Cob Jockey

Take a 3 year old baby stallion that hasn't gotten more than an hour of turnout per day since Saturday, ask him to focus and work, and what do you get?

Playing Kate's mounting block game

I just could not be more impressed with him. Oh wait, I was, the next morning, when I turned him out for the first time in four days.

He was so good, I was able to lead him 100m down the driveway together with Connor while also filming a video. I don't know when I'm going to stop being amazed by his good behavior, but that day is not today! This whole week was asking a lot of any three year old, let alone a stallion, and he couldn't have handled it any better. Good boy, Disco!

On Wednesday night, Disco and I had our second driving lesson. This time, he'd be driving during evening bring-in and feeding time, hearing the grain hit the pans, seeing horses move down the aisle. I'll admit, I had a moment where I thought, "I should really set him up for success by bringing the horses in before his lesson even though it's not my night."

I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. He was perfect. Perhaps a little sticky at the gate a time or two, but nothing egregious. It was like he didn't even hear the feeding chaos, and we had an incredibly productive lesson, even trotting for the first time.

Utterly unconcerned about feeding time

I find myself weighing this "setting him up for success vs pushing his buttons" thing a lot lately. Button pushing is, after all, how we train them. If we never tie them to a wall, they never learn to tie. If we never put them in a situation where they have to work during feeding time, they never learn to work during feeding time. 

(And obviously you have to have a little bit of both - you install "give to pressure" and "confinement" in order to set them up for success when you start tying them, for example.)

He's now been here a month, and I have erred on the side of "setting him up for success" a lot while he got settled in and while the co-op members got comfortable handling him. But now that baseline rules and human/baby horse pecking orders have been installed, I need to remind myself to keep pushing his buttons too.

Getting tacked up, which I did a surprisingly decent job with (as in, I am surprised that I remembered as much as I did). Of course I did not leave the breeching strap over his tail!

The latest button I'm ready to push is allowing everyone else to halter him. As I mentioned in the last post, I've been working with him for a while on this (not allowing him to grab the halter while you're trying to put it on him), but because I didn't want to ask the other co-op members to be as doggedly persistent as I've had to be about it, I've left his halter on 24/7 for a couple weeks now. With me being the only one haltering him, he got uninterrupted time with 100% consistency and black-and-white rules, and no opportunities for regression.

Over the last week, he hasn't tried to bite the halter one single time with me, so I'm ready to push that button and have everyone else try it with him too. I will be watching for a few things - does he even try it with everyone else? If he does, how persistent is he about it and how many times do they have to repeat the exercise before he keeps it closed? It's as much about how he learns and how he transposes rules from one human to another and how he respects us as it is about the actual behavior itself.

So far, the couple of times he's gotten it off in the field and they've been forced to halter him lately, he's been perfect for everyone else, so I have hope. But I won't know for sure until we push that button.

As with many of the good horse things in my life, it was through Lisa that I finally met a driving instructor. Lisa's been telling me about her for years, but our paths have never been closer at the moment, since she's about to take Eva on a trial to see if she wants to be a driving pony. I'm tickled that Eva brought both Disco's saddle and a driving instructor into my life.

She lives about a half hour north of me, and while her passion is combined driving, she's led a life full of interesting driving experiences as both a professional and an amateur. Think things like being the trainer for a person that had coaches with footmen, lamps, and full picnic hampers in the back for shows.

She showed up, and when Leah and Deb asked if they could audit, the instructor said "As many people as I can get hooked on driving, so much the better."

The first lesson (which ended up lasting 3 hours!) was a lot of equipment stuff. She inspected my cart (perfect size for him, serviceable but does need some work - no surprises), my harness (needs a different noseband and slightly longer traces, but serviceable), and my bit (weirdly the right size, but too narrow at the very top because Disco's face widens so quickly from a tiny little muzzle). 

I was relieved that Maude had steered me correctly in my gear choices so far, even if it's not perfect. Just like riding, I'll start with something that works and upgrade over time, I'm sure.

Ummm pop quiz. Components seen in this photo: breast collar, traces, tugs, saddle, girth, overgirth, shafts.

There is. SO MUCH. To remember. Thank goodness I had a professional there. Just getting the harness on and adjusted was an adventure. And she's a stickler, in the best of ways - multiple straps got a hole punched, not because they were too long or short, but because a half hole would make the fit perfect.

Just me, taking pictures of things to remember how they go

Even these little straps broke my brain. You have to like, remember the right direction to wrap these and put them through a little metal bracket on the underside of the shafts, and decide if they need to be wrapped once or twice, which is affected by how straight the horse is standing in the shafts when you hitch up.

Disco was as good as you could expect a 3 year old stud colt to be for all of this. A little bored, a little nibbly, but stood in the crossties for the better part of a half hour for all of this fiddling with the harness without any major complaints.

We started with ground driving.

And after a few laps of that, we hooked him up. The instructor said she would normally not go that quickly, but she took me at Maude's word that he was solid.

My first ever "behind the ears" of Disco!

She took the reins for a couple of laps before we switched seats (driver sits on the right!) and she handed them to me. But she kept the whip, which, thank goodness. I had a hard enough time just managing the reins, which she mercifully allowed me to hold like riding reins just to spare my brain the challenge of being without muscle memory in addition to everything else I was trying to learn.

