Cob Jockey

With Disco a few months away from turning two now, we are well into the "baby stallion has testosterone" part of growing up. And for the most part, knock on wood, so far so good.

There was a hot second there a couple of months ago when I got worried that I was in over my head. He bit my barnmate when she went to bring him in from turnout, playfully, but still a solid bite, right at the age everyone told me he would start to get harder to handle.

After a good conversation with Lisa, I decided that he was doing the teenage boy thing, pushing boundaries to see what he could get away with, and I needed to make those boundaries extremely black and white before his head (and his balls, lol) got too big.

So I did. I stopped accepting him moving into my bubble, stopped accepting him halfheartedly pretending to get out of my space when I asked him to move, I stopped accepting him nipping around me even if he didn't make contact, stopped accepting him swinging his shoulder toward me when I turned him around in his stall, stopped accepting him trying to pull his foot away from me when I picked feet. I made it clear that if he moved a foot in the crossties, he'd be asked to move it right back where it came from.

We also doubled down on doing not-fun adult horse things and learning how to work through the  Feelings generated by them

Writing it out now, it seems clear that I should have been firmer about those boundaries, but believe me when I say it's been hard to feel out. He's generally so well-behaved. Everyone can handle him, he's never once been a baby horse kite, even on the walk out to turnout after being stuck inside for multiple days due to weather. But that makes it easy to get lulled into a false sense of "oh that's fine" over the little things, which will eventually become big things as he gets bigger and stronger.

To everyone's complete surprise, he has remained clothed every time I've had to blanket him so far this year.

After the bite incident and the phone call, I pulled no punches with him at first. He got a warning growl and then a slap if he was out of line, or I'd set him up to "walk into" the waving whip if he was in my bubble. Almost overnight my barnmate texted me and said "Whatever you're doing, it's working!" 

And it was true. Almost immediately you could see something change in his expression when he looked at humans, and the subtle boundary pushing stopped. He's still the same cuddly guy, but there's a respect and awareness there that wasn't before. And that's a really, really good thing, especially in a young stallion as self-possessed and confident as this one is. He doesn't need me for emotional support the way Connor does, this is going to be a very different relationship.

Learning to wear boots

All of that has also informed my plans for training and starting him, but that's a story for another day.