Ruffian: Playing.

June 10, 2011

Well, today promised to be a busy day. My schedule was packed full but I loved every minute! I planned on playing with all three horses this morning. Ruffian was first. The only problem was that the horses weren't in... so Mom and I went out to find them. They were in the field so we played there. Ruffian and I had lots of fun and he was very energetic. 

I started with asking him to put his back feet in a tire. He was doing it but his mind wasn't there. He looked exactly like my little Left Brain Extrovert brother when we were doing simulations the other day :) So we switched to some circles just to allow Ruffian to move his feet! Ruffian liked this very much and so we played with traveling circles, I put different natural obstacles in his way to cause him to think about where he was putting his feet. We did this mostly at the trot and then we played around with cantering. 

Even since Ruffian hurt himself he seems to have a bit harder of the time cantering. So we played with it for a while and eventually Ruffian was able to canter smoothly for about half a lap before I brought him in for a rest. 

I wanted to play with Changes of directions and advance them so we played with those next. Ruffian has a habit of coming on to close when changing direction so I mainly focused on getting zone one and two away from me on the change. This worked well and Ruffian caught on so quickly that there was no need to drill it into him. Once he got it we quit. 

Then we went over to a log and played with jumping it. Ruffian will jump it no problem so we played with jumping it, disengage, snappy send, jump the log again and repeat. At the end Ruffian really got into the pattern and put lots of energy into it! We ended with me asking Ruffian to straddle it on the last time over, which he did on the first try :) 

Next we played with spinning and going. Where you put the rope on the other side of your horse, ask him to follow the feel around (spin) and then send on the circle. Ruffian loved this and in the end we got a really fast spin and a canter send! Ruffian was light and was having fun! 

Then we hung out for a while until Mom was ready to leave and then we unhaltered the horses (Prince and Twosox had already left and went home) and then followed the horses back to the corral. It was so much fun playing with Ruffian and it was great to see him being energetic yet obedient :)

Naturally,

~Keri-Lynn