Fair Week is Almost Here

I am looking forward to the fair. I love the smell of the fair, the most prominent being the smell of onion rings. I love watching all the shows. The show with all these draft horses pulling wagons and the mule shows. I love to help out for a day at my grade school's food stand, and how busy it gets when all the people who set up the rides come in for supper. And I love showing. It is a lot of fun. The fair is less than two weeks away, and I'm still getting the kinks out of my horse.

First off, is that he gets way too hyper running those games, so that when I turn him towards the poles or barrels he takes off. I don't want that. I want him to go when I tell him to not like someone lit his tail on fire. He is now pretty good at waiting for my cue to go. What I did was every time he took off I would turn him and make him go back to the start. It takes a while, but he eventually gets it. I also would turn him and make him disengage his hindquarters then go back to the start. He also likes to take short cuts. So, when where running the poles he cuts as close as he possibly can and my knee ends up knocking it over, and I can't turn him away because he is a hot head and doesn't want to be uninterrupted while he's running. But, I am working on it. Every time he tries to turn the pole on his own accord I would turn him away from it. Where he wants to go I go the opposite. It's a work in progress.

Today with the fillies while I was riding Santana Aleythia worked with Coffie and Dash. She told me that they are just not getting the point of flexing. She also worked on picking up their feet. When I was done with Santana, she rode Ana and I worked with Toffy and Frosty. They get flexing down pretty good. I found that the longer I rewarded them with rubbing them, the longer it took them to consistently turn their head towards me. The release of the pressure of the halter is the reward so you don't have to spend five minutes rubbing them. It seems that the longer I waited they seemed to forget what I was rewarding them for. I also worked on ground tying.