Ruffian: Trimming and Liberty.

April 2, 2011

Trimming. Ever since Myles has been playing with Ruffian I have noticed a HUGE change in Ruffian! He is 100% more confident and when I ask him something he doesn’t freeze up and go internal because of the pressure! It was amazing trimming him today he was so confident and relaxed!! I was so happy!!!

 Ruffian and I had a short but fun Liberty session this afternoon. He wandered into the riding ring as I was letting one of the other horses out so we started playing. Ruffian can, and does, loose confidence really quickly at Liberty and it has happened where he was broken through rails because he gets that scared.

So we have slowly been building his confidence and now he is so much more confident. We were able to do stick to me at the walk, sideways, lead by the chin (!!!!), jumping a single barrel on a squeeze game, and we finished with some undemanding time. He only left once and got a little bit worried but I was able to very, very, very slowly and with just the slightest amount of pressure, get him back to me.

I was really proud of how well he did and how we both were able to have fun :)

Naturally,
~Keri