Lasting Lessons

I love that Boo is not only a quick learner, he has good retention. You might say to yourself, "well, all horses retain things well." Not so, my friends - I know a mare who reminds me of that Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, you practically have to start over each day. Three steps forward, two and a half back. But with Boo, it's forward progress, all the way.

Today we only had a teensy window of time (my lunch break from work) so I just stuck his halter on and we went out into the arena to lunge. We started to the left, his good direction. I'm working a lot more seriously on transitions and especially on focusing on what I'm telling him with my body language. I have a tendency to over-cue and to be sloppy with my upper body, so this practice was more for me than for him in ways. Walk, trot, walk, halt. Walk, trot, canter, trot, canter, trot, walk. Halt and switch directions.

About this time the feed truck showed up with the hay delivery. Boo never batted an eye.

We got started to the right without so much as a hitch - none of the backing up, jostling for position, or other confusion we had a bare week ago. Just a nice smooth step-out into a walk circle. (This is where I say thank you to Maraka for breaking our little mental block!) We did some more transitions to the right - our trouble spot now is the downward transition from trot to walk, where he sees an opportunity to instead halt and turn in. So rather than cue him with the line, I'm using my shoulder position and my voice to bring him down to a walk. One I got a smooth set of walk-trot-canter-trot-walk-halt, we quit.

We'll start working on less predictable transition patterns, but for now I'm proud that he's learning voice commands, staying focused on me even when there are interesting things going on (alfalfa delivery, horses cantering downhill in the turnouts, etc), and, best of all, enjoying his reward-scritchies at the end.

I mention the scritchies part because Boo, unlike a lot of horses, has been a hard case with this - he doesn't do the pooky lip or glazed eyes when you scratch him. I've tried just about every spot on his body without luck. But - BUT - it seems that he's suddenly decided to let his guard down, because today I got pooky lip, eyeroll, and head hug all within a minute of each other. We're into breakthrough mode as of last week and I love it!

One last thing - and this is huge, so huge. He had his feet trimmed yesterday. Last trim, he was off for almost two weeks from the loss of hoof wall height and the increased contact of his soles against the ground. Today? Sound as can be. Sound and solid and happy. My farrier is thrilled at what he's seeing - he even called me over to look at one of his soles and show me the changes, the new growth and turnover and parts that are exfoliating. What's happening is that Boo's going from having very VERY flat, thin, weak soles to having thick, normally cupped soles. We're three months in and already his feet look, I'd say, 85-90% normal when you pick them up.

Sooooo happy!