callie day 9

I had a good ride on him yesterday. I didn't spend alot of time on gw, just enough to see where his mind was at and to ensure that it was on me. Then we got started. I walked him around working on softness laterally and collection at the walk. Then started at the trot doing lots of circle esses and bending. I also got him yh and yf at the standstill and then at the walk. We went out on the power line and worked on going forward with vertical softness. He kept wanting to trot so I would bend him to a walk then go off again. Finally, I let him trot and worked on softness at the trot. We played around in a mud hole for a while going up and down the ledge around it and washed off in a big pool of water by the road. Then we ambled back to the field. There we met my GS Prinz and started chasing him like a cow and working in leg yields and YH and YF to follow the dog. He was really starting to give me some good leg yields. Hope to work some more on this today.

Day 3 of the Arabs went well.
I got Darkstar out first. We started with a good brushing and then went to wk on rd. pen. He is so protective that I had to work 40 minutes with him. He would give me two eyes, but would not let me walk up to him. He would just keep backing up. So after a few tries I just kep thim backing until he stopped his feet, then walked away. We played this game to see if he would move away and when he did I made him move faster and he would give me two eyes and we would start again. He got so he wouldn't back up, but still would not follow me. So we moved on to disensitizing, and downward pressure. This is important becaus a horse with his nose on the ground is vulnerable. It is a trust thing again. But he did ok. Then we did some YH, and YF. I finished with picking up and cleaning out his feet.
Robbie- got a good brushing and then in the rd pen he was giving me two eyes immediately, so then we went to approaching him and he backed up a few times, but finally stood. In fact, he started to break free and follow me a couple steps. So we worked on this for 15 mintues and then went to desensitizing and downward pressure. Then it was on to YH, backup, and YF. He is still more protective of his right side, but he is making progress. I did the lunging for respect 1(LR1) with him and he made lots of improvements from before. It involves YH, YF and then sending forward on the circle. We did this change 4x in each direction with improvement overall. Then I started to ask for direction changes and he started getting to the point where I only had to lean and he read my body language and YH and started the direction change. That was good. I then worked on picking his feet up and cleaning them out. His front are pretty good to do, but his back a little more reluctant to offer them. We will work on that today also.
It was a good training day all around.