I've gotten in a few rides on Dublin and my new goal is one ride a week. Not very lofty, but it will be better than my recent track record! I did get to do a video on Sunday Sept 28th for my phone call the next day. Dublin Video 9/28/14.
We're working on some of the Parelli patterns, mostly Stick To The Rail. He does like to duck into the center of the arena! Getting him to stay on the rail without constant correction has been a challenge, but we are making progress and he is now responding quite nicely to leg pressure. Going sideways is also a challenge because he likes to go forward much better. We're using the fence to keep him from going forward, but the the challenge is to keep him from just turning away from the fence and going away from me. Keep those hindquarters moving sideways! What a great opportunity to improve my skills (she said, gnashing her teeth in frustration).
Parelli offers a great tool called a Horsenality/Humanlity match. If any of you corporate-types have ever gone through any kind of behavioral-style analysis such as Briggs-Meyers, you get the drift. Both you and your horse get your behavioral style analyzed and then placed in a quadrant depending on how left- or right-brained you are (left-brained is logical and analytical, right-brained more creative and emotional--translated to horse behavior, left-brained is thinking, right-brained is more reactive), and how introverted or extroverted you are. I've taken the test with Cowboy and now have take it with Dublin. Dublin wound up as a left-brained introvert, which is what I figured. I'm a right-brained introvert, but right on the cusp of left-brained introvert (my timidity and lack of assertiveness keep me in the right-brained quadrant, even though I'm logical and analytical to a fault). Cowboy, by the way, is a left-brained extrovert, in other words, a fun-loving kind of guy. My challenge with Cowboy is to keep up and make things interesting. With Dublin, it's more about showing him just why he should do it my way, or in fact, why he should do anything at all. With Cowboy, I need to mix things up and move faster. With Dublin, I need to move slower and not rush him. Hard for me to do, as I love getting fast results and with Cowboy, that approach works great! But I'm trying to slow down on some things while, at the same time, keep some impulsion going. It would really be better to do this more than once a week!
We got in a ride last Wednesday, Oct 1, and again yesterday. Yesterday, for the first time, I put a hackamore on him instead of a snaffle bit. A bit backwards--usually the hackamore comes first. But with an off-track race horse, even one like Dublin, I haven't been all that confident about controlling him in a hackamore. After a year and a half of him showing absolutely no inclination to bolt and run, though, he finally earned a ride in a hackamore. And it was a non-event. He rode like he'd been trained in it. Well, at first we lost a little of the power steering we've been working so hard to achieve, but he got the hang of that, and then it was business as usual. We side-passed over a couple barrels for the first time, and worked on our stopping. My plan is to get back into a canter soon. We got in one day of cantering before I came off Cowboy last February and all riding stopped for a bit. Then it was winter, and then life in general intervened. I can see some light at the end of the tunnel and am looking forward to life getting back to some new version of normal!
One thing that has been causing some disruption is my plan for a new barn to replace my ramshackle shelters. The barn should be going in at the end of October but there is some grading and concrete work to do first, and the old shelter and one paddock, both currently occupied by Dublin, need to come down for the grading work, so we aren't out of the woods yet, but I'm sure looking forward to being done with that project! AND to having a new barn! I'm sure the boys are looking forward to it as well, as they will have stalls in the same structure instead of separate isolated shelters. In line with that herd instinct.
