A way to come in from pasture!

     A quick note before I get started with this post: I'm changing my blog's colors around right now so things might look a little weird for awhile LOL.

     Let me start by saying that with summer comes putting horses out on pasture and the catching game.  Putting the horses out is easy, but getting them back in can be a big time consuming, chore!  Especially with Marsan and Cherroke, all of the other horses either come or will allow you to approach them.  Today I devoted an hour or so to experimenting to see if I could find a natural solution to the catching problem. 

      First I caught all of the other horses since they needed to come in first.  Then I tried several different approaches with the wild ones LOL.  The first thing that I found was that they weren't RB*.  They were diliberate and relaxed.  Once I realized this, I decided to play the game more from a point of dominance.  I was straight foward with them, in that I simply walked up towards them until they noticed me.  Then I waited until they made their move.  They were pretty disinterested until I got within about twenty feet of them, then the fun began.  They ran up to the barn, then they ran into an adjoining valley, then back down the road to where we started!  Upon reapproaching them for the second time since their little run, a strange thing occurred.  They ran towards me!  I perceived that they were really trying to get to the barn so I ran away from them.  It's pretty weird to be chased by your, horse of you own free will, down the road!  Eventually they slowed down, Marsan notice I was there and came to me.  I tried to get Cherroke to the point where he would let me catch him, but he wasn't ready for that.

In the end Marsan and I ran ahead of Cherroke back to the barn.  I put Marsan in and then Cherroke seeing a gate open to another pen entered it.  That's where we left him, hopefully we can continue to work with him on these strange tendencies.  I would love to hear everyone's comments on this!