In the evenings, I usually spent some time trying to get the excersies that I learnt from Jay to work on Lori’s horse Tango.
She is a beautiful, reddish thing, but she is also extremely mareish and stubborn. She had also been let to walk around by herself, all over the property, for a very long time, and not been trained for a while. I think this combination of circumstances were what made the cooperating with her so hard. She was used to do whatever she wanted, and didn’t like being told what to do.
The first time I tried the exercises, she behaved perfectly and did everything right. Lori had done similar things with her before, working in a roundpen, so she knew what was expected of her. But after that, everything went downhill. She started turning her back to me, trying to run in the wrong direction. For a couple of days, she wouldn’t even let me catch her. She was doing everything to show me that she wouldn’t let me boss over her.
I tried to keep my ground, though. Never let her get away with things. Maybe I wouldn’t get her to do new stuff, but at least she would learn that I could be as stubborn as her. Oh, but how I would have wanted to have Jay there, to tell me how to read her. I’m pretty sure that many of the annoying things that she did was only due to me doing things slightly wrong, not being hard enough when needed, or at other times not light enough. We were in a constant struggle against each other, and quite a few times Tango was the one who got out as the winner.
The last couple of days, though, I felt a change. She was starting to be more attentive on me, even when we weren’t in the roundpen, kind of keeping an eye on me to make sure I wouldn’t sneak up on her. I guess that could be considered something good. I wasn’t an uninteresting piece of moving flesh that occationaly gave her food anymore. I had made her see me, made me count. If I’d stayed and worked with her for a couple of more weeks, she might even have accepted me. Eventually.
As it is, she’ll go back to her old comfortable life with as much fresh green grass as she could ever wish for.
Katja Malmborg 