Saturday February 28, 2009

I work on getting Tequila to face up to me ……she will, but she still stays on the rail. I walk up to her & pet her shoulder, and walk away. She follows. I get the halter on her and walk her to the middle of the round pen. She stands there and allows me to run my hands all over her body. I know the facility where the Gatorland is to be held & the stall aisles are narrow so I want to get Tequila ready for the accidental bumps that may occur. I bop her all over her body including her tummy with my handy dandy fun noodle. She stays standing there flinching in place.

I want to get some backing practice in so that is what I will be focusing on today. She loads like a charm into the stock trailer, but has difficulties backing out. I have her get her 2 front hooves into the trailer make her back out. I repeat that several times then I want to have her load all the way in. She steps up with her 2 front feet & backs out by herself. {Smarty pants} Now I have to get her to load all the way and back when I ask her to. I don’t want to keep going over the same things so as soon as she loads and backs out twice for me we move on to something new. I have her go over a few obstacles in the yard, then to the big 4 horse slant. I ask her to load into the trailer; she does but only her front feet. The trailer is darker inside and the doorway is narrower so I’m allowing her to get comfortable with the trailer rather than having to push her to load. I wanted to end there but Ray says ‘You just can’t stop there. You need to have her load all the way’. So he gets about 10 feet behind her and she steps right up into to the trailer. She stays standing in the trailer very calm and relaxed, I let her sniff and touch what ever she wanted to. She backs out of the trailer extremely fast but as soon as her front feet touch the ground she stops. Just to make sure she has the load concept I load her once again but I still need a little pressure from behind. Hoping that in the next few days she will just step up without needing the ‘help’