I couldn't really talk about the clinic last night but now that I have had time to process a few things, i.e. sleep, I think I have got a few things straight in me head.
When you start a dialogue with Mark, he is really only interested in a few basic details about your horse; how long owned, breed, age, what you'd like to work on. His focus is on where you
are now and working in the moment. Theoden is still really braced in his body and his mind and so it’s easy to be thinking how far I still
have to go with Theoden and to worry that it is a reflection on me (damned ego!!). However, there's no place for that emotion when I am working with Mark and Theoden, we just work on what we have got. So, although I really enjoyed my session and the build up to it, I actually felt a bit deflated when I had finished. This morning, however, I feel like we have just found a key and once we have turned it, we are going to be through and on to the next level
I have to remember that we have already come such a long way. If Theoden had been challenged about his behaviour previously, no matter how gently, he would have quite simply bucked me off or flattened me. Somewhere he had learned that the way to stop people asking him to do anything he didn't want to do was to escalate his behaviour really quickly and to be aggressive. His previous owners told me that it had once taken them four hours to put his bit in.
I've never really talked about Theoden's past but when he arrived with me he was poor. He had endured a winter without a rug and the owners of the field and the people who live in the houses around the field told me that they had only seen him be fed once a week even in the snow. People had taken pity on him and fed him over their fences but this had resulted in him mugging people and even picking one up by the shoulder to shake the food out of them.
Although he had other horses next to him, he was alone in his own field and therefore had a huge deficit in combative, play and mutual grooming and synchronisation which is so important to a horse's mental health.
I don't know whether anyone had attempted to start him earlier in his life. I know Julie and I worked with him about four times about a year before I bought him and he had been very straightforward at that time. However we also watched him being trained by his owners. They had a round pen with a sand floor with a lovely rut around the outside where the horses went round and round (and round and round). Theoden was put into automatic pilot on this circle at all paces. No wonder that although he could do fantastic canter transitions loose in the middle of a field, he went to pieces about it whenever humans were involved.
When I restarted him once he was mine, everything was fine until I started to ask him for more. He didn't want to leave Petra and he didn't think I ought to put my legs on him or ask him to turn. The two occasions when he bucked me off were precipitated by only the tiniest insistence! I haven't been deliberately bucked off for a very long time and it all came as rather as shock to my body and confidence. I felt there was no point in me practising his 'no' and perfecting his buck and that's when I decided to ask Jim Goddard to work with him.
Jim Goddard made a huge difference to Theoden's work ethic and he came back with a lot less resistance and a much wider tolerance for being asked to do things. However, there is still an automatic 'no' in there that we have to overcome. Perhaps today's the day!!
