All The Kings' Horses

My round pen is temporarily unavailable, due to a new horse occupying it while he remains quarantined.  (I quarantine all new horses that come into my farm for 2 weeks, just to be safe).  So, I worked with Gia on the same things she did last Friday, but on the lunge line in the arena, rather than free in the round pen. We did the same routine - 2 minutes of walk and stretch, 5 minutes of walk/trot transitions with incrementally increasing moments of stretch, 2 minutes of trot/canter transitions with one moment of stretch per canter, then a 2 minute walk break and repeat it all on the other side. She did super with everything, except for the canter transitions.  She definitely gave me more attitude when I asked her to canter today than she did on Friday.  Her "attitude" today only consisted of pinning her ears, but that is still unacceptable behavior.  Every time she behaved inappropriately, I charged at her, stomping my feet and waving the whip - going back to the idea th

For our second session back this week, on Friday, I worked with free lunging (in the round pen, not on a lunge line) Gia in a surcingle and with the neck stretcher. I can't remember if I have talked about what a surcingle is or not before.  It is basically a large, wide strap that goes around the belly and girth area of the horse.  It has a ton of rings on it, in various locations, to attach side reins, or long lines, in a number of different levels or positions. Since Gia had been pretty obedient, submissive and relaxed in her first session back, I decided that it would be fine to go ahead and put a bit more pressure on her, in the form of just asking her to work on stretching.  Again, like on Wednesday, I wasn't expecting much since she had been out of work for a while. However, I was, once again, pleasantly surprised! I started out with 2 minutes of walking to warm up, and then moved on to 5 minutes of trotting.  She did start out a bit against the bit, but quickly g

Gia was out of work from February 20th thru March 24th - a little over a month!  My intention with this blog was to show people everything that goes into training a horse from the ground up, and unfortunately sometimes, that includes unintentional breaks due to illness or injury.  Some of you might remember that Gia was out of work back in November due to illness as well.  Apparently, she never fully recovered from that illness, and it came back to plague her again last month.  She had to spend the last month in the round pen so that she could be monitored closely.  The vet put her on antibiotics to help clear things up for good, (they did not put her on antibiotics the first time because they wanted her to get through the illness naturally, which would help build up natural antibodies to it.  Unfortunately, that didn't quite work out the way we hoped).  We monitored her temperature twice a day, counted all her poop piles at each feeding (she should have 6-8), noted how much wate