Ride 4

Stitch's fourth ride happened on Monday. My helper was the same person who helped me on ride #2, and she immediately noticed how much his confidence had grown in just two rides.

I had her only lead us around for a half circle before we walked around solo. We used almost the whole arena - there was a coil of white cable that had been left at the far end, I'm assuming for some improvement job, that many horses were convinced was a pile of snakes. Stitch noticed it, but I chose to turn early and not risk finding out what his spook felt like. So we used about 3/4 of the ring.

That was all going well, so it was time to try a trot!

I had my assistant hook us up to a lunge line and out on a circle we went. It took some encouragement from the whip, but the first trot was about 12 steps before I asked him to walk. He just felt a bit unsure, so I wanted to give him lots of praise and tell him how smart he was. We did it again to the right, about another half circle, before changing to the left.

By that point, he had it all figured out. He picked up the trot much quicker, and kept it longer. I was once even able to get him to keep trotting from my leg when he wanted to stall out near the gate where a horse was waiting to come in. 

We left it at that for the day with plans to do more trot the next day. 

There are a couple of things that we'll have to make an effort to work on in the next few rides. First - he's taken a couple of steps backwards at the mounting block after I've gotten on. I think I will need to do a ride where get off and back on 3 or 4 times and see if that fixes it.

Second - stopping to poop. Nothing major, but I'll have to convince that he can walk and poop at the same time.

Third - parking. There were a couple of times in this ride where I stopped to sort something out, and though he initially stood still, he got a bit antsy pretty quickly. He kind of does this unmounted as well, he loses patience and then wants me to play with him. We'll work on it as much as his 3 year old brain can manage.

It's been a good start to the week!