Push Update

Long story short, April made the wise decision to rehome Push, and Lynn told her barn owners about him. They came to pick him up the next day.

Push is doing really well at the new barn. They gave him a month to settle in. He got turned out in a big, grassy paddock with a run in shed and another young TB for company. The other horse had a minor illness for a few days, and Push did just fine alone in his absence. I went to go see him and he looked relaxed and happy and came right up to snuggle and investigate.

Of course, he has been handled every day. He goes in and out of a stall, has been standing on cross ties and getting fly sprayed, and gets handled by trainers, grooms, and working students.

While I was in WV, they started working with him a little bit, starting with free jumping. This is one thing I never did with him. I am not specifically a jumping trainer, and don't like to free jump young horses over anything more than cavaletti or equally small cross rails. I don't usually free jump a horse until it is five years old. I am not knocking on those who do. It's just not something I personally take part in.

Still, I admit it's exciting to see Push learning the basics of jumping.

Push did well on his first attempt, and they repeated this week, with a camera on hand. They have a specific free jumping pen. It's a large rectangular pen with high fence. The shape makes it easy to put up a jumping chute, and the size mimics a round pen in terms of being able to send a horse around with minimal jumping effort.

As it turns out, Push has a natural ability for jumping:

Apparently they really like him over there and he's doing well. I'm excited to see his progress and am hoping to sit in on his training from time to time. I am happy that the horse is in a good place, and I'm also secretly proud that I can pick out a good horse. I'm not imagining the potential, and it feels good to be validated.

Push Updates

"Little" baby Push turned three on the 13th, which means we can start the actual under saddle training, though we are still going to take it slow, slow, slow.

Leading up to his third birthday, we added ground driving to our repertoire. I wanted him to be familiar with pressure on the bit and what it means in terms of stopping and steering. I also wanted him to be comfortable with me behind his drive line, especially off the circle. Since I spend so much time teaching horses to turn towards me for changes of direction and during general handling, it can be unnerving for them when I later ask them to turn their butts to me for the first time.

To my surprise and delight, Push picked up ground driving very quickly. When we first introduced lunging last year, we met with a lot of panic and resistance, so it was really nice to see him pick up a new concept so easily and willingly. I do think he's starting to understand that we're trying to teach him, not hurt him.

Push already knew how to wear a saddle and bridle, and has probably been sat on before, though I take everything about his history with a grain of salt. All the same, I treated him like he'd never carried a rider. He got used to the thumping of the stirrups very quickly. Unfortunately, April has a huge, solid, immobile mounting block, which is going to take some getting used to. In the mean time, I am using an over turned bucket. It works just as well.

This is what Push thought about putting weight on him:

I do believe I was boring him.

The first time I threw a leg over, I think April was more surprised than Push. I hadn't told her my plan so that she wouldn't have time to worry about it. Push was like, "Yeah, ok, crazy trainer lady sits on top of me now. That's fine." As always, my mantra is, "If you do it right, the first time you sit on a horse should be a total non-event."

Seriously, the polos were much scarier than the rider.

So now we do lots and lots and lots of walking. I started off by having April lead Push around until he learned that leg meant 'go forward'. Thankfully, he is not at all bothered by leg, and we've done so much lunging and ground driving that he's totally comfortable with the bit. For now, I'm riding around on a loose rein and just letting him get comfortable with the idea of carrying a rider. We have all year to get him comfortable at the walk and trot, and I suspect it won't take nearly that long.

Best of all, April has already gotten to sit on her baby horse herself! She is brave and has really gotten comfortable with all the steps of his training process. It's a fun change for me to have an owner who is ready to participate in the breaking/training process on such a young horse. Usually, I just start them and hand the reins to the owner once they're done. I like this way much better :)

I don't think she stopped smiling that day!

Now it's time for lots of repetition. Cross tying and tacking up are a totally normal part of the routine now. We'll keep lunging and working on cementing voice commands for all the gaits. We'll continue to praise him for standing still for mounting, and I've already gotten on him like a normal person, with a foot in the stirrup instead of monkeying my way up there. We'll do lots of bending and moving the haunches and the shoulder. We'll walk, walk, walk, walk, walk until that's boring, and add more steering and contact. Then we'll rinse and repeat at the trot.

I do love baby horses :)

Introducing: Push

I've made a few references to April's "new" baby horse, Push, but haven't done a formal post about him yet. I fail at blogging. April has had Push for nine months already. Whoops!

