Progressing with Walker

It’s been a week of highs and lows with my horses, but to be fair, more highs then lows.

Last Friday, Walker and I started with liberty play with his saddle on. Sarah told me about a pattern she saw Karen Rolf do with one of her horses, a figure eight and circle game combined. I thought that sounded like fun, so we did it once last week, but we refined it, and it was really soft. Then we moved to something more challenging at liberty for Walker, the four-barrel weave.

Walker has trouble understanding the draw around the third barrel, but we played with it for about 10 minutes, he got it and we moved on. We will need plenty of refinement there.

When we started out under saddle, he voluntarily went straight to the pedestal and put all four feet on it and stopped. He looked back at me with what appeared to be a mixture of satisfaction and “Where’s my cookie?”

To top that off, we started with a ten minute trotting passenger lesson, and he trotted over the pedestal twice and over a small jump several times. I rubbed his withers a lot during that passenger lesson.

Despite the trouble we have had getting his left lead over the last week our two, I never fail to be grateful for how hard Walker tries to please now. If natural horsemanship is judged in great degree by our relationship, I think ours is pretty good.

I went back to simple bow tie lead changes on Friday, and just like that, he picked up his left lead again. It proves again that going through the levels makes a lot of sense because when you have a problem, you can break it down yourself and get it fixed, at least most of the time.

We then played the cantering yo-yo game for the third time in a row. It’s a lot of fun, because it brings Walker’s life up, which is getting more challenging to do with his increasingly left-brained behavior. If the passenger lesson wasn’t enough proof of that, one day last week, I’m not sure which, he ran me into the rail when I upped my phases asking him to move off my leg! I had to laugh, because even though that is not something I want to encourage, it showed me he is really thinking now, even if at times it’s naughty thinking.

And something I just realized on Friday was that I don’t worry at all about Walker spooking under saddle in the arena anymore, which makes playing games with him a lot more fun. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t’ ever spook, it’s just no big deal anymore, I play with it, he blows and we move on to something else.

Playing the cantering yo-yo game makes me thankful for an athletic horse. Walker was a little worried at first being asked to stay on the rail, stretch at the canter, then collect, then stretch, then go faster, then go slower, stretch, collect, faster, slower.

But in this session, he really started to understand, and about the third time around the arena, he blew and blew and blew some more! I immediately asked him to collect then stop with a rub and a cookie.  After walking to cool off, I hopped off, fed him more cookies and as it was a pretty hot day, gave him a nice hose down. Of course, the first thing he did when I brought him back to the turnout was roll!