Training Assessment

Clay West, Americas most lost and lonesome cowboy, showed up a couple of weeks ago and since then we have been in horse-training heaven. If you want an image to tie to him think Kevin Cosner with a penchant for keeping the house clean. Note, ladies, he is a single available man, only my horse-training buddy.

If you single females want to meet this handsome dude, just make an excuse to come visit. Well, that's already happening, actually, because suddenly this woman from Texas thought of a reason to be just driving by on her way to Denver ... and could Clay meet her for a coffee or something??..... well it's a fifty mile drive to the nearest coffee shop, so he declined, but I know we will hear from her again. She and some of her girlfriends want to come learn something about positive reinforcement in horse-training in May. This is good with me.

Anyway, as a prelude to getting really into the training of the equines, we embarked on an intensive training evaluation program. This thing assesses everything that they might have learned from standing to be brushed to changing leads on the fly. The animals did great on the ground work and failed miserably under saddle. Actually, they didn't "fail", they just had results indicating there is room for improvement. For me, it was a definite reality check... no more pretending your animals are trained, they either can do it or they can't. Having Clay dutifully writing down the assessment results, I couldn't even cheat a little and give them the benefit of the doubt.

The assessment has 105 assessment tasks on it. We gave it to all eight of my equines. This took about five long days and we still have 42 assessment tasks on one animal (Jemez Dancing under saddle) to administer tomorrow.

What I have learned: Paisley fails her tests mostly for being unable to just stand still; Cisco can fake it through almost anything and look like a trained horse until it comes to movement around his hips, then he panics; the donkeys excel at all tasks like ground tying and standing still but trotting or cantering are out; Cracker is so busy offering to do the tricks he knows that he doesn't have time or attention to respond to other requests; Chester has no directional control; and JD, well... he is just JD and mostly willing to go along as long as he can look like the herd boss.

This reality check is a wonderful opportunity to start working on the basics where they are weak and get things fixed up. People talk about discovering holes in their horses training... I discovered my holes (oodles of them) and I have a very clear picture of what needs to be done.

Clay will be here until late June and our agenda is to get the animals sufficiently trained to be decent riding animals. He started working with Cisco, who promises to be a really exceptional mount based on the willingness shown in his assessment results. The day we are riding down the canyon road, Clay on Cisco and me on Paisley will be a day of total success.