That's not going to help!

I lunged Windy this morning while we were waiting for the vet for his flu and tet jab. He was looking at the blue barrel which I had placed on the arena, more about that later. And he was lame :-(   Then I realised that he was hopping going towards the barrel and perfectly sound coming away from it. On the other rein he was just the same. So that's not going to help is it :-)  ?  If his way of showing anxiety is to hop, it's going to be a tad difficult to tell when he is lame and when he is just anxious!

He is already moving much more smoothly, and the constant wandering around the field and barn with the other boys is obviously doing him an awful lot of good. I intend to ride tomorrow if the weather is OK, and then start getting him out on the roads to wear his feet into the shape he wants them. The back ones are going quite skew wiff, which is, for me, a good sign. Right now, all change is good.

The vet was an hour late so I had already given Radar a really good workout before she arrived. 50 minutes of solid work. I have introduced transition training which he finds mentally extremely difficult to cope with. Asking him to trot the short side and canter the long one gets him into quite a tizzy and he has to be coaxed through that quietly to get him to settle to it. He did the best he has ever done, so I was pleased.

I've decided not to fight with Ace. It's not fun and it's dangerous. Instead, I took off my spurs and left the whip on the floor, and when he spooked I just circled away or crabbed past and ignored him. If it means that we cannot get any decent work done, so be it. I have had it with battling with him, he is getting worse not better, so something has to change.

The way I figure it is that if I cannot get him to do the work he is capable of without a battle then I don't want to keep him. So if not battling with him means that he doesn't do any decent work, it makes no odds, because he'll still be finding himself a new home next spring  anyway. He is simply wasted with me if that's the case, and I'll just have to accept that I am not capable of training such a highly sensitive horse.

So what I have done is move the blue barrels to places around the arena so that there is no one focal point for his nonsense. That made him spook in all four places (four barrels) but none as bad as yesterday or anywhere near it. I will be moving the barrels on a regular basis and he can just spook and spook until he's either sick of it or we get to next spring and he is sent to a pro to be sold. His choice. I just wish I could explain it to him!

C