Friday 12th December

Today with Blossom I played on line with the same as I have been the last few days and again today everything went well. She wasn’t quite as soft as yesterday but still a lot better than she was before we arrived here.

I then saddled and mounted and started with checking my lateral flexion and then started riding the rail of the arena. We then played with back up, she was good today and very soft so we moved on to transitions and she was a little impulsive in trot. Mareike suggested bending her and disengaging her HQ until she softened as this will really help her to totally relax when I ask her to stop. So we played around with this just in walk and then finished as it was freezing!!

I spoke to Eddy about the problems I had yesterday with Smarty and today he offered to play with him and see what response he got from him.
He started with just some friendly and then moved on to playing with the rope around his bum, as soon as he done this Smarty stopped and didn’t want to go again so Eddy turned it into a porcupine game teaching him to yield from pressure. Eddy really had to use a lot of his strengh to get Smarty to yeild, so there is no way I would have managed this. Once Smarty realise Eddy wasn’t going to allow him to just stop and not go he decided he would gallop around to try and get the scary rope away from him. So again Eddy had to work hard to get him to slow down again, but once he managed to do this Smarty would then stop and freeze again. This continued for over half an hour and Eddy would change from using porcupine game to driving game to encourage Smarty to walk with the rope on him, but Smarty only seemed able to walk for about a minute the would gallop off again and then stop. At one point Smarty stopped and Eddy just couldn’t get him to move again, very similar to what I had yesterday - Eddy used porcupine game, driving game and noise to get him to move it took several minutes for him to get any response and to start with he was only able to get Smarty to move his front legs one at a time but this was with a lot of pressure - so know wonder I got no response yesterday!!

So after this reaction Eddy changed his plan and played with a flank rope with Smarty - Well he didn’t like this one little bit and really galloped round. Eventually he started to calm and Eddy was able to start moving the rope more over his bum, every time the rope moved place would cause Smarty to explode again! He just didn’t seem to be able to relax with the rope over his bum.. Eddy continued to play with this and moved the rope to around one of the back legs as this appears to be the real problem area for him. Well Smarty did not like this one little bit and several times Eddy had to let the rope go as Smarty was panicking so much!!

After over an hour of play Eddy manage to get Smarty to walk round with the rope around his bum, semi relaxed so he finished with him on that. When he came up to me he said yeah he is quite extreme isn’t he? He says he has had horses who have been worse, but didn’t expect Smarty to be so bad. So he is going to play with him again for me to try and get him more confident and to a level where I would be able to continue with him.