Harley warmed up on the longe line neck stretcher, deciding on one of his canter-lefts that he didn’t really need to stay on the circle. He fought me, and pulled the line from my hands. Gloves and all, I let go, refusing to argue with him & hurt myself. Caught again, he had a total of about 20 minutes on the neck stretcher. Each request for canter left, he took off at a near gallop. Sheez.
Walk and trot work only in this ride, and things went mostly well. He had some moments of beautiful walk, and beautiful trot. I tried to improve his transitions from halt and walk and back, showing him that tossing his head up in the air was not the right answer.
That ended up taking thirty minutes. A half hour, just to get a little lower head for halt/walk/halt transitions. His halt into walk is now pretty good.. Walk to halt? He’s 100% certain he needs to toss his head up and brace into the halt.
When I got a decent effort, I dismounted. The phone rang. In my conversation, I tried taking his bridle off and putting the halter on. As I tied the halter, he put his head up in the sky. I tried to lower it with poll pressure like he’s been taught. He backed up, spun on his rear end, and took off. Seriously?! He played that game for another ten minutes before realizing the only way out of that arena, and out of the saddle, was to be caught, and lower his head.
Unsaddled, hosed him off, and tied him to the patience pole for about 40 more minutes.
I’m taking tonight off with him, I do believe. Romeo and I have been riding all weekend (Friday bareback w/t arena, Saturday saddled up solid work-work all three gaits, Sunday more bareback goofing off), but we took yesterday off. I think I’ll make it up to him tonight. As yesterday was day 6 for Harley, given the extreme heat & humidity, maybe a day away from work will be good for both of us.
No comments:
Post a Comment