Cob Jockey

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.