Progress

It's a pretty awesome thing when you find a trainer who truly gets you and what you are trying to accomplish with your horse AND has the knowledge to help get you there. I have found such a trainer, and no, you can't have her.

We are starting on the ground with Stella. Our first session about two weeks ago was roundpenning, but no type of roundpenning I'd ever done. Instead of pressuring the horse to move out and away, I invited Stella to be with me immediately. K and I discussed her reaction to pressure and decided it was not disobedience or defiance as so many would probably assume (and as I assumed), it was frustration. "Big" pressure isn't needed with this horse: it stresses her and pushes her further away from being interested in joining me. It would explain why I never got her to join up in the traditional round penning methods: she'd just run around bucking like a bronc until she was sweaty and exhausted and I was at the end of my patience.

There is still the traditional idea of pressure and release to ask the horse to move its feet, but the pressure came from my body language, not from a rope or whip. I asked with my body first for her to walk out, trot up, etc., and then asked a little "bigger" if she didn't respond. The idea was to ask as little as possible, and for eventually her to raise or lower the energy in her body (which would then manifest as picking up the trot, canter, etc, or coming down to the trot, walk) by just the position of my body and my breathing.

The first couple days were successful, and ended with a very calm and fairly focused mare. The next few, however, were not so much. K and I decided in our session yesterday, in order to help Stella succeed, that we would keep her on a lunge. It enabled me to have direct control over where her head was, and it would "help" her in understanding where her focus needed to be as well as minimize the amount of bronc bucking she did.

What a great session! K is so encouraging. I'm learning the importance of rewarding what I perceive to be even the smallest try from Stella. She needs that more than anything, because often she does not get the big picture all at once. I have to reward those few steps of quiet, relaxed trot, the nice down transition to the walk, that attempt to pick up the canter when asked (even though we could both tell she was saying "Mom, I'm so unbalanced!!") every single time. This is what builds her confidence. This seems like such an easy, obvious concept, and it is, the problem is noticing the small tries and interpreting the signals she gives me. Is that flinging of the head and fast trot her honest try at raising the energy in her body and picking up the canter? Is it defiance? Is it nothing? The answer is that everything the horse does is a communication to us. If the trot gets bigger and faster it is supposed to tell us something, or is a response to something we did. The problem often occurs when we try and interpret the message, and we transcribe into English what the horse said in Equine. Doesn't always work. It's like trying to interpret in Greek what a Russian said to you. Things get lost in translation.

Stella is doing better each session, and all the facets of her personality are coming out. Is she high energy? Absolutely. Is she disobedient? Absolutely not. What I'm seeing is that she is so utterly willing to do what I ask, but what I ask isn't always clear, and in her attempt to guess what I want often explodes a little. She doesn't know how to manage her energy in a productive yet expressive way, and that's what I need to teach her.

Also, as a total aside, Stella got a new toy :) Pictures and video to come.