New Kid on the Block

I have a new horse :) Storm is a six-year-old purebred Arabian, although her papers have been lost along the way. She's done some barrel racing, endurance riding, and elementary jumping. She's SUPER sensitive; a phase 2 pressure on her barrel causes her to step over with no Parelli training at all. I'm anxious to play with her but she's a shy girl (her previous owner warned me that she would be for a couple of months). She lets me come up to her, sometimes, but too much pressure, and she leaves. We'll go slowly. I also have the problem of Abbey being extremely jealous of her, so if no one's around to distract her she gets between me and Storm and drives her off. If I can get a halter on her this week (it's been ridiculously cold for doing anything serious), I hope to take her into the back field and close the gate, and then do some basic undemanding time to see where we are. Ab's going to need some extra attention, too.

Atta girl...

Been a while since I checked in. I've been doing Level 1 On Line Parelli groundwork (not in the halter in the picture, FYI) with Ab. We've got our Friendly, Porcupine, and Yo Yo Games mastered. Driving game is a little more of a challenge, and Circle game confuses the heck out of her (why aren't you turning to follow me? and she breaks gait behind me). But we've made a lot of progress. In the last two weeks we've:

1) Learned how to back up. She did not seem to have this concept from any point in her past.
2) Walked across a tarp.
3) Learned signals for moving her feet in four directions, but not towards me yet.
4) Messed around with some Liberty, as well, in her vast pasture, and being the Right Brain Introvert that she is, she has no problem sticking with me. Liberty is almost more exhilarating than riding.
5) Made some progress with the mounting block. I think I could've gotten on her the other day but she got anxious so we went for a walk until she got out of Right Brain Extrovert mode. I think she is going to be mostly RBE under saddle, which might not be a bad thing, considering the stuff I want to do with her.
6) We're currently playing with the plastic bag on the carrot stick, which she's pretty wary of and other than letting her nose it I haven't touched her with it yet.
7) No idea how we're going to do sideways and squeeze games. There's not a fence on the place that is straight with no ditch in front of it and no barbed wire. I might have to improvise with poles and barrels or something.

I really can't wait to ride her...

In other good news, Russ has sort of decided he's interested in riding... not so much for its own sake but for things like mounted medieval games, mounted archery and such. I'd love to have a second horse that I can put just about anybody on and take them riding. And a horse trailer. Maybe by spring.

Carrot, Stick, or Carrot Stick?

Miss Abbey likes to back up when she doesn't like something (RBI behavior or LBI). For a while I tied her while grooming, then I thought, I don't want to have to tie her, so I just held the lead rope while grooming, which she mostly enjoys. Sometimes I hit a sensitive spot. She backs. Today, I thought, the heck with that, I'm not moving around you for grooming, you're going to move around ME. So we practiced "back" "step up" and a send-away turn so I could get her exactly where I needed her to reach the spot I needed (I gave her some leeway for the back-end zone). This worked pretty well since she likes grooming and I'm learning her itchy spots, so I reward her with good curry on those when she moves where I want her.

Afterwards, since grooming seemed like the lesson today, I just took her and did some mirroring. I got a big sigh that seemed to say, "Oh, I like you so much better when you're not making me do stuff. By the way, got any horsey treats?"

Just got to know what motivates a horsey partner, as the above video demonstrates!