I have to admit, I don't know a damn thing about carts, but the proportion of cart to horse, as well as the balance of the shafts, looks nice.

It was the strangest sensation, to be holding reins, feeling a mouth, but sitting in a seat. I found myself more than once with my heels pressed into the back of the cart, hamstrings active, legs desperate to be doing something since my hands were holding reins.

She rides too, and she was able to translate everything into ridden Dressage for me. The outside rein still dictates the size of your circles, just like in riding. Correct contact is just the same in driving as in riding, not too much or too little. Half halts were even similar, with a "square" (both reins) half halt for preparation and general rebalancing, and a right or left half halt to control the shoulders.

Changing rein through the middle of the ring, with a halt.

Disco was just wonderful. Not perfect - there were times he didn't want to stand still or would take a step back in a halt, but the instructor was quick to growl at him and use her whip, and every time he took correction well. He is, after all, only three - and the instructor said afterward that he's "well ahead of where he should be for his age." 

I have so much more respect for the drivers I've seen navigate cones courses at speed after this. Steering is HARD, yo!

When we were all done, she helped me learn how to put everything away correctly, including a precise way to fold the reins so that they didn't develop twists over time. "I'm sorry if what I'm telling you feels very picky, these are just the things I've learned over the years," she said. I told her not to apologize for that, that those are the kinds of experiential things you can't learn from a book, that you can only learn from someone who learned them from someone who held them to a high standard, like she did.

I am literally going to have to study and practice this. #slowlearner

Thankfully, she offered to come back for a lesson later this week. I'm looking forward to it already. Who knew I would enjoy driving after being afraid of it for all these years?

I'm turning out after breakfast. Disco opens his mouth to grab the halter when I go to put it over his nose. It's such a minor thing, I could have easily gotten it on anyway and ignored his open mouth in favor of getting turnout over more quickly, but I won't. I drop the halter and walk into his shoulder, pushing him around his stall without touching him. I stop. He stops second. He drops his head and stands still. 

We try again, and this time his mouth stays closed. We've been working on this in our (virtual) Kate lessons, and he understands that he got moved because opening his mouth was the wrong answer. And his reward for standing politely for haltering is that I allow him to stand still, and that he gets to go outside.

We have so many conversations like this, and they do feel like conversations. He gives me a right answer and I reward him - by letting him stand still with my body language clearly saying "I am not asking you for anything in this moment", with wither scratches, or by ending the session. He gives me a wrong answer, and I make him move his feet - ideally in the way he finds most challenging, which right now is sideways, but sometimes it's backwards.

"Before Kate" me would have not known how to reward or discipline him in the same ways a herdmate would. How to be so aware of my body language that I understand even what the lean of my body in one direction or another means to him. Old me wouldn't have known how to reward without treats, or to discipline in a way the horse understood and could process and learn from.

But Kate has completely transformed the way I handle horses, and the horses respond. Pyro and Disco especially. I swear it's because they feel understood, and because the human's "language" makes sense to them.

I watch, now, and I see the way Connor stands his ground when Disco is being annoying, and it's Disco that eventually walks off to a different part of the pasture. "The horse that moves his feet loses," as Kate says. 

Connor and I are speaking the same language to him, and while Disco still tries stuff with us both, it feels almost half-hearted. The answers to his shenanigans, mild as they are, have been so consistent from both of us (all of us, really), that he doesn't try as hard as he did when he first got here only three weeks ago. 

It's fascinating, it's fun, and it's paving the way for Disco to be a Very Good Boy for everyone that handles him, and nothing means more to me than that right now.

Now that Disco is home, we are figuring out winter turnouts. Last winter, we kept our 3 horses drylotted all winter because we seeded the pastures in October (which worked out beautifully). This winter, we have 6 horses, and so we had to choose which of the paddocks and pastures we wanted to sacrifice and which we wanted to grow grass in and rest.

It's no easy choice. We have 3 bigger pastures that grow a lot of grass well, two paddocks that don't grow grass well despite getting the same treatment as the others, one drylot and one drylot around the barn. We also have a stallion to keep separated, so he and Connor are unavoidably in a pasture I would love to rest over the winter but can't (long term pipe dream: build a drylot in the stallion paradise pasture), and we only have shelters in two pastures and the barn drylot.

In the end, we decided to sacrifice the two paddocks, which can be opened up to the drylots and to each other to make a pretty decent sized area.

So, a couple weeks ago we opened up all the gates and chucked the non-Connor/Disco herd of four out there. They were turned out together from April until the end of August when we had to split them up due to drought, so I didn't think things would be THAT wild.

F***** horses.

Lesson learned. Even previously integrated herds need to be re-integrated in wide open spaces. Which, after this incident, we promptly put the same four horses together in the big field and they've been just fine for weeks after, go figure.

Fortunately, there wasn't so much as a scratch on any of the horses involved, and even better, most of the fencing materials were able to be re-used. The best boarders and significant others ever dutifully came out the following Saturday to put it back together, which required just a knife, a Sawzall and about 45 minutes of work.

I complain a bit about this white fence, but on the whole, it has been great to us. Generally it breaks before the horses do, it's easy to work on, and it requires no maintenance at all unless you feel like pressure washing several miles of fence (I mostly don't, although I'm often tempted).