An interesting ride.\u00a0\u00a0 Instructive in multiple ways.\u00a0\u00a0 The goal today was to ride around the East Grass, not right on the perimeter but in clear sight of all of it, for Rags’\u00a0 awareness of place and routes.\u00a0 To start with, mounting went much better except for one little glitch (mine.)\u00a0\u00a0 I was able to mount and get my leg over him in a continuous movement, first time.\u00a0 The glitch was in turning the stirrup the wrong way and thus driving the edge of the stirrup leather into my calf–not comfy.\u00a0\u00a0 After getting into the north horse lot, though, I was able to get Rags to stop and stand still while I took my foot out of the stirrup and turned it back around.<\/p>\n
We went up the Near Meadow towards the highway, on the south side of the Old Ditch.\u00a0\u00a0 There are a couple of spots where the banks have softened, and crossing doesn’t involve a steep in\/out, and we crossed to the north side at one of those points, then rode toward the highway from there, avoiding the bigger, rougher rocks near the culvert, and went upslope toward the north fence on the least rock-studded ground I could find.\u00a0 This area was burned last fall, so it’s easy to see how much soil is there.\u00a0 We arrived at the gate to the highway, turned left to ride along the trees of the north fenceline, and headed toward the dry woods.\u00a0 Close to them is a stockpile of posts and pipe line-braces; we passed those and started down the mowed path near the woods edge, a trail Rags has been on several times before, both ways.\u00a0 He was alert but he knew he was headed back home, the lower part of the field and the Near Meadow in view (for me, maybe not for him, but he knows the trail.)\u00a0\u00a0 Happy pony, thinking “This isn’t so bad–this won’t take long.”<\/p>\n
Then he threw up his head, shied full bore, whirling and backing, focused on the woods.\u00a0 I hadn’t heard or seen anything but after he shied (and I got him stopped) I heard a noise in the brush in front of us–there’s a lot of stuff that makes a crackling, dry-stuff breaking noise in the Dry Woods.\u00a0 And I saw just enough of a deer rump to know it was a deer moving, but by then it too had frozen.\u00a0\u00a0 Rags was rigid, nostrils wide, ears not just forward but full-on pricked and stiff.\u00a0\u00a0 I had started talking to him even as he moved…a calm voice can help sometimes…and kept talking to him for the next stages of this little adventure.\u00a0\u00a0 “Steady…steady…it’s a deer.\u00a0 You’re OK, good boy, just stand and think about it…it’s a deer.\u00a0 It’s more scared of you than you are of the deer.\u00a0 You’re fine, you’re with me, I won’t let it get you….” and so on.\u00a0 Patted his rigid neck, rubbed it a little, let out a breath audibly.\u00a0 “OK…you’re OK now.\u00a0 You’re being a good pony.\u00a0 You didn’t rear, you didn’t buck, you didn’t bolt, you listened to Mama.\u00a0 Good boy, Rags.”\u00a0 After he’d stared for a time (I wasn’t looking at my watch!)\u00a0 I asked him to “Walk on.”\u00a0 He backed up instead.\u00a0 We were about a horse length from the trail, maybe a little more.\u00a0\u00a0 Then I felt his back relax a tiny bit under me and though he was still focused on where the deer was (or had been.)\u00a0\u00a0 His ears were a tiny bit less stiff.\u00a0\u00a0 I gave him an encouraging nudge and turned his head toward home.\u00a0 “Walk on.”\u00a0 So he walked into the taller grass (what hadn’t burned last fall) , still obviously scared\/worried, and trying to watch the woods more than where he was putting his feet, but he was paralleling the side of the Dry Woods, and every once in awhile he’d flick an ear back to me. \u00a0 I kept talking, encouraging and praising him.<\/p>\n
When we started, I kept him on a fairly short rein (a steady contact, but with relaxed elbows, back and forth with his head) and as he calmed down, I gave him more and more rein, bit by bit.\u00a0 Some yards further on I got him closer to the mowed path, and finally on it; he wanted to speed up and rush back, but his head had lowered and he was clearly not in panic mode anymore, so I said “Let’s just walk…just walk…” in a soothing voice.\u00a0 Turned him west on the wide mowed strip just on the north side of the Old Ditch, and we re-entered the Near Meadow at the grassy dip through the ditch.\u00a0 Once we were “far enough” from the Dry Woods, he relaxed completely and though he wanted to get home (which he always does, like a normal horse) he let me guide him without resistance.\u00a0 Dismounting wasn’t as smooth as mounting, but I got it done.<\/p>\n
I will take him there again, and again, until he’s calmer about crackling brush.\u00a0\u00a0 Besides staying calm about it, the other good thing\u00a0 on my end was that his panicky moves didn’t even begin to unseat me…I did grab mane, since his neck was right there in front of me, not lower as usual, just in case he bolted, but he didn’t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He probably would have, if I’d tried to move him toward the brush right away, or did something that made him feel more endangered.\u00a0 Or if I’d turned him all the way away from the brush, so he could see escape handy and whatever bothered him was behind him.\u00a0 Some horses would rear up, some would buck (or bolt and buck, a common reaction in a horse that feels threatened.\u00a0 Suddenly the person on their back hits the “that’s how predators attack” button.\u00a0\u00a0 If a horse shies\/spooks hard, and it’s safe (with open ground around us, the brush only on one side)\u00a0 letting the horse stand and stare while you talk to it, give it encouragement to calm down.\u00a0\u00a0 But as soon as possible, get it moving at a walk, under control, while still getting whatever praise you usually give when it does the right thing.\u00a0\u00a0 The spook wasn’t the right thing, but not rearing, bucking, or bolting (or all three) WAS the right thing.\u00a0 Listening to me, obeying my aids to just stand there, was the right thing.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He was really scared, but he showed that he trusted me enough to hold his ground.\u00a0\u00a0 And I read the degree of his fear accurately enough that he could do what I asked him to do.\u00a0\u00a0 (Illusion, the big half-warmblood I inherited from Kathleen, on the same trail,\u00a0 did not trust me enough when something I never saw or heard spooked him.\u00a0 He whirled, half-reared, and leapt into a gallop; I came out of the saddle and was hanging off his side as he ran faster and faster.\u00a0 I bailed (there being no way to get back aboard. \u00a0 Rags is a VERY good boy to behave better than a fully trained, mature, dressage horse.)<\/p>\n
So that was the 19th ride of this cycle.\u00a0 Tomorrow, God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, I’ll be back on him and we’ll go ride around the perimeter of the dry woods at whatever distance Rags can handle.\u00a0 Deer rest in there a lot; they can see out but are in cover; they can find places out of the wind but in the sun on a sunny winter day, and the shade on a summer day.\u00a0 He needs to get used to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An interesting ride.\u00a0\u00a0 Instructive in multiple ways.\u00a0\u00a0 The goal today was to ride around the East Grass, not right on the perimeter but in clear sight of all of it, for Rags’\u00a0 awareness of place and routes.\u00a0 To start with, mounting went much better except for one little glitch (mine.)\u00a0\u00a0 I was able to mount Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,48,16],"tags":[52,49,17],"class_list":["post-1145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-80-acres","category-horses","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-80acres","tag-horses","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1146,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1145\/revisions\/1146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}