when to push and when to baby

As I mentioned yesterday, and Monday, and all over this blog, Murray is quite free with his feelings.  He has them, and he wants them known.  Sometimes Murray’s feelings are legitimate… well, I guess they are always legitimate feelings, but sometimes they are more reasonable than other times.  For example, sometimes he really was just body clipped and it’s his first ride in the indoor for the winter and his hammies are tight.  Or sometimes we’re out on cross country and just having such a good time and feelings we have them!!!!!!!  And sometimes those feelings are bullshit and he’s being a pansy and it’s really just time to get to work.  But when to tell the difference between these times?

Not sure what this emotion is. Possibly “schadenfreude” at my misfortune for owning him….

Anyone who has worked with a baby horse (or even not-baby horses, I’m guessing, but I’m not as experienced with those) has had to make this choice.  Possibly a lot.  Because baby horses have a lot of ups and downs and good days and bad days and if you want to make progress, you need to be able to know when to push for the good behavior and when to let things lie and call it a draw.  Or a day.

Murray was tricky for me to figure out.  When he was much younger, four (yes, much younger), he was weak and expressive.  And when he was feeling weak in the canter, he would buck.  I know that just working on that hard thing isn’t necessarily the way to combat weakness, so I tried to strengthen him a lot through the trot and trot-canter transitions and yet the bucking just never went away.  Some days, Murray wouldn’t buck, and all would be well!  In the days when he would buck more than a time or five (or ten, I did eventually get better at sitting that shit), I figured that something must be wrong/hurting and I would back off and go back to the trot work.  And then Murray used his evil little velociraptor brain to crack the code: just buck enough, and Nicole will stop pushing!  Funnily enough, he never bucked profusely during jump lessons (okay, just rarely and always more “cheerfully”), just when I was trying to ask him to actually give and use his body at the canter during dressage.

Trainer figured it out first: Murray was proooobably bucking just to get out of really using himself in dressage.

So we stuck on The Problem Solver kid who sat through it all (laughing… ha ha yes your seat is so good twelve year old I’m not jealous at all) and the next time I rode Murray bucked once, and after I sat through that he was like “well, shit.”

A perfect example of too much babying resulting in a need to really, really push things.  Like, a lot.  So you can imagine it’s pretty important to me that I don’t let Murray trick me into letting him get away with being naughty.

Murray has been really, really good for me in that regard.  I am getting quite good at figuring out when I can push him a little more and when it’s time to baby him a bit.  It probably helps that I can do more than just w/t/c in circles and full arena now, so I have a broader toolkit of things to “diagnose” his bad attitude with.  But Murray has taught me skills beyond just determining if he is being a punk, and that is very valuable.

A few weeks ago while I was riding, Murray saw horses getting turned out.  This isn’t out of the ordinary, of course, but he’d not been turned out in four nights as the whole barn was locked in because of super muddy pastures (yeah… this is California).  Murray’s response to this was to yell “get off me right now and put me outside where I belong” with his whole body, accentuated ever more by the horses gleefully galloping around their pastures for the first time in five nights.  Instead of trying to get any more work done I was like “yeah, let’s just put you outside.”

I wasn’t worried that this would teach Murray to throw more tantrums to get what he wanted.  I can’t verbalise it succinctly, but he wasn’t bucking to be noxious or unpleasant.  He just couldn’t stand that it was time to go out and he wasn’t getting to go out.  Sure, it was rude.  And some day I will expect my horse to be able to work through seeing other horses with something he so desperately wants.  But right now… it’s probably okay.

But on Monday when Murray was like “no, I really can’t put my right hind under at all and now that you’re insisting I’m going to insist right back” I was like “yeah, this is garbage.”  And I just quietly, and then a little more loudly, repeated the instruction that yes, he really did have to move his right haunch over and put some weight on that right hind leg.  The good thing is that now I know when I can do this, and how to do it so it’s not just a fight.  First I start with something relatively easy (leg yield), then move up to something a little harder (shoulder in), and then I can push for what I really want, which in this case was for Murray to do shoulder-in on a circle.

I love it when he gives up because he gets super round

So, when to push and when to baby?  I err on the side of babying about things, unless I’m completely sure that what I’m getting is pure attitude.  I’m not about to let anyone get away with being a total ass (even in the above scenario when I called it quits after Murray bucked, I made him do a couple of nice transitions first), so unless my horse is literally throwing himself on the ground, I’m going back to something I know they can do, but that asks them at least to behave.  With Murray usually that’s some kind of lateral movement — leg yield or shoulder in — but I often have to go back to something even more basic — just giving to pressure.  Same thing when Peanut or any of the baby ottbs are being rude, just give to pressure.  And then you evaluate from there.  Sometimes they let you know that it’s absolutely everything they can do to just keep it together and do what you’re asking, and that’s okay.  Everyone has off days, right?  I just call it and give them pets for agreeing to let me on their back.  More often than not these days, I get a big groan, a deep breath, and that soft, acquiescence that suggests Murray is finally accepting me as his leader.

Murray does not accept the sparkly pink unicorn’s beauty

Hahaha yeah right.  It just means he’s willing to play along.  Which I’m okay with also.