About the Horses of Windy Hill

Some of you may know that I own several horses and occasionally train horses for other people.  I've decided to include the latest horse in training here on my blog just because it's fun and it also proves that I am  not always stuck inside doing things that turn out to be another epic fail here on Windy Hill:)

Argent 6 yr old Dales Pony

This is Argent, he first came to me when he was approximately 6 months old.  He was a wonderful student and a quick learner.  Since that time, I have down sized by about 20 acres and only have the room for one training horse at a time.  Argent is the first one here.  I love Argent.  He is here to learn that the super spooky horse eating battery operated childs toy will NOT leap out and attack unprovoked...aaannnnd, that it really is okay to stand quietly when he is under harness.

Argent was trained to drive and ride.  He actually does really well both.  But we want more than "really well" we want, superb! stupendous! Amazing! This is due to the fact that Argent owns 4 boys of his very own.  All of which are quite precious and are in need of a solid, steady, easy going, non-spooking large pony:)

Cue John Lyons Apprenticeship  trainer ...ME.

The first thing we worked on were the round pen steps

move your feet

 Some of the round pen steps are:

• Move your feet when I move mine
• Stop when I stop
• Yield to Pressure 
• Come to me
• Follow me
• Drop your head
• Relax
• Back up 

back up when I cue from far away

back up with me when I back up

come to me

Follow me

Argent did all of these relatively quickly.  

Now it was time for relax ~ relax in this particular instance is to be translated as "No matter what is going on, you (horse) need to trust that everything is going to be okay.  I'm your leader, and I will let nothing happen to you."  One of the issues I noted with Argent is that when he is trussed up in his fancy harness his body language says to me "I'm nervous, I'm not sure about this, I'm going to stand still, but I'm not going to like it." I want his body language to say "I'm relaxed, I'm comfortable with whatever it is you are doing." So, we started simply, with just the lariat ~ would he be relaxed with the lariat flopped onto him (relating to the harness)

Not relaxed 

Okay THIS is how Argent looked when we first started with the Lariat....now if he looks like this with a simple lariat, I certainly wouldn't want to put a harness on him, much less hook a cart up to him.

Relaxed

aaaah, now this is how he looked when we were finished for the day.  Head down, and ears held apart.  No stiffness!  As you can see from the lighting this took quite some time.  But we did it and I'm proud of him.

The horse eating tractor?  Well, that's for another day, but he WILL approach it now.  He's doing much better with that as well!  

You see?  I may be the opposite of a "handy woman" when it comes to my fixer upper house, but give me a horse and a lariat and I can make GOOD things happen:)

And that is why we have horses here on Windy Hill ~ so I can  prove to myself on a daily basis that there ARE some things I am good at:)