Random ramblings

I always think that I don’t have much to write about these days, since I’m not doing much horse stuff...Once I sit down and start typing though, lots of random stuff comes out!  Maybe I’ll try and do a “random ramblings” kind of post every week or something... 

His move looked like this! Luckily I was far away... 

Spencer hasn’t really travelled too far in his paddock with all of the deep snow we have had. He has a few trails packed down around the barn and to his shelter. I figured he wasn’t comfortable walking around in the snow much because it is all hard now and while I can walk on the top of it, he sinks down every other step. 

 I went out to feed on Monday and when I went out back door to see how he was doing, he gave me this wild eyed look and took off galloping around his pasture!   I guess the snow wasn’t too deep/hard/crunchy for him after all!  At one point, he even jumped the manure pile and then did some sort of Spanish riding school moves.  He jumped straight up in the air and then kicked out with his back feet.  I wish I had my camera with me!   It took him 10 or 15 minutes to calm down and he came back to the barn all sweaty and with his head down.   What a guy. I had to walk him for a while to cool him out before I could feed him.

While I was searching for images similar to the move Spencer “performed”, I found this cool post about in-hand dressage with a miniature horse:  http://equineink.com/2008/06/18/good-dressage-comes-in-a-small-package/

His name is Lancelot and he is so handsome!  He has some videos on YouTube and his owner has a book about training minis...

Since I can’t do much outdoors with Spencer right now, I thought I would practice clipping him.  I saw the previous owner clip him and he was fine, but to be honest, I was expecting a bit of attitude when I tried it.  I got out the clippers and he didn’t even flinch.  I was expecting to have to do a few sessions of desensitizing him and calming myself, but I had his bridle path trimmed in about 5 minutes and he would have let me trim his muzzle too, but I didn’t bother.   So, I’ll need to think of something else to work on.  Maybe I should try pulling his mane and practice braiding or something...???

Oh – I just remembered something horsey that I did a couple of weeks ago. I went with a friend to visit her young horse that is in training.  This barn is into cutting and sorting, so we went to watch an afternoon lesson. The trainer then took my friend’s young horse into the arena afterwards, to get him used to the cows.  It looked really fun actually...it would be neat to try that sometime. Maybe one winter I’ll board for a couple of months and do something like that with Spencer!

moooo

The young paint isn't too sure he likes the cows...

Ok - enough rambling for today. More to come next week. I like my rambling posts!  

Managing winter

This is my first winter with my own little barn and my own little horse to take care of (since I was a kid!).  So far, I think we have been doing just fine.  I was unsure how things would go when the snow, cold and ice hit us.

Trying to work a bit in the fluffy snow over the holidays

Tack room –  A+.  It is insulated and faces south/south-east, so it stays quite warm, especially on a sunny day.  Even when it was -25C (-13F) over the holidays, the temperature would range between 0C and -2C (32F and 28F).  My water hydrant is in the tack room, which was a smart move on the original owner’s part.  It has yet to freeze on me, but it does have a little heating coil wrapped around the exposed part, if I need it.

Fencing –   The bottom strand is buried in snow, so I’ll need to disable the connector to that strand.  Note to self for this weekend!  The north-west corner strands in my small paddock are sagging on me as well.  When we got our first big snowfall, I was able to knock the snow off and tighten up the strands, but it didn’t hold up.  I’m going to tromp out there this weekend and see what I can do. 

Spencer -  In mid December, as the weather was getting nastier, I wasn’t sure what to do with Spencer. He has a shelter, but wasn’t really using it.  He would stand in different places in his paddock, depending on which way the wind was blowing. It was getting tricky to put his hay out, because I would put it where he was standing in the morning, but the weather would change by the afternoon, so he wasn’t eating much because he didn’t want to stand in the wind (wimp!). 

Spoiled!!

Of course I felt guilty about this so I figured out another solution (spoiled horse alert!!) – I was able to open the back door of the barn and tie his stall door open so that he has good shelter for the cold, windy days. With this new arrangement, I wasn’t going to blanket him, since he had grown a really nice winter coat.  My friend that was taking care of him over Christmas felt bad because it was -234234234C and blanketed him anyway.  After wearing a blanket for a week or so, his fluffy coat was all squished down.  I pretty much had to keep the blanket on after that.

