Cracker Joe Heads to the Corner

Having discovered that my animals flunked cantering, we started doing a little pen work on transitions. Cracker has always been like a little hotrod, so we spent a lot more time on slowing down to a walk than speeding up to a canter. My little hotrod was cutting around the corners of the pen and generally not staying on the rail, so we shifted gears into a different mode of training after the walking gait was stable.

I took Cracker into the corner and asked him to target the corner post. After thinking his trainer had lost her mind, he decided to try it just to humor me. I served up the bridge and reward, and it wasn't long before Cracker had developed a certain fondness for the corner posts. The first day of this training, we just circled around the square-round pen, making friends with each of the corners several times.

Today was the second day. I spent the morning teaching the animals to stand to let me run the shop-vac over their shaggy shedding coats. Cracker had the hardest time accepting the vacuum. It was the hose that scared him, so this afternoon I tucked one end of the hose inside the other end, so it turned into something like a big ring, and I talked Cracker into putting his head into the center of it. It gave the white hinny a very Hawaiian look, like he had just gotten off the plane and they put a thick lei of black flowers around his neck. We strolled out to the square-round pen and reacquainted ourselves with the corners. One quick zip around the square and Cracker was ready to go. I started running from corner to corner, Hawaiian Hinny following me and tucking his nose up to the post. Then I quit running in as far, but that didn't stop Mr. Cracker. He is both eager to please and loves to earn his horse treats. He gets excited. I started worrying that he would kick at me as he went rushing on into the corner, as he did that once when he got overly excited and it sent me tumbling into a snow bank. It wouldn't be from meanness, just exuberance. Luckily it didn't happen this time.

After a while, it was time to vary the program, so I drug a large white sewer pipe into the pen and laid it diagonally across the middle. The game was to jump it and run to the diagonal corner. He did fantastically and seemed to love the activity. Tomorrow I will take out some "marker-cones"(really spray painted plastic jugs weighted with sand) to provide a visual boundary. I suspect that he will have no problem staying on the rail when I send him out to circle as his focus is now on the corners.

Tomorrow, if the weather stays nice, I will be reporting on vacuum-cleaner training. Clay says if I can vacuum a mustang, he might have to switch over to my crazy style of training.