We do more with Hope than take photos of her. Throughout the months, we have continued working on daily handling and desensitizing. For various reasons, in various ways. Safety is at the top of our list. For her, for us and for those who help with her care.
We felt Hope needed some fine tuning on putting her rear legs down nicer etc. Our Farrier recently had back surgery. We want all our horses to be really easy for him to trim. Not just pretty good. Because we asked, he suggested using a rope to lift and desensitize her legs further. Not just our hands. He mentioned we are probably lifting/picking her legs the same way every time, and he does it different. Good point. Leg placement/adjustment is also part of showing conformation. Everything should be done with ease.
We never did end up using the rope lifting suggestion. We do (still) make sure to change up how and where we lift her feet. Ropes of course are wonderful and useful for a lot of different training. Hope doesn't seem to take issue with wiggly ropes. In fact she likes some ropes a little too much. As with most youngsters, she frequently tries to put lead ropes in her mouth. This is something we continue working on.
Our vet was out for Spring shots and said "she is still looking fancy". He was really impressed with Hope, more so with how she acted. In preparation for shots, Brad worked on desensitizing. He started using prickly brushes and progressed to poking her with a small screw driver that was sharp, but not too sharp. It worked! She didn't even move when the vet did a blood draw. Hope taped at 574 lbs.
3/19/24
If interested, here are some clips of Hope learning (day one):
2/13/24 (11 secs)
other direction (11 secs)
rope desensitizing (6 secs)
start to lunging (22 secs)
My skilled hubby recently whipped up a bridge. A good first step to upcoming trailer training. The very next day a swinging gate appeared in our arena. It will be useful for his show practice. They no longer allow rope gates in Ranch classes.
I watched him walk Hope through the gate the first time with little to no resistance. She briefly paused, then walked through both directions. I don't have any visuals. I think I was holding my breath in anticipation of what might happen. I told Brad that Hope is going to make him look like a world class trainer lol. He is doing a really good job with little Miss Hope!
new arena obstacles
3/26/24
second evening session
3/25/24 (20 secs)
other direction (17 secs)
All the training continues. Including morning walk-a-bouts. Walking off bridge, paying attention, standing still, me leading etc. The following day Hope met the dreaded tarp. I walked into the arena in the morning to find Tank helping out. Apparently, this was a big improvement over her first reaction (backing up) to the tarp.
3/26/24 am
On the other hand, Brad's cat Purr was not as helpful. She decided to play with the tarp, diving under it etc. Great for unexpected trail training, but it was a little too much to start off with lol.
3/26/24 pm
I kicked the animals out of the arena and helped. We ended the first day with Hope putting her two front feet on the tarp, standing still. She willingly walks across the tarp for both of us now, and stands on it. I can tell she is not 100% sure about the weird slippery crunchy randomly lit thing that moves.
We can't leave the tarp out, because my other horse likes to pick it up and shake it all over. Hence the white patch of tape. Some peoples horses never grow up. Sigh. I wonder what Hope would think about Koda and a flying tarp. We will leave that lesson for another day.
