Making Progress.... Slowly!

I am pretty new to this horse training business, learning as I'm going along. I also tend to err on the side of caution. The miserable weather we had been having, alternating relentless rain and wet, sloppy snow, hadn't been helping, either. Consequently, the training of our two young Spanish Mustangs was not progressing as quickly as it possibly could. My farrier certainly thought so. When he was here in December, he assessed the situation with a practiced eye and declared "I would have all of this done in a day!" (meaning catching, halter breaking and leading, picking up feet etc.) Um.

Spurred on by the gauntlet on the ground, I decided to make some time the following week for a round penning session with Xoia, the filly. I started with her simply because she is a couple of months older than Xeo, and pretty much the boss. My thinking was that once I could reliably catch, halter and lead her, it would be much easier to start working with him.

It was a pretty low key affair. I still worried about overtaxing her, being only 8 months old, so I didn't push her very hard. Basically, I just kept her feet moving, walking mostly. Whenever she turned her butt on me I increased the pressure briefly to make her trot, but she didn't do that very often. Around and around we went. I don't know what I would have done had she resisted for a long time, but in the event it took less than half an hour for her to decide that standing and facing me was considerably less work that walking around in circles, and she allowed me to approach her and rub her head. So far, so good.

It didn't seem like a terribly big deal at the time, but the overall effect was surprisingly dramatic. The following day, I had a new horse. As soon as I showed up, she came over to say hello. She followed me around the pen while I was working. She happily stood to have her head rubbed. She was still jumpy about me moving around to her side, but with a bit of patience allowed me to halter her. Leading went from mostly yielding hindquarters to get the feet moving to calmly walking along. Well, well.

I decided to take her for a walk around the property. This was her first venture outside the pen since she had arrived. We walked though puddles, followed narrow rabbit trails through the brush, jumped over logs, walked across a tarp and dragged it around, checked out a small wooden pen, visited the other horses, the goats and the chickens. No problem.

Since then, she has been coming along in leaps and bounds. New things are approached with caution, but a basic attitude of: "If you say it's alright, then I guess it must be!" Picking up hooves? "OK!" Rainsheet? "Hey, look what I'm wearing!" She almost halters herself now in the expectation that we might be going for another adventure.

We'll be having lots of adventures.