Sunday, January 09, 2011

Genesis

Today Chuck began recording rides for RAC.  Here is what he had to say:

 It is the first time in over a year since I have ridden the young lady that I rode today. Unfortunately, last spring *Katrina’s Fire Walker (*Walker) suffered some physical difficulties and is just now on the mend. Now that she is feeling better we have decided to get a little exercise. She won’t be the only horse that I’ll be riding, but I will be concentrating on getting her more fit, both physically and mentally.


We had a short ride, about 20 minutes. She was a bit uncomfortable leaving the rest of the herd, and is still a little off, in that her responses were not as confident as they were previous to her illness. Here are a couple of photos from today. 
















Target training




This afternoon, after Chuck’s ride on *Walker, I spent a few minutes introducing *Love to target work. I had a pool noodle, and *Love was none too sure that it wasn’t going to eat her. However, as we have done a small amount of Clicker Training before, I was confident I could get her over the problem.



First step, of course, is to get her to touch the target (noodle) with her nose, and typically you arrange that to happen accidentally. Once accomplished, I introduced the word “touch” and asked her to “touch the noodle” and caused it to touch her nose again. She is a quick study, that one, and within a few tries had the idea that she needed to touch the noodle with her nose in order to get a treat. Once that was done, I began touching different parts of her body and C/Ting. As she is a confident young filly, it wasn’t long before I was able to lay the noodle over her back.



I like to introduce all sorts of things to the young ones as a ‘sacking out’ procedure and today was fun for us both.