Mighty Stallion, Ridden by a Child!

This is really yesterday's entry. I was too tired to fight for the computer last night. :P

Cory had two more firsts yesterday -- first ride by someone other than me, and first ride with another horse in the arena. We put Madeleine up on him and he was just as calm and even lazier than he is with me. At first I told her I would just lead her around but quickly let her loose on him when it became apparent she couldn't get him moving any faster than a slow crawl. I managed to get some trot steps out of him using the lunge whip but poor Mad couldn't keep him trotting for more than maybe a quarter of the way around the arena. Yes, I put my 13-year-old daughter on a stallion for his sixth ride ever and flicked the lunge whip at them. It's not as bad as it sounds -- I know this stallion very well. Fly and his owner were also riding in the arena and we even tried to get Cory following Fly to keep him trotting and that didn't work either. I'll ride him next time with a dressage whip and see if I can teach him a little more about what leg means.

In Which I Discuss Whips and Spurs

I've heard from many people, well-meaning and otherwise, who think that the use of whips and spurs is abusive. Here's why I disagree. Some horses, whether through genetics or previous bad riding, are dull. This means that they don't respond readily to the natural aids -- specifically in this case, the leg. When you're riding a horse like this, you end up having to nag at him to get him going. There's only so much leg and driving and clucking you can do before the horse starts to tune out the constant signal you're sending. With a spur, however, you can ask once and take your leg off. The dressage whip works the same way. It is not to beat the horse; rather, it backs up your leg aid. So for example with a horse who is not listening to the canter cue, you can quietly ask with a little outside spur and a flick of the dressage whip behind your leg on the horse's flank.

Horses are bright and trainable for the most part and if you rapidly apply this series of aids -- leg, cluck, spur, stick -- they will usually learn that if they want to avoid the use of the spur or whip they will respond before you get to that point. A rider with independent aids (the only sort of rider who should be using any artificial aids anyway) will be able to ride without letting the spurs touch the horse's side except for when they mean them to.

Briefly and simply -- I'd so much rather be able to ask a horse to do something one time, quietly, than have to nag. The choice of which option is kinder is clear to me.

Littlest Warmblood Gelding Ever?

Today I need to introduce a new cast member.

Texas is a six year old Welsh Pony gelding. We've only had him a month or so. He came from a family who rode him mostly Western, did some leadline and some barrel racing with him. He is here to be retrained as a hunter pony. He is such a character! He is absolutely convinced that every horse and pony wants to be his best friend and is happy with him being, say, right on top of them. All the time. Luckily the other ponies are pretty good-natured about this and there is only occasional half-hearted kicking and squealing on their part to get him to back off. Under saddle, Texas is green and can be pretty stubborn. When he wants to he can have a pretty good motor but sometimes he'd just like to stand with his feet planted. He knows some good pony tricks.

Texas just came back from the beach. Two of my students were going to go horse camping but one of their horses came up lame just before the trip. I let them take Texas so they wouldn't have to cancel the trip or share one horse. I don't often loan horses out but I trust these girls not to do anything stupid. After all, everything they know was learned from me. :) Anyway, I think the beach was a good break from the arena work because Texas came home refreshed and ready to work.

Texas is super flexible and has a tendency to curl his neck up when I ask him to bend or turn. I put side reins on him today for our ride just to hold his head a little more in a forward-facing direction. I have to talk a little bit about side reins now. I have heard people expressing indignant horror about riding in side reins but I think they are one of the very few valuable training tools out there. Note: I never ever use draw reins. The potential for rider error with draw reins is just too great -- whether by accident or out of misguided sense of how to use them or even in anger. The ability to crank down on something more and more, with no way out for the horse, is just a bad idea. With side reins the length is fixed and as long as they aren't overly short for that particular horse's training level, there is no harm done. The benefit is that it allows the rider to leave the horse's face alone. For example, with Texas if he gets all curled up I have to add a lot of outside rein to straighten him out and that's just a lot of contact with his mouth at this early stage. He already has a tendency to get behind the vertical on occasion so I want to leave his mouth alone as much as possible. He goes in a very flexible rubber mullen mouth snaffle to save his nice, soft mouth. With the draw reins on today, only as tight as they needed to be so that he can't get his head around to practically my knee (which he can do easily) I was able to work on circles and serpentines without touching his mouth too much. He was very, very good and finally understands what I mean with the direct rein. I even did some canter work today -- five times around the arena each direction -- which I haven't done in a while because he needed so much work at the trot.

