Leadership....

Having recently been criticised for being too "hard line" with my horses and "bullying" them, I was very interested to come across this blog post

I agree with pretty much everything in it. Horses like to know we can be in charge of them and keep them safe. Gandalf loves being with Seraphina, although she "bullies" him unmercifully. I spend a lot of time watching my horses' interactions (sad, I know) and she is pretty relentless, moving him around, biting him, keeping him away from any hay she wants, changing her mind about which pile of hay she does want and moving him around again and again.........but if she goes out without him, even if he's left with Sky, he gets very agitated and calls and calls for her. She is his leader; she makes him feel safe.

That's what I try to do for my horses. Make them feel safe. Sometimes to do that  have to take them out of their comfort zone, let them get worried, frightened, then be there to show them that actually, it's OK, nothing bad will happen. This involves a lot of umbrellas, dogs, flappy plastic, going past scary places over and over again and not being fazed by any "undesirable" behaviour. And above all, being consistent with my own behaviour........

So the way I see it, you can either change your horse to fit in with what you want to do (hack out alone, do a TREC course, ride along a main road, go to a competition, ride past that scary dog) or you can change your life to keep your horse in his comfort zone, not take him away from from his fieldmates and not do all those competitions/fun rides/hacks you'd really like to do. I made my choice a long time ago........

Sometimes people really get on my nerves......

As you probably know, my husband Mike is running the London Marathon to raise money for World Horse Welfare. Someone yesterday told us they couldn't possibly sponsor him as it's "only for horses", not whilst there are "children dying in Africa".

It really, really annoys me when people make such statements without checking out the facts. This person clearly has no idea of what WHW actually does. Mike has blogged about this, far better than I could have, you can read his post here

I've lost my ride....

The SNO declared that she didn't want to ride up front of me today (and it hurts my back at the moment to have her there) so guess who got to walk?

And not just walk, oh no, "mummy can we trot?" started as soon as we'd left the drive.......

After the first attempt, when she nearly ran down an unfortunate passerby (and his dog!) I had to do a fair bit of running alongside her to be ready with the brakes.......

....and when her sister wanted to jump a ditch, yes you guessed it, we had to do that too

I need a sit down now!!!

Some new stuff......

Couple of firsts for Sky today. Took her out for a walk and decided to see what she thought of the tunnel under the railway, a bit concerned at first, but went under it fairly happily.

Then I saw some cows. They were obviously youngsters, judging by the way they went haring off when they saw us. That got Sky's attention.......then they came haring back to check her out, she did a huge spook and ran snorting to the end of the long line.....but didn't go further.

 She checked them out a bit more and eventually got close enough to say hello......

...and even said hello to the little donkey in with them

Must take her there more often........

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.....

OK, so I don't set myself up as some kind of horse fixer. All I try to do is help people, when they ask me, to have a better time with their horses. Usually that means I try to get them to be more confident around them. Sometimes I lend them one of mine (if they ask me to) to ride to be able to do so.
Having agreed to do that a few weeks ago, I have had to go and get my horse home this week because the loanee decided I was "using" her for free livery BUT at the same time,  just for good measure, she claimed that he would be better off staying with her as I have apparently been systematically overworking my poor horse.  As if that weren't enough,  she has described me as a "bully" of both horses and humans to a mutual friend. I have no idea why this has all kicked off, but one thing's for sure, I will think long and hard about helping anyone else I am not 100% sure of in the future......

Ocarina.....

Went up to Jane's today to see the big girl, Jane hasn't had time to do much with the horses recently as she's been busy working, but as I had the afternoon off from the SNO she asked me to come and show her some of this stuff I'd been doing with Chester. So I have lent her my Philippe Karl DVD and I showed her some of the "high hands" stuff today. Ocarina tends to lean on the bit and not take much notice of a contact so we did some groundwork first.

She went from this

to this in a relatively short time

then we progressed to mounted work

She has formed a real attachment to Maverick and if he went out of sight it all went out the window, so that's going to need some work too.......and she's always trying to rush everywhere too so Jane's going to work on getting her to slow down a bit.

Ali asked if she could ride Mav (something she wouldn't even have considered doing a year ago, shows how much having Fina has done for her confidence). He tried the usual stuff (napping, reversing) to get out of doing some work, you could almost see him thinking how much he could try and get away with, I reckon he thought he'd retired ;-)  but she got him listening to her and they had some fun

First river ride of the year......

Nearly 20 degrees out there today so we took the kids and horses down to the river. Rode over to Tanya's with my small noisy burden in front of the saddle, she kept wanting to trot and worked out that Gandalf will trot just from a click of the tongue, had to tell her to stop it!!!

As we rode past the Percheron breeder's farm he was out with a couple of his mares so we stopped for a chat.

This is not as simple as it sounds, him being deaf as a post and needing to lip read!! And he's not kneeling down in that pic, he really is that short.......

Then it was on to Tanya's where the SNO decided she wanted to ride Fina instead, which the NNP took remarkably well really, especially as she and her sister immediately started arguing check out Ali's expression, the SNO is being a tart for the camera......

We found a cool path down to the water and of course the girls (and the dog) got wet......

Even Gandalf had a splash in the water.......

We had a nice picnic (Gandalf was very interested in that!)

Then it was back to the campsite for a spot of jumping then we turned the horses out so they had a roll, a hooley and Ches & G started playing!

For some reason, it's always the boys that play like this, he never does with Sky and Fina......