Day Ten--trailers, guns, and tarps, oh my!

Oh my, what a non-"event" they all were! So we have been doing lots of fun stuff the past few days. Yesterday, we loaded in the trailer, and it was so not a big deal. We just walked in, stood, walked out, and repeated. About ten times. No biggie. I figured that it wouldn't be a problem when he started to follow me into the little enclosed hay storage part of his shed last week. It's a pretty small space and he just marched right in there to eat some hay.

Yesterday we also did our first session with the cap gun. I pulled the trigger with the gun empty lots of times all around him. No reaction. So I put the caps in. Shot the cap gun off to his side, then closer, then directly above his head. I think he may have possibly put his head up an inch. Once. And that's it. What a quiet guy! So next we move on to the .22 with blanks.

We saw our first tarp today. I just put it on the ground and led him up to it to see what he thought. Well, he took a sniff pawed at it and pawed it right underneath him and onto his back legs. Then he stood there with this really proud look like he had just done something great. Very cute. After playing with it, biting it, pawing it, etc. we walked over it. He acted like he walks over tarps every day. So then he wore the tarp and carried it around a bit. Again, he acted like he has loud crunchy sounding things hanging off of his back every day. No biggie.

And we finally cantered today. I tried cantering him on my own yesterday, but I ended up basically just desensitizing him to my legs kicking. I didn't have the right reins to use to slap his hiney, and I didn't have my dressage whip. So he decided that tolerating my strongly kicking legs was not that bad and all we got was trot-trot-trot. So today I brought back my equine motivational device a.k.a. Stacy in the middle of the roundpen, and we cantered with no problem. I will definitely be carrying some sort of whacking device with me in the saddle next time we canter on our own--with calm comes a little lazy, I guess. DEFINITELY not complaining about that though--I'll take a little lazy any day!

We also rode out of the roundpen today. No problems, even with four dogs running around and about five different people doing all sorts of stuff in and around the arena. We had to work a bit on our steering, but we got it figured out and walked and trotted around the arena.

And we're now going for walks (leading walks) all over the place and down the road a bit. He's learned that going away from "home" means great things like a bit of grazing time and getting to sniff all sorts of cool stuff.

And perhaps my biggest victory today was finding something other than hay that he likes to eat. I hope to teach him some tricks, but that's hard to do if I don't have any treats to reward him with. I've tried sweet feed, senior feed, anise flavored horse cookies, apples, carrots, and some other cookies. No takers. He'd sniff them and then make a face. But today I tried some soaked alfalfa cubes and bingo! So from there, I can hopefully introduce some grain and hopefully introduce something I can use as a treat/reward.

Trailers, guns, tarps, cantering, riding outside the roundpen, leading all over the place, and learning about goodies. Pretty big couple of days. I will have more pictures posted hopefully on Saturday when my photographer for hire (aka my hubby) is back in town.