Lady Learns

  
 
     I feel like nowadays the majority of my time with the horses is spent working on their feet. How is it possible that I ended up with two horses who both have terrible hooves! Lady, due to the fact that she'd been foundered by previous owners, has to be shod on all four feet. Particularly the front hooves. Mya is only shod on the front, and that is because she's had trouble with white line and cracking. Two years ago Mya had large cracks running up the middle of her front hooves, but with lots of attention and care her left front is now completely solid. The right, well, was. That is until she somehow manage to throw a shoe and take a chunk out of it. Which wouldn't have been so bad except that it got fungus of some kind in it. The farrier then had to cut away a lot of the hoof wall to expose the fungus. Now I regularly have to soak her right front hoof in a solution and then put medicine on it. I'm really hoping the fungus is dead and it will stay dead. I'd love to be doing other things than constant hoof care! But I don have to say I've spent some good quality time with the ponies because of this and I have learned a ton.


     I've made some breakthroughs with Lady's training recently. As you probably know, when I got Lady back in May one of the biggest things missing from her training was lunging. She had absolutely no concept of how to do it. She pretty much didn't know groundwork in general. So since I have had her that is one of the things we have worked on a lot. The other day I had her out in the round pen and we were doing the regular free lunging work when suddenly it seemed like something just clicked in Lady's brain. She started paying attention and actually listening. Before she was just trying to avoid me or halfheartedly obeying. But this time I could tell she was fully listening to me. She picked up the trot with just me saying the word and clicking. That was the first time she had responded like that. Before I always had to bring up the lunge whip to reinforce the command. But this time she didn't need it. She knew what I wanted without me having to make exaggerated motions. I have to admit I got really excited. It was so cool! That was also the first time she really did "join-up". She was following me around like a puppy dog. It was really amazing. Its like Lady finally accepted that we should work together.

In other news, she now lunges beautifully. (Though we're still working on the canter. She still needs a lot of work with that gait.)