Looks who's wearing a saddle!

I took Tygs over to a friend's house who has an indoor arena and trains horses yesterday so she could help me get passed Tygs' sudden stubborn streak. I wasn't gaining much ground and I knew it couldn't continue. We started out by me showing her what I was doing and then correcting my mistakes. Before long she had him and me communicating nonverbally and him realizing we weren't playing his games any more. He doesn't try to cut me off when he's lunging anymore and I know what to do if he does. He was continuing his stubborn streak of walking beside me and we cured that in a way that doesn't give me a migraine! I had originally been taught to pull him off balance, which gives me a headache. Kathy taught me to make him work in a circle, which I knew in the back of my head, but I wasn't doing it for some reason. I just found out that I have moderate arthritis in all of my cervical joints and that's why I've had so many headaches, so I need to learn to do some things in a different way.

After all that she said, "Let's get a saddle and keep going." That was more than I had hoped for yesterday, but what the heck! So we put a saddle pad and saddle on, tightened it up and she started putting pressure under the girth, which he did a number of circles on his own and finally figured out just to stand still. She then lunged them with that on. No buck! Yeah. Then she put pressure in the stirrups with her hands and he proceeded with the circles again until he stopped. Then she had me do the same thing and he did repeat the process, but only a shorter time period. I thought I was going to fall down from getting dizzy before he stopped, but he did stop.

I then remembered I had been working on him flexing his neck, so she started that and he did do it, but he was having a hard time figuring out he could turn his neck without going around in a circle. His right side he doesn't like to do things on as much as his left, but we did get him there. I copied her actions and he did fine with me too. Then she put the lead over his neck, tied it to the halter to form a rein and we each took a side and he flexed back and forth. He did good!

We went outside then to take a picture of him wearing a saddle and after the pictures she said we'll work him in and out of the trailer after the saddle comes off, because he suddenly didn't want to load to go over there and it took my husband and I a half hour to load him. I wasn't impressed. He had loaded just fine to bring him home, which was just a month ago. Maybe he likes me so much that he didn't want to leave and he thought he was going to live somewhere else! lol Well, it took a couple of tries and some corrections, but within five minutes he decided he would get in and out of the trailer without any problem. Yeah!