A bit of donkey work before setting off to our first client today.
Nearly Thoroughbred Freddie presented three areas of work this morning. Like a lot of non-New Forests he finds the crab flies on the Forest quite a challenge to contend with and efforts to remove them are rejected as just more irrititation. I work on the basis that the owner has paid for the whole of the horse and therefore should be able to touch him everywhere. Important however to choose the right touch in the right places. I needed to find the kind of approach and touch that told him that we were there to help him not make him even more fed up. A deep flat, 'ironing' type of touch worked well and meant that I could fully explore all his nooks and crannies. On that note he had quite a lot of build up of grease inside his sheath which might be better removed.
Next we looked at his groundwork. Freddie has a tendency to push his owner with his head and also to pull her around when he didn;t want to stand still. We worked on that, setting up a few clear boundaries and enabling him to just relax.
A lovely counted stop as he starts to tune in to what we would like.
Before we finished we got Karen back on board for the first time in a couple of months. She had an accident then when he took fright at a duck in the ditch and before that he was completely spooked by some very noisy motorbikes. This short ride highlighted some areas for attention including asking him to soften to the bit and techniques for bringing his and Karen's adrenalin down.
