The Dogpatch Horses

I hope I am doing this right. I seem to be very sub-forum challenged! Anyway, this is a continuation of my recent posts in other sub-forums.

Just for amusement's sake, what the heck is "Dogpatch"? For those who aren't old enough to remember, Dogpatch is a ficticious place in a cartoon strip from the 20th century. Kind of a political satire. It was a poverty stricken dump of a community in the back country someplace. We moved to this place in 1980 and it acquired its nickname almost immediately, being a tommy-tumbledown dump, with past residents being of a reportedly unsavory character. The nickname stuck and we still find it amusing.

Anybody who's been kind enough to read my recent posts knows my current project is Laddie, a half Clydesdale, half Standardbred gelding, about 23 years old. A very gentle but troubled soul. I'll just pick up where I left off.

Laddie and I continued to work on jogging on the right rein, but we've hit the anticipation/anxiety threshold and Laddie's responses were deteriorating a little bit. I was asking for some "long interval" transitions, jogging from one letter to the next, dropping to a walk, jogging again, etc. But the "whoa" button got messed up, he wasn't stopping quite as well when asked, REALLY anticipating the jog cue and tensing up because I was starting to use a little more rein pressure to get the downward or stop transition, and he responded by getting a little more bracey.

There's no way at this point that I'm going to let him fall apart! So we backed our transitions down to walk/whoa/stand and abandoned the jog for the rest of the lesson. Stops got sloppy, so we just walked a small circle. He "knew" why we had to do this and preferred to stop after that. We did a few really good repetitions, enough to be sure he was relaxed and feeling successful.

Chatted with the neighbor over the fence when we were done, and Laddie stood there with his big ol' head in my arms.

Here is today's mud...er...mug shot. Next time I'll take that ugly halter off.