Obstacles With the Horses

Yesterday my sister and I set up a little obstacle course for Misstack and Ana. We set up four barrels in a row, flat on their sides, for them to jump over, and we put some logs on the ground for them to step over. The first thing we did was take the horses into the round pen and had them yield their hindquarters to turn and face us, then change directions. I'll put a video of this up later.

The next thing we did was take them over the logs we put down. If you don't have logs, just use anything that your horse can step over without having to jump. One of our "logs" was actually a rolled up carpet. You will have to have a long lead rope and a manageable whip. When you send them across the logs at a trot you have to watch how much rope you give out so they don't go on the far side or the side you are on. You will also have to walk with your horse so they go across all the logs. So while your horse is going across he logs you are still behind your horses driveline but walking alongside the logs as your horse goes across. To get them to change directions we used the yeilding hindquarters to face us then change directions. To do this you "step towards their tail", bring the whip down towards their hindquarters, and pull their head towards you.

The last thing we did was the barrels. We had them lunge around it a few times and then we trotted them up to it to jump. With Misstack it didn't go so well. She did not want to jump it. Part of it was my fault because I wasn't far enough away from the barrels to keep her from going around them while still letting enough line out so that she could face the jump to jump. what ended up happening was that she nocked the furthest barrel ot of place and she jumped the gap it created. After that it only took a few more tries and getting enough momentum up for her to jump it. And then Ana tried it and she did it right away. But she has a little bit of an advantage over Misstack. When she was one and two years old a foreign exchange student worked with her, and she put little jumps up for Ana to go over. Ana still didn't do it all the time though, but that was mostly operator error.