October 4, 2010

This is Cinco's third saddling.  You would never know the Cinco of today is the Cinco that first came here.  His confidence is growing by leaps and bounds. 

He doesn't mind the saddle at all.  He accepted it like he had been saddled a lot of times before.  We did the ground skills and drove him a lot and he accepted it all.  He stops, backs, side passes and all the rest, all from the middle of him.  This is pretty good for a horse that was a bundle of jumping beans when he first came.  With horses like Cinco, the best way to train him is to set it up for him to succeed and wait for it to happen.  This gives him time to think about it and to do it without getting shook.  Horses like Cinco learn from patterns. 

Gully has had about 14 rides.  He is really is starting to do well.  He breaks at the poll and has become soft at his face.  He is a very athletic horse .  He is stopping and turning good.  He is showing a lot of confidence when asked to do things.   This type of horse is the one who is easily bored and when you teach him something you have to quickly teach him the next thing.

Sugarfoot has a little bit of a temper.  Most of that is her lack of understanding of what you are trying to teach her.  We worked on ground skills and a lot of speed control and change of directions to engage her mind.  She jumped over jumps, backed through gates and did the figure eight on the cones.  She is a very athletic and smart little mare.  She is going to be a super stopper, because of her natural ability to round her back and bring her hind legs up under her and slide. 

Fred is still unconfident.  He is still fighting demons.  He is very uncomfortable with the friendly game.  We did saddle him today though.  He doesn't seem to care at all about that.  He is still scared of the stick, and we are not sure yet if he is scared of the stick, or is he scared of what happened to him with the stick in his former life.  With a horse like Fred Re-naturalization is a long slow process.  It takes time and more time.