Sidepulls with Claire

Sidepulls with Claire-- Setting her Head!

I have taken a few days off from the blog as I left for the weekend to drop off my niece and nephrew and pick up Hillary and David. In the meantime I have been reading lots of different books on training horses. Some of the books I have been reading are:

1. "True Unity" by Tom Dorrance,
2. "Become Perfect Partners" Kelly Marks,
3. "Getting to Yes-- Clicker Training" by Sharon Foley,
4. "Western Pleasure: Training and Showing to Win," by Doug Carpenter.
5. "You can train your horse to do anything!" Shawana and Vinton Karrasch (clicker training)

I have lots others I am waiting to read, and so I am truly trying to gather best of what I can from the experts,and those people who believe in being gentle with horses.

Here is what I did today with Claire:

1. I put her in the round pen and put the side pulls on her for about 15 minutes. I walked, trotted and loped her around with the sidepulls. She mouthed the bit, but not bad and started to develop a nice headset. She would plunge down in the bit quite a bit to try to escape the pressure, but then would come back up. I put it on the fourth hole and so it was fairly loose with slack. I will take it up tomorrow to the fifth hole, and maybe more until I have her nose a little past the vertical and will keep it there until she can travel around in a walk, trot and canter accepting the bit.

I plan on doing just the sidepulls for the next three days, and then on Thursday-- if she is really giving to the bit, I will begin riding again.


On a sad note, Poco is terrible lame. I am worried because I think it is in her shoulder and it happened from our ride at Tarrants. I have a vet appointment next Monday.