Day 45-49

  We have been doing a lot of review with Disco and have figured out that he is really smart and is a very quick learner, so it is time to ask him for a little more. Your horse can only be as good as you make him. We are starting to ask then tell him to do something with no middle pressure. The point of this is so he will start to do things as soon as I ask him to and wont just fumble around until I make him move. (he was sorta lazy on his send offs so this will help him a lot) He is really good about doing what I ask him to do, when I ask him, and how long I ask him to do it for, if I ask him to back from the front gate to the arena non stop and circle trees along the way, he does it with no questions asked. (just the occasional lick or puppy face:) He is progressing very fast so we can now move our lessons and do them other places. (obstacles, the beach, vet, tick spray, ect.) Yesterday we moved the tarp over to the fence, put half of it up on a post, and staked the rest to the ground. We also put two barrels under it so we could get him to jump it and not just plow through it. It was something new and scary so we didn't know how he was going to react to it at first but he really didn't care a bit about it and just wanted to eat it. Comanche was on the other side of the arena with the tarp in his mouth shaking it up and down trying to scare Disco :b

First I lunged him over the end of the tarp where it was just laying on the ground so he could get used to it before just running and jumping him over it. When I final asked him to jump over it he stopped right before it and sniffed it for a minute, then I sent him off the other way and tried again. He jumped it every now and then but he was having problems because I was, I needed to run with him more, add more pressure, and give him more rope. When I finally understood what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do he would jump it really good!


When we un haltered him we kept the jump up just for him to play around with and we expected there to be a path going around it but when we put his feed out he just walked right through it and didn't care a bit that it was there even though he about fell on his face doing that. =)