Horses don't have a sound for pain. Puppies whimper. Kittens mew. Horses, on the other hand, endure. Silently. The performance horse world is full of silent horses. We can learn to hear them though, if we want to.
Nov 12, 2012
Little By Little
Nov 11, 2012
Back to Work
Hey!
Some moms, when they find out their kid is about to get
married, call the florists and the caterers. Me being me, I called the bobcat
and the excavator. What I was thinking when I volunteered to have the reception
at our house, knowing that we had neither yard nor patio, no place to sit, and
that we lived virtually in a dog toy graveyard, I have no idea. Be that as it
may, the wedding came off splendidly. We *do* now have a yard, a patio, and the
dog toy graveyard is no longer a main feature. The heavy equipment left three
days before the Big Day, and I was still planting trees and hanging lights till
literally 45 minutes before I was supposed to be at the church. It was a
perfect SoCal evening, with an almost full moon and a gentle temperature. It was
relaxed, sweet, lovely, and wonderful, and man, am I glad its over.
I miss writing two or three times a week. Heck, I miss
riding, too, and the boys have been totally neglected while I ran around with
concrete and bricks and potted plants. But things are settled now, and I am
catching up on body clipping and feet trimming and will ride again today,
hooray!
Let’s go back to how we addressed Brian’s cross tie issues.
This approach, of small therapeutic doses endlelessly repeated, worked well
with him. It works well with all horses, and is a big part of why my horses, no
matter their pasts or backgrounds, are well behaved and trusting and obedient.
And so with Bryan ,
this was the basis of all of the work that we did whether mounted, on the
ground, or during free work.
The consistency of The Rules goes across the board. Every
time we handled him it was the same; no slinging your head around (thereby cracking
the human in the face) no stepping past the human; no dragging behind the
human; no screaming when attached to the human; no jumping on top of the
human…I think you get the drift. As usual, every horse we would take in would
grasp The Rules quickly; horses aren’t dumb and they crave and honor
leadership. Natch, B, not being the sharpest marble in the drawer, took a
longer time than the others.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)