As you can all see from my last post about Blue, how well he was working even though he was off work for a while.
When everything is going well, there always has to be something that pushes us back isn’t there?!
Blue is kept at a riding school, with a livery yard too – so have the usual turn out service etc. done for him but the staff made me aware yesterday that they couldn’t get near him to catch him so they left his head collar on when turning him out.
Later that day I went down to see him and he spotted me, whinnied and trotted over and was very easy to catch, so I thought that was one problem solved…
Oh boy was I wrong… I went down today as it was such lovely weather (18 degrees may I add!) so I thought it would be lovely to carry on with getting him fit and go for a little lunge. I didn’t think twice about him being a problem to catch yesterday, so I did what I normally do and went to catch him while calling his name of which he normally comes over to me. Today, I called and called but he didn’t take any notice of me, so I went up to him to catch him and I couldn’t catch him… every time I went near him he decided to trot off! Eventually I caught him with some pony nuts, he does anything for food!
So off I went after bridling him up, we walked down to the lunge pen and started to warm up. He did one lap of the round pen in walk and then went nuts, he threw his head about, and then set off into an uncontrolled canter around the pen throwing in loads of bucks. He had only ever done this when we first got him and since then he hadn’t… I proceeded to calm him down, trying to bring him into a tighter circle and using a soothing voice to calm him down. Eventually he stopped and I thought it was best to leave it and not push him into anything and make things worse.
So I went to put his head collar and he went to bite me a few times (he hasn’t tried to bite me in a few months now!), by this time i’d had enough so I just chucked him out into his field with his head collar on.
It’s like we have gone back to how he used to be, even after all he has improved on and work he’s had done with him.
Could it be the spring grass or do we need to start again from basics? 🙁
