Welcome to Bit of Honey Training LLC

Welcome to Bit of Honey Training LLC
Welcome to Bit of Honey Training LLC

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Progress for Tsavo

Last week I got a new horse in for training, and his name is Tsavo.  He is a Georgian Grande, a breed I'd not heard of before he arrived.  He is a cross between a Friesian and a Pinto Saddlebred.  Tsavo definitely has the high neck carriage of the Friesian/Saddlebred, which gives him a lot of presence.  I was curious about how tall he was exactly, so I took out my stick with a level and measured him at precisely 16.1 1/2 hands.  He's seven years old and an absolute sweetheart.


The first few days he was here I had him in a small paddock sharing a fenceline with the ponies so that they could all meet each other and make friends, and once I saw that they were all getting along fine I turned him out in the pony herd.  Probably because he's young, he ended up on the very bottom on the herd hierarchy below Dewey, who is below Garmin the blind pony.  It's fairly entertaining to see big Tsavo being bossed around by the small pony, the small arabian, and Dewey.

Tsavo is here to get some mileage under saddle, and to prepare for the upcoming season of trail riding and horse camping.  I'm enjoying him a great deal, he is very eager to please.  His first few training sessions here were typical of a youngster who had been out of work for a while.  He did a lot of fooling around while tied, whenever I would disappear into the tack room he'd jump up and down and buck, then stand quietly as soon as he could see me again.  That only took a day or two to go away.  Once he realized that I disappear and reappear from the tack room multiple times every day he settled down and now just munches his hay bag whether I'm around or not.

I've been lunging him before I get on, since he can be hot and has an impressive buck on him.  As with all the horses, after a few training sessions of ground work and then mounted work he realized the routine is the same every day and he settled down significantly.  Now I'm riding him around the arena at the walk, trot, and canter, and we're hacking out in the back forty with no difficulties.



He has had some cute moments in the arena trying to turn at the canter under saddle.  As every baby horse has to learn, there is a speed/accuracy tradeoff when trying to canter in circles with a rider.  We had a comical ride yesterday when I asked him for a right lead canter and it took him a little while to get the correct lead.  Once he had cantered the perimeter of the arena a few times I asked him to canter across the middle of the arena, in a circle only half the size we had been doing.  The poor kid got confused.  He turned his head the way he was supposed to go, switched to the left lead and then continued to canter sideways in the wrong direction!  It was like a cartoon where the character tries to hurry and ends up spinning his wheels in place before he actually starts moving!


I had to bring Tsavo back to the trot and have him do the circle several times at the slower gait, so he understood where the turn was and at what point he needed to shift his weight so as not to lose his balance.  Once he had thought about it and realized what was required, we did get a couple successful circles in the right lead canter.  This is a good example of why I don't count on one-rein stops, though, because most horses can canter pretty fast even with their head turned around.

We had similar coordination efforts when I took him out to the back fields.  He's a little like riding a hammock, each end can go different directions.  Tsavo was a little nervous about looking at the spooky logs I use as jumps in our cross country course, and asked me if he could head back to the barn.  We were way out there all alone with just Forrest the border collie, and Tsavo started to turn and walk back to the barn.  I corrected him and asked him to walk west, so he turned his head west but continued to walk east.  Once I made my intentions a bit clearer by using my seat and legs he straightened out, and after circling various logs a few times he even obliged me and walked over them.  I have a few huge logs set up so you can just barely walk between them and he even did that without needing the dog to demonstrate it first.  We headed back to the barn after he had checked out everything in the back forty and he was really well behaved, walking on a loose rein with my feet out of the stirrups.

It must be from so many years of showing paints and pintos in my youth, but I had to give Tsavo a bath when we got back to the barn.  It was warm and he had gotten a little sweaty, and I simply couldn't bear to look at the manure stains on his stockings any longer.  He seemed to appreciate the hose-down, and leaned into my curry as I scrubbed his white spots until they sparkled.

On another day I was grooming Highboy in the barn, and I happened to look out the door and see Tsavo standing by the water tank.  I had just filled it and topped it off, and he decided that it was big enough to climb in!  I caught him splashing, and when he realized I was looking at him he stared at me as if to say, "Hey thanks, Kim! This place has all kinds of fun toys!"


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