Today Sasha made us crepes for breakfast. Yummm! Crepes with caramelized apples and whipped topping. Basically I'm going to get fat living here eating delicious food for every meal...
As we were finishing up breakfast, we noticed the donkeys out with the horses and pretty quickly realized that Spot had broken through the fence. It was actually quite impressive. He had snapped a metal chain, and the fencing between the zebra/donkey pen and the mares was bent -- he even cracked the cement holding the fencing in place! It was a bit of an ordeal getting Spot back in with the donkeys while making sure he didn't charge and bite Jericho or Cisco, while also trying to rescue poor Comet and Dancer from the evil zebra monster :)
Today Roaney took a road trip to Farmington. He's getting gelded tomorrow and should be back by Tuesday. I was so proud of him -- I was able to get a halter on him without much complaining. Unfortunately we needed to switch him to a different one he could take with him to town and had some more trouble the second time around. Since we were in a bit of a time crunch, I ended up just walking him into the chute and putting the halter on from there. Once he was haltered and we clipped on the lead rope, we walked him up to the trailer. It'd been a while since his trailer training so it took a bit of muscle (on John's part) to keep him from backing away once he put his front feet up on the trailer. In the end he just wound up hopping up on his own and he got lots of yummy hay for doing that :)
I worked with both Lefty and Hammer today on standing to be brushed. A bunch of the horses were all dirty from rolling around in the mud left over from yesterday's big storm, but Hammer was the worst. He was basically a mud statue -- there was dirt caked on all over his body! Hammer was an angel for brushing as expected. I was so proud of Lefty. Even though he has a left bias and always wants me on his left side, I was able to work on his right side and get him to allow me to brush almost all over his right side (back to his hip but not quite down his back right leg). It will be a continued work in progress getting Lefty good with handling on both sides.
Hammer also got to work on some more saddle training. He did really well today with my arm over his back doing "walk on", "whoa", and "back". I was able to start adding more pressure on his back and have my right arm all the way over. I was even able to move my right hand a little bit as we were walking. Hammer thought it was a little weird at first but got used to it pretty quick after I had him walk 3-2-1-treat a couple times.
Last but absolutely not least I also worked with Dougie today on getting his foot in the water bath. Today, we did the session without a lead rope and he did great and stood with his foot in the water bath for over 10 minutes. We also experimented with spraying his hay with water before feeding it to him (realistically it's getting sprayed as it is entering his mouth!) to desensitize him to the spray bottle and also see if it would help with his cough that would happen part way through every training session. It definitely did! No coughing and he actually started recognizing the spray as a cue for the food to come. I would spray once before taking the hay out of my bag and he started turning his head towards me when he felt and heard the spray. Yay Dougie!
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