My good friend Nicole who lives about 1km up the road is keen to learn horsemanship skills and then improve her riding. I've already given Nicole and Joe a mini-lesson at their place, late last year, where we discovered just how green the 'quiet' Joe really is. Nicole and I would love to be able to go trail riding together, but seeing as I decided not to get another riding horse while I wait for Tallic to grow up and be broken in, I thought it might be a good idea to train us together in the meantime.
First expected hurdle was how Tal would cope with having a new horse on the property. He was quite interested when Joe arrived, but stood well to be groomed and booted when they returned to the RY. Leading him into that paddock, he was a bit excited, but walked quite well toward the RY. We stopped outside of it, where I proceeded to get his attention with some corrections, a bit of backing etc while I talked to Nicole.
We decided to work them both in the RY together, but we left the gate open. Tallic behaved REALLY well, doing his yields, changes, backing and standing like a true champ. He required a lot fewer corrections than I expected and stayed a lot more foccussed than I expected too. Looks like the ground work we've done previously has been successful - yay.
Some of the things we did while I was helping Nicole with Joe include:
- backing with wriggly lead
- going out to the left and right, stopping on the circle without turning in
- as above but sometimes facing-up
- swapping from left to right with minimal cues
I'm sure we did more, but I can't remember anymore! and it only happened today.
I packed him away after approx 20mins as Nicole needed some help, and he'd been such a good boy and coped so well, I wanted to quit while all was good.
Overall - very happy with the little man. I think he coped with his first play-date really well.
