Day 4

Today we got to the ranch late at about 3:00. We picked up my friend Jaclyn on the way to our ranch so she could see Disco and she wanted to watch me train (She wants to be a trick rider when she gets older). When we got there we gave disco half a scoop of feed before getting started. My dad had to take our other horses to tick spray, we live inside of a quarantine zone because a few months ago someone found a fever tick on one their property so now we have to take our horses to get sprayed every 2 weeks! We have to take Disco next time also, so we will have to make 2 trips since we only have a 4 horse trailer (it is really a 3 horse slant trailer but we took out the dividers so that all 4 could fit). Once my dad got back we started working with Disco. Again we had to clip on the long line just to be safe. We got him in again with no problems. When we got him in we had to weigh him so we could send in our progress report that is due Thursday. He weighs around 700 lbs and his body conditioning is right in between moderately thin and moderate (my brothers friends dad who is a vet came to pick him up at our ranch so he helped us with all of that stuff). We also sent in his DNA papers today so we should be hearing back from them soon. When that was all finished I got to work in the round pen, on about my 2nt turn to the right i ran back to fast and fell over. Again someone was videoing...ugh. Besides that little thing he did great and I stayed on my feet the rest of the day. :) Everything went by the fastest ever until we started a new exercise...Sending... he was yanking me around the whole roundpen until my mom had to go back and read me the troubleshooting in the colt starting arena mate #6 exercise 12 DVD #2. I was tapping too aggressively, starting too close to the fence, waiting too long before asking the horse to yield his hindquarters,and moving my feet too much. Once i fixed these things i got a much better result! Clinton says you want to do things as easy as possible but as firm as necessary. When he did good a few times we quit him and desensitized him to the lead line. After i did that my dad brought in a jug of water and pored it on him, he completely freaked out at first but ended up getting better. Then I desensitized him to the stick and string and took him back to his corral, he went in to his corral without any problems today. We gave him some more feed then i gave him a stalk of sugar cane, yummmmm... He liked it a lot, but our other horses stole one of Jaclyn's stalks and LOVED IT! My horse Texas picked one piece up and threw it and hit my moms horse Starbucks head with it! Starbuck went right back to eating after that and Texas was sad cause he didn't have anymore sugarcane, lol!