Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Ruffian: Figure eights and more.

December 4 2010

Ruffian and I had an great play time today. We had some small breakthroughs and over all had a good time. We stayed on the 12ft line but that was okay because we still don't have a whole lot of room to play because of the ice. 
We played with circles and played with maintaining gait. Ruffian wasn't sure he wanted to trot around so we played the game, don't make we come out of neutral. He caught on pretty quickly. I had to make sure that when I was assertive I wasn't putting to much pressure on Ruffian because even though he is a LBE he can go RBI really quickly. 

Once that was going well we played with Figure eights at the trot. Ruffian did really well for not having done them in a while. Once he maintained gait and was listening well we stopped. 

I had a plastic bag on the end of my carrot stick just to add a bit of a challenge and see how each horse would respond to it being there. Ruffian had some issues with it rubbing him and moving around. So before we started anything I had to get him okay with it moving around. It took some time but in the end it worked well and Ruffian gained confidence quickly.

I think it is time to pick up the pace a little bit though because Ruffian is pretty confident at the walk but he looses confidence when I ask him to trot, and maintain gait, so we are going to play with that and see if we can get some of our patterns back up to where they were.

Naturally,
~Keri

No comments:

Post a Comment