But last weekend, Jo and I managed to get to tack carboot, where Jo bought a couple of feed balls. Great fun. We tried Lu and Charlie first. They picked it up straight away, and it was funny watching their techniques. Charlie took to pawing at the ball, and kicking it.....typical boy. Lu tried to pick it up with her teeth. The Shetlands just got violent.
On Wednesday we had a strange occurrence over Suffolk. Two jet fighters were sent to escort a commercial flight to Stanstead. The sonic boom was heard all over Suffolk. The talk of many small towns! It must have disturbed our sleeping ponies. Lu ripped a shoe off.... It was twisted beyond belief and can only have been pulled off violently by sudden movement and being trod on by another foot. The farrier (Vince Buckman) came out the same day and said it was the 3rd customer that day with the same twisted shoe. I guess we should bill the RAF
Today we had Chanice Who Helps On Saturdays. As it was windy (yet another tail end of an american hurricane) I decided to get Chanice and Daisy to join-up. Now there has been a bit of talk on Face-Ache about Join-Up being out-dated and stressful to the horse. Well its certainly not as stressful as the old methods used to break horses. Back in the day (for centuries) the horse was tied to a stake without water for 24 hours. The next step was to tie up one hind leg to the horses belly and bring it to the ground. With the poor horse tired and frightened it would accept the tack. Someone would then mount, while the horse was roped from all directions, and hang on if it dared buck. If the horse was a wild one, it would be beaten into submission.
Then along came Monty Roberts. He studied Mustangs in the wild and learned the language of the horse. In the wild there is an alpha mare. If a youngster gets out of line she will send it out of the herd with aggressive body language until the youngster submits (lowering of head, licking, chewing). The mare will then turn her back, allowing the youngster back into the safety of the herd, and he will follow her as leader. Horses have a strict herd hierarchy. The Alpha Horse (always a Mare) is the one that moves the other horses feet.
Monty Roberts tried this out in training horses. It worked. It always works. It is the way horses think. The whole premise of riding horses is pressure and release. Simply asking a horse to walk on? You apply pressure with your legs until the horse walks on, then you sit quietly. Monty Roberts has changed the way people 'break, start, gentle' horses. At the end of the day (and the beginning) we need our horses to respect us. For that to happen, they have to accept we are the Alpha. We have the brains, they have the brawn. The horse has to trust us to think things through, and follow without question. After all, their instinct is to flee from danger. We are the ones who can risk assess any danger. They have to accept we know what we are doing. Nuff said.
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