Learning and re-learning

Lady was lame today, and definitely has thrush. I treated her feet and put her away. I didn't even check Papillon. Presumably she is sound but I didn't feel like fighting with her over the gait we were going to maintain so I dumped more iodine and formaldehyde mix on her hooves and put her back too. I dont know how fast Lady is likely to recover. I meant to ask Robert to keep her in but maybe he'll do that anyway, since I told him she had thrush. 

I took Dylan out, and he's really learning fast. He's leading fairly well but he wants to get his shoulder behind me. Thats pretty easy to fix, I just have to get around to leading him about with a driving whip in my right hand held out behind us. For the lunging he is slowly learning about voice commands. Mostly what he is learning, and this is the important part, is that he's learning how much control he has over the situation. He absolutely gets to decide how much I harass him. I dont think he had figured that out before. Its sortof hard thing to teach early on because he has to do something right before I can demonstrate that doing the right thing means I leave him alone. So he definitely gets that he should be moving around on a circle. He seems to have figured out that the combination of me pointing and saying "out" means he will either move out or I will come at him in an unpleasant and mildly scary manner. The thing he doesn't get is speed control. 

Today I took him out and within a minute he decided he wanted to trot. I like a horse to warm up before we do any trot work, so I asked him to stop. Midway through asking (he was ignoring me, presumably because he had no idea what I meant) I thought to myself, "If we get this out of the way once, we wont have to do it again, and he probably wont need to run very long before he gets the point." So I let him run, I pushed him out of my space when he got in. I was pretty anal about that. When you're running a horse out like this the last thing you want is any stepping on the lunge line or stepping over the lunge line. (I dont claim to know much but I do claim that this is true.) Anyway he ran for a while, he looked like he was going to transition down to walk so I told him "trot on" and he did. This happened about three times. I probably should have waited longer before asking him to walk, but I do worry about lunging a horse too long, especially since I cant safely let him out on a very large circle (I got to about 12 m diameter max.)

 So I asked him to walk and it took him about half a circle but he did walk. He wanted to stop but when I asked him to keep going (raising the whip, making the 'invisible wall') he walked on nicely enough. After a while I thought maybe I'd ask him to trot. Upward transitions, especially walk to trot, you have a very short time between command, enforcement and the correct action, I dont know if thats more helpful for learning or not but it seems like maybe it aught to be. I meant to get him out again because I wound up only working him in one direction. I like to end on a good note, and I find that its helpful to seize a good note ASAP before things go south again. 

I got star out and there were two other mares in the arena. Niki being long lined, and seabreeze being seabreeze. Seabreeze is an Appaloosa with a stubby tail. On the one hand she can be kindof naughty and spooky sometimes. On the other hand, her owner (bless her heart and hope she's not going to read this) pounds on her back like a sack of potatoes, and seabreeze doesn't seem to mind. Anyway, Star wanted to pick a fight. She also wasn't super thrilled to see Robert in the arena. She's a little afraid of Robert, sometimes has to be restrained so that she doesnt back into him. So it was wild times in the arena. She wasn't what I'd describe as calm, she did one reasonably impressive rear. I doubt her hooves came more than a foot off the ground, but she followed it up with a little bit of a buck, and she rounded nicely so I think it looked more impressive than it was. She wasn't all that bad though either. At least 80% of the time she behaved like a normal-ish horse. Anyway, I decided rather than try to trot with her, which was my original plan, I decided to take her out on the trail. I was just going to do my usual quarter of the field trail, up about midway, turn, follow the main trail back. I changed my mind and wound up doing the main, 0.8 mile trail. 

One thing I really like about star is that even though she's been off for at least 8 months, everything I taught her before does come back to her within a few days. One thing she remembered today is that I'm going to pick a spot on the horizon, and her job is to get there. Right now I'm not too fussy about the details, if she needs to shy around that blue barrel out there, fine, if she needs to stop and look around, no problem. It was a little annoying that she didn't want to step in the cart tracks, but she eventually made peace with their existence. Soon, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next time after that, I'm going to get a little more strict about how closely we follow my idea's about how we should proceed. For example, today I let her leave the path rather than walk between the two puddles on either side. I also let her leave the path when it got squishy and a little water logged. Very shortly thats not going to happen anymore. 

Eventually she needs to be able to toe the line when we're outside. The problem is that she gets adjusted to the scenery pretty quickly, so it will be difficult to tell whether she's actually learning to do what I say in general, or whether she's just learning that this one particular place doesnt merit any serious anxiety. She does seem to want to do what I'm asking her, which I appreciate. I think next time we'll be able to to the same trail with a lot less stopping. Also, I think we're doing it with a crop next time.