Moment In History

What happened to Bella while I've been gone? She's got confidence! Woah, who knew!?!? I'd been having issues with her on line for the past few months, because I feel like she's living inside a little bubble, and the bubble is her comfort zone. And if you push her too close to the bubble, she'd bolt and leave you in the dust, although of course she warns you first. :) But I didn't see how we could get anything done with her if she'd always get so worried about things, because when she bolts, she's gone. She's a Percheron, after all.

But, no issues like that whatsoever today! I finally took the initiative to go play with her, because I usually play with her like once a month, maybe that. Moose is really my focus, sorry Bella (or rather, lucky Bella, depending on your perspective :). Anyways, Bella has been a handful for the farrier and last time she was particularly bad about her feet. So, my mom and I've done some research and gained a bunch more savvy arrows, so this time we're prepared!

For starters, the farrier is coming in 2 weeks. So, one of us is going to play with her at least every other day until the farrier arrives. Our issue specifically is that once we get her foot up, she doesn't want to keep it up. So, we're setting up ourselves for success big time. We're getting her prepared for as long as that takes until she's a nice, respectful horse. Also, we're changing the environment around. Normally, we bring the horses out of the pasture to trim their feet into a small area without a whole lot of maneuverability. We've changed our game plan. This time, the horses are going to get trimmed inside the pasture.

And thanks to Dave Ellis, we're going to have a different set of rules with our farrier, too. It's basically going to run so that if the horse is being naughty, our farrier will tell us "take it away" and drop the foot and the moment that foot hits the ground, we're off circling and backing 'for miles' (I use the quotes, because we're not going for miles, but we will go for as long as it takes. I've heard a story about horses who got backed up all the way down a mile driveway for not standing still to mount and I'll tell you he didn't try that again anytime soon.) and going sideways with as much effort as the horse put into being sassy. If Bella gets really bad, even with our preparation, then we're going to have the farrier trim Moose until she settles down, so that still keeps things efficient time-wise for her. Basically, we're going to let Bella choose if she'd rather back up for 'a mile' or hold her foot up for a minute. And we're going to play with her for a little while before the farrier gets here, too.

So, today is the 2nd session since we've started this plan. With her front feet, things went very well. I could hold her foot up for 7 seconds, and it was still my idea to put it down. Marvelous! She wasn't so cooperative with her back feet, though, but she does normally have more trouble with those than the front. So, instead of breaking my back trying to get her to understand, I switched to the carrot stick and tapping her foot to lift it. Her first thought was that I wanted her to yield her HQ. So then every time she'd yield her HQ I'd yield them fast in 2 complete circles. So, then when she started thinking a little, she tried backing, and I had her back 4 steps for her every 1 step back. So, then she started alternating between the 2, because she didn't know what I wanted. After about 10 minutes of this, she stepped back but with the foot I wanted her to pick up, so I released on that. She licked and chewed on that one for a while. Then, I tried tapping once more and it took 3 times, but then she picked up the foot again. I quit on that note, because I wanted to do some other things and then bring her out to graze for a while in case I lost any rapport today.

Today was really a "Moment In History" kind of day, so it was pretty sweet. I was very happy that Bella was left brain, because now we can make some real progress!!! And I am very happy with myself, too. I was an alpha today, that's for sure, and Bella picked up on that right away. On a comical note, Bella's yielding her HQ today was better than Moose's, (but Bella was pretty stiff/tight). And we actually got 1 lap of circing on a 12' at a walk. *Half-hearted "yippee!"* That's still pretty pathetic :), but it's progress all right. My horses are so funny. ;)