My friend Susie picked up my horse Marie this afternoon. She and her husband are going on an overnight trip to NH to an endurance ride that is also having a pleasure ride. Susie and David are doing the 12 mile pleasure ride So, Luke was feeling a bit sorry for himself this afternoon being all alone. I had picked up grain and didn't feel like moving Luke to the back paddock so I could open the gate and drive into the barn and decided to just carry the bags from the gate to the barn. Luke was standing in the front stall and as I was coming across the paddock with the first bag clutched against my chest, I see a look of serious concern come into Luke's eyes. The closer I got, the more concerned he got and he started blowing and snorting. The bottom half of the back door to the stall he was in was closed so he couldn't just "get out of Dodge". TRAINING OPPORTUNITY! I stepped into the stall and stood quietly and encouraged him to approach me. He spun at first, did some more snorting, briefly considered jumping over the 1/2 door (at which point I quickly eased off on the "pressure" by stepping back) Luke settled finally facing me. It took a bit of sweet talking to get him to step up to me. In a few minutes he quieted and I was able to lift the bag up and put it on his back. At this point he was now pretending like he was never scared. "Yeah, I knew it was a bag of grain all along, I was just playing with you silly human". Have I ever mentioned that I just love a mules expressions......
After I took care of the grain, and then replaced the hose to Luke's water bucket with a new one, I decided to lunge him. He did great! Walk, trot, back to walk transitions all done very well. And good on the whoa today. So, once again, we didn't have to work very long at it.
No comments:
Post a Comment