Cow Work
Although technically it was a bull 😉
My darling husband took both children with him yesterday leaving me in peace to go ride. I saddled up and headed for the pen where a few head of cattle are living for the summer. We were going to play.
Rusty was doing so good I wanted to get some video. We all know that holding a camera while riding makes for better training after all.
The young bull was working good for us, slow and easy. Although technically Rusty is a working ranch horse, in reality he doesn’t actually work very often. He’s tracked cattle five or six times and worked great for sorting pairs once this spring. He was doing great watching the cattle. His biggest problem was wanting to creep forward towards them.
After a few nice easy back and forths the bull went for the fence.
So often horses will lose cattle at the fence because they are hesitant to run into a solid object. Perfectly understandable. I wouldn’t want to crash into a fence either. There isn’t any need to actually hit it but it’s still hard to run strong with a barrier right in front of you.
I wasn’t riding effectively because of the phone. Rusty is inexperienced with cattle. There was no way we could cut him off before he passed us running along the fence.
But Rusty did it!
All by himself, I sure wasn’t helping much, Rusty went full bore into the fence. Because of my lack of effective riding and assistance we turned the wrong way at the fence. That didn’t mean Rusty didn’t do a great job, just that he didn’t know what to do. What a good pony. We’re going to have to sneak out there more often. Maybe he could make a good cutting horse as well as trick horse!