Manure Pile – The previous owners left a decent sized manure pile behind. I had intended to have someone come in with a tractor to remove it, but my budget last year didn’t allow it.  I didn’t plan on keeping Spencer in his stall much, if at all over the winter so it didn’t really cross my mind.  Of course, now that Monsieur Spencer has his own private horse hotel, complete with housekeeping staff, I’m adding the manure pile every day!  During the holidays, the snow was blowing and drifting a lot, so every couple of days the manure pile would get drifted over and covered with snow. It was tricky to push a wheelbarrow out far enough, so the manure pile is a little closer to the barn than I would like.  I can’t do much about it now, so I’ll just manage it until the spring.  Spencer also likes to paw at it (bored?) so it is a bit messier than I would like as well.

One thing I would like to change in the barn is the location of the light switches.  The switches are in the tack room, but getting there involves opening a gate in the pasture, which is hard in the dark and cold. My tack room outside door has also frozen shut several times so far this year, so getting in that way isn’t the best.  I go in via the main sliding doors and it would be nice to have light switches there as well.  I’m hoping to have an electrician out this summer to see if we can get that fixed.

All in all, we are faring quite well this winter. I sometimes daydream about taking him to a boarding stable for the winter so we could ride, but it is also nice to have time off to relax and try to stay warm!  The days are already getting a bit brighter by the time I get home from work, so by late Feb/early March we should be able to get started on some work!

I do find myself occasionally longing for the long, hot days of summer and a sleek horse!

Happy New Year!

I decided a couple of weeks ago that I wasn't going to write a 2012 year in review post or post any goals for 2013.  I think most of you who read this know that Spencer and our new house were the highlights of 2012.  As for 2013, I'm going to let the chips fall where they may. I have some ideas of stuff I would like to do, but I'm just going to focus on building my relationship with Spencer and see where we end up.

I had a nice Christmas holiday with my family this year.  They live about a 7hr drive SW of where I do, so the weather at this time of year always makes the driving dicey.  We dodged two major storms this year, so I feel lucky.  We now have at least 20" of snow, if not more.  This snow all arrived in the past two weeks! Hopefully that is the last of it for a few days at least.

I don't really have much to report other than I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

Here are a few pics of Spencer in the snow from the past few days.  Hopefully I'll be motivated to write more in the coming weeks.

Thanks, Boo to winter and some cute pics

I wanted to thank everyone for their great comments on my past few posts. It is really nice to read all of the supportive comments!  I had another great lesson with Amy this weekend, which I'll write about later, if I don't get completely buried in snow!

Our weather forecast is pretty much snow, snow, snow for this week!  :-S  I like snow - it is pretty, but it makes driving to work and travelling for Christmas a bit more of an adventure...  We are forecast to get almost 50cm (19") by the end of the week!!!! I hope the weather people are wrong!

Since I don't feel like writing anything big today, I thought I would post some cute pictures of Spencer from a month ago, when it was still green and slightly warm!

I like seeing him lying down to sleep!

I also like my telephoto lens that allows me to get close without disturbing him

Roxie was curious and thought she would investigate...

Spencer wasn't too pleased with having his nap interrupted by a cat!  He even tried to nip at her, which I missed. ..

Roxie gave him lots of room on her trip back to see what I was doing...

I am having fun getting some pictures of Spencer and the cats. It seems I'll be able to get some nice snow shots if the weather forecast is accurate...

Keeping it real – Part 4

Phew – this story is getting long! I’m trying to keep it brief, while documenting the process for myself to re-read later on if I get stuck.


The trainer – let’s call her Amy – was due back for a second lesson on a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago. On Saturday afternoon I decided to take Spencer for a short ride. I tacked him up, headed out to the ring and proceeded to walk around a bit. He was cranky and grumpy and quite tense. Of course, this made me a bit tense and annoyed. I tried to let go of the annoyed feeling, but was having a hard time. Old thoughts of “you can’t do this” were creeping in to my mind. After about 20 minutes of a crappy ride, I put Spencer back out in the field and sulked around the house for the rest of the day.

Sunday morning, I went out to catch Spencer to try and clean him up a bit before Amy arrived. Any guesses as to how that went? I couldn’t catch Spencer at all. He was pinning his ears at me and trotting away when I got close. He hadn’t tried that with me in the 2.5 months that I owned him so far. I was very glad that a trainer was on her way to my place!

Amy arrived and she worked with him out in the paddock. She moved him around the paddock to show leadership, the same as you would in the round pen. He finally settled down and responded to her cues and we caught him and brought him in the barn. We then headed out to the round pen and it was my turn to try and work with him. Amy was giving me tips as I worked. After a few minutes, I was feeling more confident and relaxing a bit. Spencer was responding to my body language and would get a bit confused if I mixed up a signal. Amy thought that the “join-up” exercise would go a long way in helping me realize I could do this and that Spencer wasn’t dangerous or out to get me.

