It's important that I make sure that the work I do is relevant out here. I have an audience made up of three distinct sets of people - the owners of the horses who have already thoroughly embraced this kind of horsemanship, interested guests and visitors, and then the grooms and syces who have are being asked to continue in this same way in order to achieve some consistency of approach. The horses themselves are divided into two camps - ex-racehorses that have been there and done that, and then some native and formerly semi-feral ponies from places like Ethiopia and Somalia. The established horses are generally quiet and accepting as they are in regular work, get fed according to their needs and it's pretty warm out here most of the time. The semi-ferals have been roughly treated in the past - for example, Federer was branded with a hot iron on his face and is pretty worried about having his head touched. Others have dubious conformation and it remains to be seen whether this corrects itself when they put on weight and muscle. Therefore, none of the horses are particularly pushy and groundwork isn't needed for control. However, it's a great way of establishing leadership so that they can afford to relax whenever they are with humans.
Strictly, I am not allowed to teach Join-Up but, having gone through the basic groundwork exercises in the first session, I gave a demonstration of Join-Up so that my participants could see whether they had been heading in the right direction with their own Join-Ups learned from a book. Afterwards they demonstrated the way that they do Join-Up so that we could compare and contrast and it was great to see horses like Fumbi (Dusty in English), Yellow Bill and Blackie joining up with their various trainers. If I have over stepped the line somewhere then I hope I shall be forgiven on the basis that I have only made brief comments about changes they might make and I am hopeful that some of my students will arrive on my doorstep in England on their way through to the Kelly courses. I know I would love to see them again.
Yesterday evening I gave a demonstration of the wild pony handling technique on a young Ethiopian filly called Silver. She came round really quickly and allowed me into her right side to put the headcollar on with relative ease. Having taken about 45 minutes to achieve this three times in that session, she took just 10 minutes to be touched and then have her headcollar on this morning and amazingly allowed me to lead her out to her inclosure.
This morning we covered desensitisation techniques and some of the ponies should be eligible for the Olympic team given the height at which they originally cleared the tarpaulin rather than putting a foot on it. Having had no rain here for three years, not many of them had met an umbrella either! There is a limit to how much they can be asked to get used to things when there are real predators a round. During the night too, elephants got into the main yard and stirred them all up for some time.
On the wildlife front, we saw large numbers of dikdik on the way back to the Lodge and a reticulated giraffe. At lunch, 30 or so elephants were relaxing in the waterhole below our room. This one private lodge is larger than the whole of the New Forest and has a huge variety of wildlife including lions, leopard and cheetah. Tom and Jo, who are staunch conservationists also breed pedigree Boran cattle and have a herd of breeding camels. During our off duty time we are being thoroughly spoiled as the accomodation is beautiful and the food is wonderful. The company is great too and we have had a great laugh with Alastair and Kit in the evenings (I know Alastair will be disappointed if I don't mention him!!).
