and then jumped it the other way.  He says he could be a reining horse, too, you know.