Surprise!

Surprise -- Ginger is still here!

Bambi left yesterday, but Ginger stayed behind. We wanted to be absolutely sure that Ginger's adopter would be a good match for her, so John was going to meet the man and check out his place before bringing Ginger down. Luckily, John thinks the adopter will be perfect! The only thing we are waiting for now is to see if there is another horse that John can deliver in that direction at the same time, since it is way too expensive to make the 8+ hour (in reality 14+ hrs with tire problems!) round trip drive to Santa Fe for just one horse.

Greta has really made a turn for the better in the past couple days. All though her training, she has been scraping by on all the tasks -- meeting criteria but not exactly enjoying the training. She was always pretty angry-looking regardless of what we were doing. A few days ago, we did an impromptu pressure-release session with her when Pat and I tried to work with her together while she was on a lead rope but she went way over threshold and couldn't handle a "stranger" pulling lightly on her lead rope. We were hoping to do a session where she got rewarded for doing a "happy face" while Pat was interacting with her, but we ended up having to do a session where she learned to step towards us to release the pressure on her lead rope (plus get a food reinforcer too, since that's what she understands best as doing the right thing and it helped speed up the learning process by making it doubly reinforcing to come off the pressure). It was kind of stressful and seemed like a major disaster, but she's really come out of it with a different attitude. She is still eager to interact with me, but she is more calm about it now and will actually be curious about new things, rather than being super intense and getting aggressive if anything was new/unexpected.

Update on Simon:
Simon has now graduated out of the training stall and is now living with his old friends in a larger pen. At first he was sort of the outcast and would stand by himself while the three other boys were swishing each others' flies, but he was soon re-integrated into the group -- thank goodness, I was starting to feel sorry for him!! In terms of actual training, Simon is now leading around the central training space, and has learned to come off pressure, make inside an outside turns, and walk with his jaw at or behind my shoulder without pushing on me (the last one we worked on quite a bit today - he really wanted to be extra close and walk ahead of me for a while so Pat helped us work that out). I think I'm in love :) my sweet Simon really likes getting scratched right where the underside of his neck meets his chest, and when I scratch him there he sticks his neck out and purses his lips like "Oooh that feels good!" If only I could feasibly own a horse...maybe in 10 years or so.

Update on the new mares/foals:
All the mares and foals are finally named and now eating from our hands through the fence panels. Too bad I still need a cheat sheet to know the names of some of them...there are just too many! Most of them will even come up when we go in to clean their area to see if we have food. They actually became enough of a problem that we had to put out food on the far side of the pen to keep them from bothering us while we cleaned! Starting now, their training regimen changes a little bit. They will be fed loose hay in the AM and PM, and we will do a session of hand-feeding in the middle of the day. Handfeeding meals is very time consuming, and at this point it makes more sense to focus our energy to get the current batch of horses trained and out of here and then put the mares/foals into intensive training when spaces open up. Not sure if I will be here for any of that -- I sure hope so! I already have a favorite :) her name is Jasmine and she's a yearling who has very pretty feminine features. She's probably the least fearful of all the horses and will nicker at you to bring her more food when you're doing a handfeeding session. She's going to be fun to train and probably fly through the program.