The last thing we worked on was the halt. He's super with his downward transitions (love that soft mouth!) except for walk to halt. (At this point in his training I wouldn't ask for the halt from any gait but the walk.) He fights that one for whatever reason by curling his nose to his chest and barging through my aids. I worked on it using the voice command along with my seat and as little rein as possible and he is getting the idea quickly now. I've just made the connection that training Texas is most like Isaac, an ISR gelding by Ideal that I worked for a couple months many years ago. Both are powerhouses with natural push from behind but both can be stubborn and resistant to going forward. I ride Texas in the warmblood spurs and carry a dressage whip. Neither one touches him very often but they're there when I need them. Maybe he'll be a dressage pony. :)

Isabelle is an Arena Baby

First on the agenda today was lunging Rosalynn to see how she is doing. To the left, she is sound! To the right, with the bad fetlock on the inside, she is off but not as bad as she was. So she's not ready to ride yet (I'm disappointed about that) but there is major improvement and I'm optimistic she'll be riding sound again at some point.

After we blew through cleaning most of the stalls, I rode Isabelle. She started out really forward and actually threw in a token buck. The funny thing about the buck was that then she immediately flinched and I could read her mind exactly... "Oww! Maybe the old twist and buck isn't such a good idea any more..." I figure that Isabelle and I are about the same age right now and I can relate. After that, she was actually pretty good! When she would do her stiff-as-a-board routine through corners I was able to get her to lift her shoulder and bend, and her trot to walk transitions were pretty good. Her walk to halt transitions are always bad because she has the terrible habit of tensing through her jaw and resisting the halt, but I am finding ways to release her jaw and make the transition prettier. I haven't jumped her in months because we've been focusing on flatwork, but how fun is that? (Not much.) So I took her out onto our makeshift cross-country course to pop her over the little cross-country jumps I built to prepare students for our recent horse trial and she was immediately snorting and blowing and leaping into the air, thinking I've been on this hill before and there were not these weird things up here!!! Is that a brush jump or a sleeping monster who will surely devour me if I get too close???!? You've heard people talk about stall babies, right? They're those horses who spend their whole lives safely tucked into a padded stall and can not deal with the real world. Well, I guess Isabelle is an arena baby. We did manage to jump all three of the scary things (the tiny bank, the straw bales, and the little wall covered in brush) and then we ran and porpoise-bucked and generally made a big deal of ourselves. Using the same jaw-releasing technique we had just worked on in the arena, we managed to do a halfway decent downward transition from the canter. HA! Still, I think a running martingale is in order the next time we jump outside.

My final ride was Cory. I rode him because a student didn't show up for his lesson and I actually had time to kill before I had to feed dinner. This was ride #5 for Cory, and the first one I did without lunging him first. It was also the first ride with no one else on the property. I swear he plods along on the rail like an old school pony. I spent so much time clucking and squeezing that I think I'll carry a dressage whip next time. I don't want him dead to the aids before we've even gotten started! We walked for five or ten minutes (I don't know, it seemed endless at his pace) and then trotted around the arena a few times each direction. I almost took him out for a little hack around the property but I figured two firsts were probably enough for one day. We have yet to make any trot circles or to ride with other horses in the arena but we have plenty of time. I don't think I'll even canter him until next year. He's my first nearly blank slate and I want to do this right. Every other horse I have started has belonged to someone else and so they came with early training and quirks picked up from other people. We've had Cory since he was eight months old so any quirks he has are our own. I love not having to hurry because someone is worried that I'm wasting their money by taking my time. I look ridiculous on Cory, by the way. I keep my weight under 120 pounds because of all the ponies I ride, but I can't help my long legs. I haven't let anyone take my picture on him yet and I'm not sure I will.