By this point, I think we pretty much consider Shadow, April's standardbred, a graduate of the TUH program. He has been doing awesome with her, and has really turned into a horse who knows his job and enjoys it. April takes him to hunter paces and rides him in her free time. He's not getting any younger and he battled some lameness issues for a little while there, but over all he's awesome, and is definitely her heart horse.

Kristin on Arrow and April on Shadow during their first hunter pace of the season. I love that my students "grow up" to ride together.

Last summer, April brought up the idea of getting a second, younger horse, that could grow up to be the jumper she has always wanted. I did tell April that I thought she was nuts for getting a second horse when she had so much other stuff going on, but then she showed me Push.

Sweet Pusher Man was a just-turned-two year old chestnut thoroughbred gelding, available through one of the local racehorse people who is always rehoming racehorses. He was never tattooed and never raced. Reportedly, he would walk out of the starting gate and sort of look around and go, "Meh." I'm not sure that story is true, but the bottom line is that he never made it as a racehorse.

When April showed me Push's ad online, I commented that he was a nice looking horse and worth taking a look at. After lessons one day, we drove over to meet him in person. He was laid up in a stall, recovering from an abscess. He was sweet on the ground and put together nicely. I asked to see him out in the open, and said, "I understand that he might be a little off, but I'd like to see him move."

Well, Push was a gorgeous mover and not the least bit lame. As he tore around the ring with his tail in the air, I told April, "I think you're crazy if you get a second horse right now, but if you're going to get one anyway, this is a nice one. In fact, if you don't take him, I might consider him for myself!"

We talked price and April got a great deal. Less than a week later, Push moved to Cara's.

A lot has happened in the last nine months, and there's no way I'm going to catch up on it in one entry. April graduated dialysis school, got a new job, bought a house (with a barn in the back yard) with her boyfriend, and added a puppy to their growing family. She managed to juggle all of this with having not one, but two horses, and I am extremely impressed.

In the mean time, I worked with Push here and there. My conclusion is that they threw in the towel on him before he even got in the starting gate. I also suspect that someone along the line was very rough with him. He has a lump on his poll that indicates that he may have flipped over and whacked his head at some point. This doesn't surprise me.

Here are the things that Push was really good at right from the get-go:

• Being groomed
• Taking baths
• Getting saddled and bridled
• Getting in a trailer

These are the things Push was not very good at:

• Picking up his feet
• Tying
• Leading
• Lunging (especially lunging)

Most of Push's issues stem from fear. While he is a serious sweetheart on the ground, Push quickly gets panicky under any kind of pressure. I suspect that he was cornered and reprimanded for getting the wrong answers in his early training. In the beginning, Push was prone to kicking out, and he was very quick with his feet. While he's  not malicious at all, I did worry that he would injure someone out of fear. He also did not have any concept of giving to pressure. Lunging him resulted in him locking his neck and bolting away from his handler until he either dragged them or ripped the line away and ran off. Honestly, it was really sad to watch. It was also pretty scary, and it wasn't long before Push earned a bad reputation at the barn.

While Push was at Cara's, we worked on desensitizing, picking up our feet, and learning to give to pressure instead of fighting it. It was a long, drawn out, and tedious process, but Push was improving.

Baby steps.

Eventually, April moved her horses home, and I went over there to work with Push some more. The nice thing about April's house was that she had a nice, enclosed space to work with the horses in. I had suggested that Push was the type of horse that would benefit from working in a round pen, but there was none available at Cara's, and the lack of enclosed space was really slowing our work down. In one session at April's, we made tremendous progress, and I gave April some exercises that would help Push choose coming to his handler over panicking and fleeing the situation.

In a turn of events, April needed to make some repairs to her property to make it better set up for horses. Push and Shadow moved temporarily back to Cara's. In the time they were there, I worked with Push every single week. Finally, we started to have breakthroughs. Push learned to give to pressure. He started picking up his feet like a pro. He stood tied and cross tied without a fuss. Lunging started to fall into place. 

The desensitizing was also going ridiculously well:

Being silly after a good session.

In fact, these days, he lunges beautifully. We've even started to introduce side reins a little at a time. Best of all, April is able to do the work with him herself.

Looking like a grown up.

Last week, the boys went home again, hopefully for good this time. We had a session there too. Even though there was a lot going on and Push was distracted by the "new" surroundings, he ended up being relaxed and well-behaved. 

Push turns three in less than a month, and we're getting ready to put a rider up for the first time since April has owned him. I imagine he's been sat on before so that part shouldn't be a big deal. I am excited to see where this horse goes from here. He is a beautiful mover and he's smart once he stops being fearful. He is lucky he ended up with someone so patient and determined. I would love to know what his complete back story is, but I suspect we'll never know.

Did I mention he's a big baby?