Ruffian: Porcupine games!

January 27 2011

Since it was so warm out today, -3 C. I decided to play with a whole bunch of different porcupine games with Ruffian. We haven't concentrated on them in a while so I wasn't sure how light he would be. 

We started out with hindquarter disengagements and that went really well. Ruffian was fairly light and we were able to get 2-3 full rotations going in each direction. The forequarters were a bit harder. They were sticky ;) But after a little bit were got it lighter and even with a bit of speed :) 

Then I wanted to play with a direct rein from the ground. Ruffian didn't know what to do so we played with it for a while and what he would do was just spin his hindquarters around and around. So after we had gotten a small step in the right direction I stopped and thought about how I could get this to make more sense to Ruffian. 

So what I did was I held onto just under the halter, just above the snap, and asked Ruffian to yield away from me by following that feel. Once he was able to more his forequarters away and keep his hindquarters relatively still we did it on both sides and then went back to the previous task. 

This went much better because Ruffian knew to move his forequarters to get the release. We ended when we got some really nice steps with out his hindquarters moving. Then we hung out for a while when we went over to the fence and I mounted from there. We rode around bareback for a while. We did lateral flexions, indirect and direct rein, one rein back up, and a whole lot of friendly game! Ruffian was super confident and did really well. I was really pleased with how well that went. "Slow and right beats fast and wrong!"

Naturally,

~Keri