I finally came to face the fact that Becky’s weight has become a real problem. It got to the point that her saddle – which has interchangeable gullet system, and is now on the widest gullet possible – no longer fit her, and I could not get on her from the ground without the saddle rolling. So, she is now locked up in a small private yard, and though there are horses in the yards either side of hers, she stands at the gate and looks at her former herd where she used to be the top mare… and they stare back at her.
Heartbreaking, but has to be done. I just do not have the time in the week to give her enough exercise to overcome the rich growing grass in the big paddocks, which was leading her straight to founder.
It seems to be working, too – the girth went up one hole already!
And it didn’t diminish her energy any. Maybe made her crankier though: when I rode her on Tuesday (just before the Melbourne Cup: what better way to spend the Melbourne Cup holiday in Melbourne than to ride yourself?!), she started doing her little jumping around in preparation to bucking at a walk. To be honest, I am still chuffed that I can now be clear, consistent, and just purely single-minded enough in my cues to actually overcome her tantrums. It takes confidence to be able to communicate that “we are doing this and that’s all we are doing, and you can just put your thoughts of going somewhere else, or bucking, aside.” And, amazingly, she actually does as told. No huge amount of force hauling on the reins, or kicking, or anything, is required – just the ability to interrupt her drifting out of line early enough and firmly put her back. Yeah, I say “just”, but I am still preening every time I am actually able to do it.
The latest trick that Marina taught me helped me enormously in this. It’s probably something that everyone has heard at some point: to think of your legs as being the guiding posts for your horse, and your feet in the stirrups as two fences, or rails, or skiis, or tracks that fence your horse in. This way as you turn your hips to communicate to your horse that you want to turn, your thighs and legs start applying the correct pressure, and the reins become secondary support tools, to be used if the leg are ignored. The second benefit is that you become very sensitive to your horse pushing with his shoulder or butt outside the line you chose (outside the fence).
That’s what permitted me to catch her drifting out of line early enough, and put her back with the extra pressure in my legs or reins soon enough, before she decided that she was the top horse in our herd of two, and tried to put me in my place by bucking.
The difficult thing about this visualization is that it doesn’t help all that much until you are sitting correctly in the saddle, with your legs under you and relaxed in your shoulders and arms – which is something that, believe me, doesn’t come easily, or fast. Once I started thinking about it, and using it, I realized just how much my legs didn’t do what was required before – because, all of a sudden, my thighs were starting to get quite tired! The danger there was to not get too tense in the legs, as I concentrated on “steering” with them, as that caused me to get tense all over, and to lose some of the feel of Becky’s movement.
This setting of the two lines of the “fence”, with Becky in the middle, helped me to get better at the shoulder in, which was all about having those fence lines going straight ahead, and Becky’s shoulder just off the line. Previously, I had a tendency to twist my hips with Becky’s shoulder, so I ended up sitting at an angle to the line too, and it all started to turn into a kind of awkward side-pass.
Now we are working on smoothing out the shoulder-in in a straight line, and also doing an exercise where we are moving laterally with the same body-position. So we start off about 5 meters away from the arena’s fence, moving parallel to the fence, then I ask Becky to take her shoulder off the line on an angle that is away from the fence– as in classic shoulder-in - and also ask her with my inside leg to move laterally towards the fence. The end result should have us approaching the fence smoothly on a diagonal, where we cover about twice or even three times the distance going forward (so, about 10-15 meters), as sideways to the fence (5 meters). The way I understand it, the benefit of this exercise is that it allows the hind inside leg to step even further under Becky, thus encouraging her to use her hindquarters. But, more importantly to me, it’s a more difficult exercise than shoulder-in straight down the line, which means that I am more aware of when Becky is resisting the bend, or tries to barrel straight ahead. In turn, the more I am “on the ball” in correcting Becky, the more she gets in tune with me, as she realizes that she has to listen to my cues carefully, and she relaxes more. Magic!
Working on this “diagonal” shoulder-in is what took Becky’s mind off bucking at the walk.
We then worked up to the trot, which is essentially the same, but the angle of the bend is a lot smaller. And then, just for the fun of it, played with some cavalletti poles that someone left behind in the arena. Given that we’ve never done that before, and that I didn’t really know how far apart they should be for a horse of Becky’s size and movement, I didn’t care about finesse at all. What I cared about is going through on a straight line, which really made me concentrate on setting Becky up for it and not letting her fall out. In the trot I had to really think about going forward - have all my intention going ahead and think “trot”, or else Becky would slow down, break to a walk, and start to weave uncertainly just before going over the poles.
In the end, we were quite successful, and it kept Becky’s interest which resulted in her finishing our session in a lot more relaxed and less cranky mood than what we started with.
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