KBR Training Case Study:"Patience"
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Patience must have been an interesting horse in the wild.
She's not very tall and she's not very aggressive, but she's
very, very "the boss" in any herd situation. She doesn't
look for trouble but she won't take any guff either.
We have to be careful who we turn out in Patience's herd. If it's a horse that wants to compete as leader, or just be obnoxious, Patience will square them away forthwith and a lot of the time Patience won't have a mark on her. Week 5: I went out to the pasture to check on Patience. I picked up feet and did all sorts of things without halter or lead and she was just as cool as could be. Later in the day I turned Shiloh out to graze for the afternoon with Patience and Mello. After a couple of hours they started racing around, bucking and playing. First they'd race all around the horse course, then they'd stampede through the gate to the pasture and run all around it, then they'd stampede into the paddock. There wasn't enough room to run in the paddock so they'd just bounce up and down like they had springs on their feet, then tear out the gate and run around the pasture some more. Just before feeding time I went in to get Shiloh. They were all dozing in the paddock and when I clicked for Shiloh, I had two mustang noses up in my face. (Mustang noses are pretty darn cool.) Both Patience and Shiloh got a carrot. I haltered and led Shiloh out, being careful not to let Patience slip out with us. Patience can also open gates and you'll catch her exploring the gate latches and safety chains with her lips when nobody is watching! May 9th We had some fun with Patience today. First of all she and Ranger stood for a while at the tie poles while all sorts of calamitous things were going on. Both she and Ranger handled things pretty well although they would occasionally pass each other glances as if to say, "What the heck are we doing here?" Then they both went into the arena while Cindy rode Prints and we led them around. Later Sierra ponied Patience around the arena and after about 20 minutes Patience put it in "park." She had enough. I climbed aboard but it was hard to find "first gear." She didn't care about following Prints any more and Tami grabbed the lead rope to get her going. (She'd only been under saddle a couple of times before and this was her first time in the arena so I didn't want to go kicking her or smacking her to get her to move. She actually did pretty well, never losing her cool. We never got her to start with leg aids but we can work on locomotion the next time out. The group; Sierra, Prints,
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Patience on the footing
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Continue to Moving "Stuck" PatienceContinue to Patience at Xenophon
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Here's an interesting behavior-
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