Developments with Miss Rondee

I have been looking forward to this meeting tonight since we brought Rondee home from the trainer. I wanted the opinion of another person, but it needed to be someone with a completely different perspective, no vested interest at all, and most importantly, someone with a wealth of experience. I wanted that person to deal with Rondee with little to no knowledge about what had gone on, so they would not have specific expectations.

Marvin the Magnificent was perfect for this. He has known her since she was born, has trimmed her until she went to training, and knows her mother and siblings. He also has an almost cosmic connection with horses the likes of which I have never seen.

Look at the tension in her body in the photo above on the right--and this was after a few minutes of moving her feet around until she seemed to become a believer in him. Things started changing immediately.

His first conclusion was that she is right smack in the middle of either turning squirrelly or making amazing strides. She is a reactor not a thinker, and is so to the extreme. His first comment is that she needs to be taught to think...never occurred to me that you could even teach such a thing, they either are or are not a horse that thinks. What a great thing to learn!

I settled down with the camera and watched them play for a while. It is like a clinic every time he is here, so I count my lucky stars that it happens a couple of times a month. Tonight was a whole other deal though, the changes in her in a short period of time, and with different manners of approaching or asking her for something. It so illustrates how horses feed off of us.

She initially did not want to be touched, and I have always known that she is herky jerky about her head and face being messed with. Marvin calls her claustrophobic, but even that receded over the next half hour or so. He tried several differrent things with her to guage her reactions, and one of the most interesting was designed to make her think, I assume--he used virtually every part of her body to lead her. I have seen people do that with a rope around a leg, and seen him do that a lot with babies when teaching them to trim, but the rope around her ears was a new one on me. It was bizarre how the lightest touch could get her to follow her ears around. She would plant her hind foot and move around it with just a tiny pull on the rope.

She learned or maybe the word is evolved so quickly with him tonight. This horse standing free to be trimmed is NOT the same animal that spooked at her shadow when leaving the trainers, and is most definitely not the one that was still wearing a drag rope in her stall after four months there.

I feel so much better about things with her now, seeing how different she can be when placed in a different situation, with different handling, and different attitude. Now for me to learn enough to capitalize on it.