November 23 2009
Wow Twosox and I had an interesting playtime today. We started our in the corral and just did some Touch it then we went up the riding ring and did some circles up there. I wanted Twosox to trot 4 laps each way. It took a while but finally he did it. During the process he got a little worried but then calmed down. After that we played with driving the hind quarters. That was really interesting because I thought Twosox knew that..... maybe he forgot ;) Twosox will move his hind quarters away when I am farther away from him but when I am standing by his shoulder he would only take a couple steps then stop or walk forward. So we played with that until he could move his hind quarters in a full circle.
After that we went to Figure eights. I was planning on playing with getting Twosox to trot the whole figure eight... or at least more of it. But as soon as I asked Twosox to speed up he got worried, he started looking out as he was going around the barrels and he couldn't give me two eyes [sometimes he couldn't even look at me with one eye] so I tried different things, standing farther away from the barrels, standing closer, not using my carrot stick, and lots of other things. Nothing really seemed to help except this one thing..... we went back down to the walk and our figure eights were no better. So I figured that we should fix then again. So what I did was everything Twosox came around the barrel and was bracing I would bring him in all the way instead of sending him out again, rub him and then back up out and send him through the barrels. After a while of doing this Twosox started giving me one eye, then two eyes when he was walking around the barrels. So at least our Figure eights at the walk are back to where they were before the start of our play time. I think I will email the Savvy club member support and ask them because I am out of arrows. Everytime that I ask Twosox to pick up the pace a little he gets scarred and our Figure eights fall apart but there has to be a way to keep his confidence but still get the trot.
My mom asked me to show her something with Knightly. She was having trouble with getting him to move his forequarters over and not walking forward. So I left Twosox on his “spot” and started playing with Knightly. With in a couple minutes Knightly figured out exactly what I wanted but then there were some other things that needed to be solved.... aka yielding his hind quarters with out pinning his ears and tossing his nose at you. So we played with that. Pretty soon Knightly figured out that he couldn't do that!! So then we went and did some sideways with a fence and played around with Knightly not putting his head over the fence when he is going sideways [he figured out that if he put his head over the fence the rope would get caught and then he wouldn't have to go sideways.... clever LBI]. It was really fun!!! We pretty much did different forms of the Driving game the whole time. Knightly is really light when he wants to be but while he is being light he is also giving you other problems..... pinning his ears, swishing his tail etc etc.
All this time Twosox was standing where I left him. He had moved a little bit but other then that he stayed right where I left him. When I got back to Twosox we did a little bit more Figure eights at the walk. They were MUCH better. Twosox could look at me when he was coming around the barrels and was confident the whole time.
After that I let Twosox go. He followed me over to the gate at Liberty. It was definelty a play time that made me think!!!!
~K
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