Undemanding time

June 5 2010

This morning it was rainy so I didn't play but I did spend about a hour or so of undemanding time with the horses. It was wonderful! I mostly just scratched them and hung out with them, not doing a whole lot. But I did play with Prince a little bit at Liberty. One of the new things that I have been teaching Prince is to smell his tail. So I decided to play around with that a little bit more. I started out by just asking him to bring his head around and hold it there. Then once he could do that and not move his feet I put it all together. Now the really neat part is that after we had done it twice successfully I wanted to do it once more so I brought Prince's tail around and just before I was going to ask him to bring his head around he tipped his head towards me!! It wasn't all the way but I decided in a split second to release. So we continued to play with it and Prince had figured out the pattern!! It only took a couple times and Prince actually brought his head all the way around as soon as he saw that I had his tail in the proper position!! Prince is so smart! I couldn't believe it!! So now we are up to 6 seconds. A little over half way to my goal of 10. 

Another couple other things that I noticed was that (1) Prince was following me around everywhere I couldn't walk away with out Prince following me and (2) part way through while I was rubbing Twosox and Prince was behind me he sent Twosox away. Twosox didn't go far because I blocked Prince a couple other times Prince sent one of the horses away if they came near me. Once I saw the pattern, at first I though maybe one of the horses had gotten to close to him or something, I started asking Prince to stand a little farther back when he was with me. Not as punishment but just so that he could still be with me but if I was scratching another horse he knew that I was still boss. By the end Prince was fine again and I was able to scratch both him and Twosox and they were both really close and there was no issues. Prince has never done that before though so it was interesting. 

The whole time Ruffian was eating and didn't even come over to see me, which was weird. So I asked him to come over to an d we spent some time together away from the other horses. One thing that I have been noticing with Ruffian is that he doesn't bring his head around to be haltered as he used too so I decided to play around with that. I tried a couple different things and one thing that seemed to make a difference was when he did bring his head around I rubbed the side of his face that was closest to me. I am not sure why but that really helped. After that he brought his head around really nicely and kept it there. I then wanted to wait until he had licked and chewed. He took a long time to process that. It must have been a good 10 minutes. Finally he relaxed and started licking, chewing and yawning. Then he lowered his head and went to sleep. 

I had a lot of fun just being with the horses and watching them, interacting with them and just hanging out!! I can hardly wait for Monday to start a whole new week of playing... hopefully it shall be a better week weather wise and that was I can play with all three horses more. 

Naturally,

~Keri