What Aleythia and I talked about doing with the fillies... We decided that we need to do more desensitizing with Dash. We think that maybe we're taking it a little bit too fast and she's just not quite ready. We'll still ride, but we'll desensitize before and after riding.
Proof.... I decided that I would just work on desensitizing Dash to the plastic bag so that we would have more time to work on getting all the other horses done. It didn't help. I walked Dash through gate in the barn and bent down to pick up the plastic bag. She flipped out! She bolted in the opposite direction and started bucking right next to and running into all the other horses who were tied up. So we had a bunch of slightly crazed horses. Dash stopped bucking, but now all the other horses were a little riled up. For the next hour I worked on desensitizing. I wasn't able to get her to walk forward to follow the bag. I just stood there lightly shaking the bag.... six feet away. And that's about as close as I got... In an hour... So, guess what I'll be doing for the next week.
Aleythia rode Ana, and I'll let her tell you about that... if I can convince her to write...er.. type. I asked her too and she didn't seem totally apposed. We'll see.
She worked with one horse and then didn't have gumption to do the others. She did work with Frosty while I rode Misstack. So here we have Frosty's reaction to the plastic bag.
Misstack is getting quite a bit better at flexing. She doesn't turn every time I do it, and she's lighter. She does put her head down to brace against it sometimes though. It'll get better.
I convinced Aleythia to desensitize Frosty while I rode Coffie. I desensitized to the plastic bag first and it didn't take long. I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't get bucked off when Aleythia started waving it around.
I also rode Santana. He did pretty good. He's getting pretty good at flexing while trotting in a circle. I love it. He just feels so light and ready to do what I ask. It can definitely improve, but it is definitely better than what it was.
So that was my horse training day. We worked with seven horses in three hours.
One thing I'm not too excited about is when I get a job. I'll be running in the morning, working, and then riding seven horses, sometimes nine. The last two come in when I'll be helping a friend train her horse, Patches, and if I can, retrain Flicka. Fun right? I suppose I'll get used to it. But man the first couple weeks of that are going to be awful.
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