Other than riding and lunging today, I did the usual feeding chores, cleaned five stalls, trimmed two mares' hooves, made a feed store run for a salt block for Teddy and a five-way vaccine, visited with Teddy and Dorothy and Laura for a while, came home and vaccinated the two heavily pregnant mares, and taught a lesson. Woo! (Should have been two lessons though, grumble grumble.)

First!

Okay, so this is my first blog entry and I think it is the part where I am supposed to explain just why I am blogging. I've apparently become typical, as in, whenever someone who loves to ride decides to buy land and build a barn and live on the very same property as their horses, they stop riding. Yeah, that's me. There are always a million projects that need to be done and I have a hard time justifying the time to ride, even though I have a barnful of horses who need the rides. I've tried making riding a priority, making lists and goals and promises, but nothing is working. My newest thought is that maybe if I blog about my rides, anyone can read and see just how many or how few rides I am actually putting in. (Because of course my riding log is really, really interesting to the multitudes on the internet!)

I call it short stirrup although I have long since aged out of that division... we focus on ponies here and since I am pushing 5'8", short stirrups is exactly what I have when I am training. We do have some token horses as well, including one gigantic three-year-old -- you'll meet him later.

Here is an introduction to a few of the cast of characters.

Rosalynn is a twenty-year-old Swedish Warmblood x Thoroughbred mare. She is an extremely valuable part of my lesson program because she is perfect. Before I had her, she was winning at second level in dressage when she was sidelined to have a foal and never really got back into it. I bought her as a sixteen-year-old, intending to breed her, but when I found that she was still riding sound and a wonderful teacher I used her first in my lesson program. We did breed her for a 2007 filly but when I tried to bring her back into work early this year after weaning the filly, she was off. I'd had this mare for nearly five years and she'd never been off! We've had a hard time diagnosing the problem -- films were inconclusive -- so I figure it's soft tissue and is just going to take some time. I refuse to put her on stall rest because she'd be so angry she'd probably tear the barn down, so she still goes on turnout with the mare herd. She is getting sounder, very slowly. Her appearances in this blog are going to be related to her recovery.


Isabelle is a ten-year-old Oldenburg jumper mare. Don't you just want to kiss her great big warmblood head and ears? Yes, we are still "training" at ten. She has the double-whammy disability of some unknown but obviously suspect handling in her past coupled with her sire's resistant-to-training temperament. I actually had the pleasure of starting this mare as a four-year-old and she was so talented that I wished I could buy her but she was out of my price range. I was able to purchase her several years later and she certainly wasn't the horse I'd known before. The things that were the same -- an extreme sensitivity to touch and an ability to dance and cartwheel and buck in ways I've never seen another horse manage. The things that were different -- an extreme dislike for contact with her mouth and an occasional total refusal to work. We've had her teeth floated and her body chiropracted so the issues that remain are emotional. I persevere with her because when she is good, she is very, very good (I can cross my arms and ride her with my seat alone on her good days) although (and I'm sure you saw this coming) when she is bad, she is horrid. She loses her brain on occasion and when her brain takes leave of her body, her only speed is GO. Ah, I love her so. :)

Cory is a three-year-old Welsh Mountain Pony stallion. He is the Jack Johnson of ponies. Why gallop with Owen when you can walk slowly to the gate at turn-in? And why walk at all if you can get away with just standing there and looking hot? I see photos of his Welsh friends and relations moving out huge at the trot like you would not believe and I think that I'd have to set off bombs to get him that motivated. He'd much rather do the Cory-jog. Since I believe firmly that stallions should have jobs other than having sex, Cory is being put under saddle this year. So far he has posed no challenge other than keeping him moving!