Notes from Friday, The 31st.
I didn’t even try to catch him in the big pen today. I went ahead and just ran him in the round pen. We did a lot of what is called the catching game. When he ran away from me, I put pressure on his hip and I pushed him until he wanted to flick an ear at me and then I asked him to stop. When he stopped, I would walk away from him. And if he followed me, I would reward him with a little bite of food. He’s highly motivated by food, so it’s easy to manipulate that we spent a good hour doing this, and I really felt like we made some good progress. He was calm. He wasn’t nervous about his head, I could put a rope around his head And I made the decision that at an hour we were gonna stop. When I reached to take the halter off, thankfully, I had done that in the Round pen, he freaked out. So it was back to work, push him on his Hip until he looked at me, and then I would repeat what I had been doing for an hour. After catching him again, I took my Long 20 foot line and just rubbed it all over his head and his neck , And both sides of him. This added another 30 to 45 minutes and at that point when we reached a good stopping point, I took him out To the big pen and Gave him some food and let him eat it with the halter on while I stood beside him and rubbed on him. And then took the halter off, rubbed on some more with the halter, and then just turned and walked away. It was a good time to stop.
His attitude seemed a little different, maybe this is a break Through day for him. We’ll see next time I ride.
