I am so excited about writing this post because today was an awesome day! I went down to play with Gingy and he did great! Just as I had hoped he actually wanted to come play with me today. Plus like it says in the title, I don't think Gingy needs ear physical therapy to get his ears pointing forward again, they stayed forward almost the entire session today.
I had thought about doing an obstacle course with a jump, weave, L for backing through, etc. Then when I got down there I didn't want to set it all up, so I set three jumps up in the pasture at different places. When I went in the corral the horses were cleaning up tid bits from breakfast. I thought Gingy might come to me and he did. He thought about going back to the hay, but when I asked him to pay attention to me he forgot about eating. I haltered him up, and groomed him. For some strange reason he didn't want to stand still to be groomed today, maybe because he was actually enthusiastic about going out to play. I didn't really feel like saddling him, but I though it would be good since I wasn't going to ride him. Just so he could be saddled and find out that doesn't always mean I'm going to ride. He was a little impatient about the saddling. Then he didn't really want to get bridled, but it might been because the bit was rather cold. At any rate I gave him a chance to open up for the bit on his own, then I offered to poke th roof of his mouth. I ended up needing to follow through and poke him, but after that he licked about it.
First we did cantering online. It was a cold day so he had more energy and that was good. I'm not sure he's cantered online on a hill before, but I knew he could do it so I didn't back down on my request. The thing he had the most trouble with was rushing down one side of the hill and hitting th end of the rope when he ran up the other side. He started wanting to slow down climbing back up the hill, so I knew I had to change some things. First I tried just give him some slack on his return climb, but he bacially took that to mean that he could go sideways instead of forward, oops. Next I tried applying a little pressure on the rope before he went up the hill to help remind him that he was still on the line. That helped the most. Once when he was working doing his difficult lead he got away from me. In typical Gingy fashion he ran a little ways and started munching. Maybe I should have thought up a better plan than to just walk up to him, but that's what I did. He ran off into the little corner of the pasture when I approached and I still followed. So there we were face to face with him eating grass. I used my carrot stick to get his attention on me and off the grass. It took a couple of tries, but once he was focused on me he naturally wanted to come to me. His ears were up, so I felt like it wasn't done grudgingly and I should take it and go. We did some more cantering online until he got a complete lap going each way. After that we had a little pause, to stare into each others eyes. It felt good and Gingy did some licking and chewing, I think maybe I did too.
The next thing I wanted to do was traveling circles at the trot over the jumps I had erected. As it turned out Gingy needed some time to get his trot together. We did trotting until he was relaxed and connected then we tackled the jumps. Even as I was helping put the bend in his body at the trot his ears stayed up for the most part especially when he finally became more connected. That is a big improvement over the last three years of tensed, slightly back ears. On the first jump I had him go next to it few times, so he would notice it. He did alright, he second guessed me and tried to jump it right away. I did a few more circles with him just next to it until he stopped thinking about jumping it, still inwardly I was very happy that he had thought up jumping it on his own. That is another big change, he had energy and he wanted to use it to jump. Even though he second guessed my intentions I could tell by his expression that it wasn't out of resistance. After the circles next to the jump, when I did ask him to jump it he did fine both ways so we moved on. The next jump was a little harder. It was out in the middle of no where without a fence next to it like the last one. Plus it was right in front of the hill so going one way Gingy would have to be coming down the hill when he jumped it. The direction that lead to the jump on flat ground was easy for Gingy and he jumped it no problem. The other direction coming downhill was were he had trouble. He I kept giving him to much rope to begin with and he was a little uncordinated coming down the hill so he missed the jump several times. About this time he began to get tired of trotting. After letting him trot a little more I had him reduce to the walk and walk over the jump instead. He got a little lazy, but I fixed that by systematically swinging the rope acrossed the jump as soon as he started over it. That put some pep back in his step, plus he was now rested somewhat so we went back to the trot. This time we were both more cordinated and he got over the jump at the trot several times. I let him stop when he actually had slack enough to go around the jump, but chose to go over it instead. What a great change from swerving around it! By that time were both feeling a little tired, thus we called a day on that pleasant note.
Today was just so fun! I felt so in the moment, I can remember almost every detail about the enviroment around us and also what we did, the expressions Gingy had all of it. Gingy actually showed his more willing playful side, for the first time I felt like we were really partners having a good time together. Even though he played some mental games it was all in fun and I had fun countering them LOL. This is just the beginning and as is becoming my habit I will probably lie awake tonight thinking about all of the fun we'll have tomorrow. You know what I've learned the most about this week? It's the power of consistency. I always used to feel like I needed to be trying all kinds of different things with Gingy each day to give him his dose of variety, but we didn't make much progress because we didn't stick with very many things long enough. The strange thing is that each day that we stuck with that figure eight pattern things changed and the game was different so we both found plenty of variety even in the midst of consistency. I think that's pretty cool. I'm going to keep working with Gingy cantering online this week and we'll see what variety that brings about.
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