Sweetpeacefuldream Plays in the Sandbox

This week I have set up some of the Bit of Honey Circus in the arena.  I lay out ground poles to make a square shape, and then I put all kinds of stuff inside the box for the horses to look at.  I call it the Sandbox.  There is a large plastic laundry detergent container, old plastic cottage cheese containers with rocks in them, sparkly tinsel decor from the dollar store, plastic bags full of plastic bags, and a variety of other things.  For some reason, when the novel stimuli are located within the confines of the sandbox the horses are braver about dealing with them.  I'm not sure why this works so well, if it gives them a psychological boundary, the poles protect them from the scary stuff?  Then when the horse walks into the box, it is to master the objects because the stuff never left the box to come after the horse.  At any rate, it works really well so I use it often.

Miss Pea thought it was pretty fun and interesting.  I let her look at everything while I was on the ground first, and then I got on and rode for a while.  We also rode through the sandbox, and she has no problem stepping on the hula hoops filled with beads to make noise, the plastic bags, or the cardboard box.  Even the blue foam wasn't an issue.  We still need to try out the pink pop-up umbrella, but I don't expect any problems with that either. 

The point of the Bit of Honey Circus is not to teach a horse how to hula hoop.  In fact, I don't care if the horse never picks up a hula hoop in her life.  The whole point is to teach her how to be brave in the face of new things, even scary ones.  I don't care if a horse never ever walks across a tarp, I just want her to learn how to handle herself when she is nervous, and to learn to look to her human for security and support.  I like this kind of thing for all horses.  It's useful for trail riding preparation because a horse might encounter just about anything on the trails.  It's useful for a jumper because they learn how to think about scary things and be brave, instead of being afraid and just rushing and jumping to get it over with.  I like it for dressage horses because you never know what will catch the wind and go flying across the dressage court at a horse show while you're riding a test.  Every horse can use the life skill of handling herself well in a stressful situation.