I have two bits of news for my June blog. Hamilton is permanent and I want to make the commitment even though it might mean not eventing/competing this year. I see him as a horse that has been trained the wrong way, almost broken in a damaged sort of way. I think he needs to be retrained or made whole again and trusting. Trust will have a great deal of influence in that. If he doesn’t trust us, we won’t get anywhere with training him but once he learns that we can be trusted, he can maybe learn to accept what challenges we give him. We have to take it at a snail’s pace, one step at a time. It takes a while before you can get things perfect. My hope is to get Hamilton to trust me enough so that when I present him with a challenge, he will not just run away from it; instead he will trust me and try that challenge to the best of his abilities. If he isn’t able to complete it we will work more and more on those things until he is able to complete them. It’s going to be a looooong process, but in the end, I know it will be worth it. I just have that feeling.
I have a part time summer job. I’m working at Mountain Top Inn and Resort in Vermont in the Equestrian Center. Louise, the program director, knows my mom so she kindly gave me a job. I take people on trail rides, I tack up horses, I feed horses, set up jumps, take down jumps, etc. I just started and had a lot of funny experiences. For my first weekend we had a horse trial and trail rides. The trail rides are English and Western. I have never done Western. That was a learning experience. On one of the trail rides a little girl’s pony kept going the wrong way so I had to take her on a lead. Her horse constantly wanted to go ahead and behind me. He’d go ahead and I’d pull him back, he’d go ahead, and I’d pull him back. That made for tired arms. Next I had to switch horses with a customer’s unruly horse. He took off away from the group but I brought him back. I had a buck and other fun stuff in there. Thankfully, Punky’s antics have taught me how to sit through that kind of “Punkitude” behavior. I think I will learn a lot this summer and I’m sure I will have some interesting stories to tell.
I will keep the info coming on Hamilton, Punky and work. I know there will be good and not so good stories on Hamilton and many funny ones about work. I’m off to Junior Horsemanship Camp soon and will write about that too.
One Response to “Brady’s Blog June ’11”
Smartysmom
Brady, I am so glad you are keeping Hamilton. If he is like most Connemaras, he is going to turn out to be the very best horse. As you know, they are very smart. They also really like being partners with people. When I first got Smarty, I was used to being in charge all the time. He had different ideas so we made a deal. I’d listen to what he had to say and respect his opinion, and he would make sure I stayed jelly side up.
He had some really bad habits to start, and was very disrespectful of people, and didn’t much like them. If he disagreed with me about direction and speed, he’d just do what he pleased and too bad for me.
So we used lots of cookies to make ourselves interesting, and once he got interested, he found having people friends was very entertaining, so he wanted to spend time with us and interact. It took me a long time to figure out how to respond to the things he did that I really didn’t like, but once I figured out the response that worked, he got it “just like that” and stopped doing them.
Now he is such a pleasure, and very very brave, and will go anywhere and do anything. And if something spooks him, he says to me “danger danger mom, we’re going to leave now. Get a good grip. You ready? Here we go!” and he’ll trot away as fast as he can and off we’ll go with me safely jelly side up.
What a great summer you are going to have!
Best of luck with everything.