Calm obedience

Colonel is making progress. On wednesday I put on my music and took him out to do some trotting around. We're working on calmness and a willingness to bend correctly and to stay of the damn rail. He only threw a could of bucks the whole time. He was a pill about moving off my leg and supporting himself with his inside shoulder. When he calms down a little more I'm going to take a crop out there and re-enforce my leg aids. This will probably hype him up further but, what am I going to do?

Star is working on WTC calmly. Not only calmly really but willingly keeping the pace that she should. We need to work on transitions also, but I believe in one thing at a time as much as possible. I also want to start clicker training her over the jumps. I truly believe she's not afraid of the jumps but she has no substantial motivation to go over them. The other thing I need to do is some training re the appropriate response to the use of the crop. Right now she likes to rear, back up or spin. Not OK. I tried just cropping her until she moved forward but she got herself turned towards the fence and did a pretty good rear so I turned her and then she moved forward but again, she'd evaded the aid. I'm not getting a good forward response from the crop so, more work is needed there. I guess I need to just keep hitting her until she goes forward and try to ignore the rearing. If the rearing gets sufficiently bad I'll see if I can do an emergency dismount and beat her into submission from the ground. It sounds bad to say it like that but rearing is dangerous and against the rules she knows it so a good cropping might do her good.

Keno also needs a crop to support my leg but I suspect it wont take much. He just wants to be reminded that he needs to do as he's told and I think that will be that.