She also somehow helped me cut through all of the old “ideas” (for lack of a better word) I had been holding on to about me ruining my horse, or not being good enough to do xyz. I also didn’t have to worry about all of the different training methods different people had been trying to teach me over the years, or methods that I had tried to use with varying levels of success. I don’t really know how to explain this - but it wasn’t anything she said - her way of handling Spencer was just so basic and focused on responding to his body language. There was no anger, no tension and no frustration in her methods.

We worked with him in the round pen and on the longe line for about an hour, stopping every 5 minutes for me to ask more questions. I really felt by the end of the hour that I could work with him safely and actually make some progress! I then tacked him up and rode for about 20 minutes. I had a really good ride and it was 100x better than our ride the day before! I was sad to see Amy go – I wanted her to move in, or for Spencer and me to pack up and move to her place, so we could work with her full time!

I feel like I made incredible progress in the week following my lesson. Monday night I repeated the round pen exercise and was very close to getting him to join-up. I was already more adept at the longeing work and wasn’t getting any attitude from him at all. The following Sunday I tried the round pen again and was actually able to get him to join-up with me. I was pretty happy with that. It was a big step for both of us.

Note: I know a lot of people feel differently about the concept of join-up and whether it works or whether it is completely silly. For me, it was a big deal, because just two weeks before, I was too nervous to go into a small enclosure with Spencer. Now, I felt I could at least work with him safely and be a better leader. I was hoping to start building some respect and this experience was the foundation for that.

This past week, I have been limited in my work with him, since it has snowed a bit and the footing isn’t great. It is also dark by about 4:30 now. (Oh how I would love an indoor arena to magically appear at my place!) I feel that shorter sessions are still good for us – even if it is only 15 minutes or so.

And that catches you up with the past few weeks. I really feel that I am in a good place and have a good foundation to move forward to work with my horse. I think we’ll do really well this spring and summer. I’m so glad that I didn’t give up on myself or him!

Keeping it real, Part 3

I don't mean to drag this story out, but it is too long to post all in one shot.  I only have one more part to go to wrap it up!

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I made an appointment to have this new trainer come out to my place. I was nervous and didn’t really know what to expect. It turns out she was friendly and easy to talk to. I gave her an overview of Spencer’s behaviour and my issues and we got down to work.


We rigged a round-pen (actually a square pen!) in one corner of my riding ring, using some electric rope and plastic fence posts with some ground poles underneath.

(Note: I wasn’t 100% sure that he would stay in this ring – he probably could’ve jumped the fence or crashed through it without much trouble. I do not recommend doing this at home without a trainer or an experienced friend to help you out if things get messy. Fortunately, Spencer was very good in this space.)

She then proceeded to use round pen work to see what Spencer was all about. She felt that some of his behaviour was just plain attitude: he is a bit dominant, as well as being a bit lazy and just didn’t want to be asked to do anything. She got a lot of attitude (bucking and kicking out at her) from him at first, which made me happy, in a strange way. Wanna know why?

Up until this point, I was taking his behaviour really personally. Like he was cow-kicking at me. Or being difficult with me and me only. When in reality, he was a bit frustrated and annoyed in general. Not taking things personally was a huge first step for me. I figured that if that realization was all that I got out of the lesson, then it was worth it.

After some basic round pen work, she did a bit of work getting Spencer to respond to her on the longe line – she called this technique “gypping”, a term that I wasn’t familiar with. It is sort of like longing, but the horse doesn’t trot in endless circles. She would use her body language to send him out on a circle to the right, then would switch and go back to the left. She also used this technique to get him moving his feet around.

She then did about 20 minutes of work ground driving/long lining him. As far as I know, he’d never done that before. He caught on really quickly. By the end of the almost 2 hour session, he was responding much better. He probably really appreciated the clear leadership he was getting from the trainer. I watched intently for the whole session and asked about 10,000 questions. She was really good about giving me straightforward answers. This first session/lesson was mostly about her working with him to get a starting point. I still wasn’t feeling 100% comfortable tackling some of the exercises on my own.

I was pretty happy with the outcome of the first session – it showed me not to take things personally and to let some of the frustration and anger go. That alone was well worth the time. I booked her to come back again in two weeks.

In the meantime, I was back on my own with Spencer. I wanted to try some of her techniques, but was just a little unsure on how to proceed. I was still a little nervous around him and wasn’t sure that I could get the same results as she did. My mind was flooded with all of the new things I was learning. It also seemed funny to have worked around horses for many years, but never had I had all of this information presented to me in this way.

To be continued...