Best of Both Worlds

I went to spend a little time with the girls Wednesday. Remi is here for two weeks. I went at lunch. Vanessa is keeping the little boy. His name is Legend and he's 5 months younger than Kennedy. He's a little sweetie.


After lunch we went for a walk around the neighborhood. Vanessa wanted to take the opportunity to go grocery shopping while I was there. I wanted to take Kajen along with us but I couldn't find his leash. I improvised and used some baling twine I had in the truck. It looks a bit "red-neck" but it worked!

Legend wanted to push Kashton in the stroller. The girls had their bikes and kept getting ahead of us.

It was a beautiful day for a walk/ride in the neighborhood. We all had fun. I never heard a peep out of Kashton!

After visiting the kids I went to work with one of the new horses, Dixie. She is the youngest and has been trained the least. She is halter broke but that is about it. My first goal with her is to get her to pay attention to me and respond when I ask her to. I've been working on this by way of using a round pen. I learned this from a well known horse trainer John Lyons (not personally but through his video teaching series on this method). I used it with my other horses and is very effective.

She is so pretty. I enjoy watching her. Mr. Lyons teaches that you can't make a horse stop moving his feet but you can control which direction they go! The motivation the horse has to figure out what I want her to do is her lungs. She will get tired and want to stop. The goal isn't to wear her out but to focus on me. In this picture I definitely DON'T have her attention. Her nose is pointed outward away from me. I want it to be pointed more towards me.

 Now I have your attention! It's almost as if she's saying "ok...you have my attention....now what do you want?"

My next goal is to train her to load in the trailer of her on initiative. She got in the trailer when we picked her up to bring to our place but it took two hours to do it. I worked with her Tuesday but it was a rough day. Two times I tried to urge her to load she balked then reared and pulled the rope out of my hand. One time she fell over! I spent quite a bit of time with her in the round pen that day!

She seems to be saying "Big scarwey trailer!"

Wednesday, I did the same thing. We started in the round pen and then moved to the trailer. Her and my attitude was much better that day. Look! We're halfway in! That is major progress! Although I didn't get her to go all the way in, she did this willingly about 4 or 5 times and backed out calmly each time! I was very pleased. I am going to try again tomorrow. Hoping I'm not too optimistic but I am expecting her to get in all the way!

I eventually want to ride her but I have quite a ways to go before that happens!

Have a good one!