Training Day for Big Al
Photos taken by Bonnie
Ali is the perfect horse, except for a few little areas that need some polish, such as being gracious to other living creatures - or to any other living creature. That one seems hard, so I strong-armed Cathy and Betsy into helping me with a more tractable problem: tailgating.
When there are more than two horses, and sometimes with two even, Ali can't stand to be more than about a foot away from the horse-in-front-of-her's tail. This is dangerous for her and, at a minimum, really embarrassing for her rider, so I've been trying to figure out a way to stop it. The Parelli people wave their progress strings from the lead horse, simulating a tail swish. That seemed hard to organize because I'd have to find a couple of people who could wave the progress string properly; that is, without spooking their horses and without whacking/blinding mine. Second, most of Al and my riding is done with Bow, who is the most suave, debonair, insoucient two year old ever, but he is two - it doesn't seem fair to ask Cathy and Bow to try swinging a six foot rope while going down the trail.
I decided that squirt guns would be the right tools. Al hates water in the face so I figured a squirt would back her off, it couldn't hurt her even if she got hit right between the running lights, and it would be relatively easy for anyone to help me with - I can see myself asking Betsy to take an over-the-shoulder shot while we're going down the trail. So we gave it a try.
In our preparation phase, Betsy and Cathy chose their weapons and accustomed themselves to their handling characteristics. As you can see, some people got more into the whole gun thing than others. Cathy immediately wanted a strap-down, speed-draw, Wyatt Earp holster for hers.
We started out by walking the horses - I wanted to see exactly what Al would do when she got a snootful of water. Also, I wanted to see if it was possible to even hit her with a squirt gun. The answers, in reverse order, are that (1) Cathy and Betsy are both (a) fast and (b) dead shots and (2) Al stops dead and stays backed off.
As you can see, the walking didn't last long; we started trotting them almost immediately - but you'd run, too, if you had a crazy triathelete chasing you with a neon squirt gun. It was really intimidating when she started waving it in the air in triumph. Cathy was so scarey, Ms L didn't even want to go with her. Cody couldn't believe what he was seeing.
After that, we mounted up and gave it a try. As you can see, it worked! Al stayed well back, even when the horse in front of her stopped.
After initial proof of concept, we tried it at a trot, as well as the walk, then tried passing and inserting ourselves in line. In all cases, we could impose manners on Al with the squirt gun and the most times it took her to learn was three squirts, and that was at the beginning. You can see poor Judy and Kharina out there milling about with us - they thought they were going to have a nice, distraction free day in the arena. Ha! I had to include the headless picture of Betsy because I thought it was such a good picture The Tuffster. Sorry, Betsy - we'll cut off your feet next time to make up for it.
After we got bored in the arena, we headed for the trail leaving the barn and repeated the process with similar success. I think we're onto something.
