A New Goal

When we joined Hippologic’s course on setting, and achieving, goals with our horses I set our goal as Figuring out Spanish walk. I can’t say we have it mastered, not by a long shot, but we are much better than we were! He is offering many steps in a row, someday we will transfer it to his back. Someday when I’m back to riding and can figure out how to transfer it.

For now we set a new short term goal. Ever since I saw Alexandra Kurland’s video of her horse doing a beautiful collected trot with nothing on him and never having had a bit in his mouth, I have been dreaming. I want my horse to do that. So we are starting, small. At a stand still Rusty is happily tucking his nose to his chest. I have to watch our form, we definitely don’t want an over bent, nose to chest sort of carriage. Nicely rounded would suffice. I would hate to accidentally teach a bad habit.

Now we are working on holing his nose tucked a few seconds at a time and adding walking. He is happy doing this with me on his right side but quite stressed when I walk on his left. That’s interesting because I started working more on the right side because he was only comfortable with being worked from the left side. Difficult horse.

Our longer term goal, learning to be a cutting horse, is coming along nicely. I think. I’ve done some cutting, years ago, but have never trained specifically for cutting so I’m not sure where exactly we should be, if we were training traditionally.

He has been tracking me nicely for awhile now. We stuck with it to make sure he had the idea down. Now we are starting to add speed. First we worked on trotting out of turns. He is willing if not enthusiastic. Now I am asking him to trot into the turn as well as out of it. The first time he gave it to me we stopped there, rewarded generously and went on to easier things. Today we practiced it a couple of times each way. Coming back away from the other horses, turning to the right, he kept wanting to turn away from me. When he finally gave me a good turn we did just one more and stopped.

I hope to move on to using posts, laid on the ground or on cement blocks to start, instead of the fence as a barricade to keep him back from me. Unfortunately, all the posts are froze solid to the ground right now. That may just have to wait for spring.

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