The Attack of the Yearling...

...in a six year old body! I'm pretty sure my horse is really a giant yearling. Or he's teething? He is just mouth-crazy these days! Yesterday he had his weekly massage and he was so naughty. His normally calm and collected therapist was even reaching the point of frustration with him. He just would not stop with the bites. His leadrope, the fence, your coat, my coat, boots, hands, whatever.

I think he's bored. He needs some serious work. It seems like his body is getting back in alignment and we are ready for some work again. We did some light lunging yesterday with 5 walk/trot poles. I had him in a surcingle with pretty loose side reins. He seemed to enjoy the challenge of the trot poles. He's pretty silly to watch going over trot poles because he is just so unsure of where his feet should go. He managed to get it sorted out pretty well yesterday and made it through a couple of times with not even a knock a pole! Which for him is a tiny miracle.

I took him out to the end of the driveway to work on backing up a hill, the only hill we really have to work with. He was not too sure about the whole thing. He was interested in the road and the cars and bicycles speeding by. He definitely did not want to turn his back on them! It took probably ten minutes to get him to stand with his butt to the road. We did a couple of sessions of backing up, no more than about four steps each time.

One think I learned yesterday is that my horse may not officially be clicker trained, but I think he's mint wrapper trained. I used empty mint wrappers in my pocket to encourage him to "do the right thing". When he was spooking at bikes and cars being behind him I scrunched up the wrappers for their great little plastic sound and he instantly relaxed and paid attention to me... I didn't know he'd been eating so many mints!