RAC (Ride-A-Curly) Adventure Blog

Tonight Tygs and I started working on jumping while lunging. Let me emphasize "started." I put out two fence posts on opposite sides of where I would lunge him. I first just walked him over them. When I started lunging him he just walked, but once I told him to speed up, he trotted around and over the posts very nicely. He likes to go to my left better than my right, so the right is always a challenge. Every time I wanted him to go right he did a couple times, but then would shake his head at me throwing a fit and stop and want to turn to the left. I didn't let down and eventually he went around to the right as long as I wanted him to. He really impressed me both ways tonight when I bent over to signal him to whoa, it was pretty much right now. He never "jumped" the posts, but he got the idea and now I'll work on making bigger objects for him to go over.

After that I walked him down the road to work on him walking beside me, changes of pace, whoa and my husband wanted me to introduce him to the neighbor's cows. Haha! Tygs really impressed me tonight as I was thinking how it was when we first started a few months ago and he would try to herd me back to the horses. He didn't try to turn around at all, so we really worked on him not getting past my shoulder with his head. We've got a little bit of work to do yet in that area, but whenever I made the motion for him to "back" he did well. He didn't pull his previous stunt of just stopping and holding his ground either, which made me very happy! It would be nice to think that won't happen again! Like I said, it would be nice to think. Changes of pace I've never worked on and he walked slowly or sped up when I walked normal. I couldn't get him to trot going away from the house, but I did manage it coming back and he must have spooked at something and flipped in front of me and I had fleeting thoughts of him running back to the house, but I told him "whoa" and pulled slightly and he stopped. We continued on. He did get antsy as we neared the house, so we did lots of circles. Hope everyone is having a good week! Janeen and Tygs in the UP!