Dominant little Gingy LOL

I got to play yesterday, just didn't have any time to blog about it until now LOL.

Let me make you aware of what my resolution was for this session, it was: I will not let Gingo envade my space. This was an important resolution for me because lately Gingy has been envading my space a lot and getting even more dominant then that. Remember how I wrote about his being grumpy, I found out why 1) I've been letting him get away with pushing, nipping, and butting...ME 2) I am still having trouble finding a way to be effective and not nag him.

Yesterday my focus was on 1). The feeling that I had when I entered the pen was very strange, I felt like I was being the leader again like I haven't been for awhile. Gingy came right to me, I stroked him for awhile. He haltered nicely, stuck his nose right in without hesitation. Then I thought I'd take him out to the pasture which I did.

Most of the snow is melted out there so it's pretty nice for playing in. I had the weave patter already set up, so that's what we did. He was being rather sluggish and he kept wanting to stand on the cones instead of go around them. I started doing some transitions to ease his boredom and that worked out well, when we finsished with that pattern he had chosen of his own accord to go around the cone.

We did the figure eight too. Once again he wanted to walk over the cones, if he couln't just stop at them all together. Every time he stopped I just sent him on, now that I think of it, it might of been good to do something a little more provocative. He stopped walking over the cones and reverted to walking by them on the wrong side. This time I could see that look in his eye that said, "what are you going to do about this." I decided to send him a little faster every time he missed the cone. He stopped missing the cone, and I was about to ask him back in when.....he walked over one again and stuck between his back legs! I kind of just stood there and he tried to keep going(of all the times to remember your responsibilities horse!). His back legs weren't a big help to his forward motion, so it was mainly his front legs that were scrammbling trying to go forward. Eventually he stopped, and looked at me, and in that time the cone fell down and he was released. Then I burst out laughing LOL.

After that I didn't bother to put him back out on the figure eight. We did a little sideways without a fence between the cones on the weave and he did really good with that.

So that was pretty much the end of our session.