May 23rd 2010

We headed home this morning after another brilliant night at the live show of Over the Rainbow. We stayed at the party for a while but left reasonably early as I wanted to get home so I could work with our visiting mare the next day. After several conversations with the original owner it transpires that the mare did indeed have an accident with a pole. She is furious as was unaware of this but asked her team of helpers if they could shed any light on the problem and, as I suspected, the person who was with the horse at the time did not tell the owner what had happened so the mare’s fears were never addressed. Horses never lie!

The plan is to continue with the saddling and just keep revisiting the poles. I have chunked the exercise down further and am now using half rounds so that they won’t move if she touches them. She is able to walk over these but her heart rate and respiration tell us that she is still highly concerned. She is, however, developing trust in us which is the first step to helping her gain self-confidence. She is a delight to train and a willing student so everything else is well on track but I do want her to feel safe walking over things on the ground for obvious reasons. It’s easy to see why we end up with some of the nervous wrecks that arrive at our yard, as so many small concerns are overlooked in a horse’s early training and are not addressed, or made worse by the human’s reactions.

This entry was posted on 17. June 2010 at 21:43 and is filed under Sarah Fisher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.