Marker-boy is demonstrating how well he’s doing when it comes to being loosely tied to the pickup bed. Don’t worry, I spent plenty of time ensuring he knew what being tied meant, and working with him about scary stuff. Plus old Mocha provided plenty of examples about how to stand (um, we won’t talk about Mocha and waiting for the farrier because the old lady is…opinionated. But if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you already know that).
It’s been a relatively mild winter here. There’s some snow in the big pasture but nothing like in past years. Most of our precipitation has fallen as rain, or light snow that melts off. Fortunately, it appears that the mountains are doing better with snow accumulation. At our elevation, the biggest concern about lack of snow is whether it’s recharging groundwater. We do need that low-elevation snow.
In any case, the mildness of the winter (no temps below the teens F) has been good for old Mocha in some respects. She hasn’t needed to cope with trails through the snow to reach hay and water. On the flip side, the dampness and warmth led her to grow a small abscess in one hoof and possibly inflammation in one arthritic knee. I worry because the farrier is becoming a more stressful experience for her, in spite of him being very careful with her and working with her limitations. On the other hand, she seems to be staying warm with her mediumweight blanket and she’s gaining weight back that she lost in the transition between summer and fall.
She’s also becoming more responsive to my call at catching time. In part, that’s fueled by her desire for cookies, and the awareness that if she doesn’t come, Marker’s likely to get a lot of the stuff she really likes. But. She tends to stay at the edges of the herd. She does lie down and roll more than I’ve seen evidence of her doing in the past–perhaps spending the summer with Marker helped develop her confidence about getting down.
Marker boy is still learning. But he’s been making progress in his ground handling, and is much more mannerly. Both horses are at the point where most of the time I can throw the lead rope over their necks and they follow along. Marker wanders when distracted–Mr. ADHD boy, clearly–but he’s being cooperative. I’ve discovered that he is more sure-footed than Mocha was on ice and snow. Some of that is due to him being barefooted where she had to be shod for soundness reasons on her fores, but the other factor is his gaiting ability. He adjusts his speed depending on the footing much more reliably than Mocha does.
Another interesting difference between the two is that I would end up schooling Mocha more intensely because regular repetition within a session usually led to her improving whatever task I was asking her to do. Not so with Marker. If he doesn’t get it within three repetitions, it’s time to move on because otherwise he gets tense, worried, upset, and won’t show improvement. But…if I go back to that task or movement within the same session, or save it for an ask in a later session, he nearly always does it correctly the first or second time. Different minds, and he apparently seems to need that time to let something settle in his processing where Mocha needed the muscle memory practice and correction. I’d say that he’s in his head more than she was–for her it was about getting it set in her body, more than her thinking through it. He has to process it.
Using my words works better with him. He responds positively to soft vocal praise while we’re doing something, or if he’s worried and needs reassurance. His physical reactions to “good boy” or “bad boy” are obvious–if I scold him, he gets the same expression that many dogs do when scolded–hangs his head slightly, ears slump, and he looks dejected. “Good boy” elicits ears up, head up, soft eye. Mocha–well, “quit” served a lot of purposes, but she never particularly reacted to verbal praise. Not like Marker does. I could never quite talk her through a reactive moment like I can him.
It’s all fascinating stuff, and definitely an example of how personalities differ within horses.
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