Nilla has been good lately. Since the last lesson I haven’t asked her to do any real dressage work. We’ve done some trail rides and one arena ride. For the arena ride, we did a 20m circle of poles, but I totally left her alone about it.
Wanna leap from a stride away instead of calmly cantering over?
No problem.
Want to canter around on your forehand with your head in the air like a llama?
Fine by me.
Want to jump up instead of just trotting?
I don’t care.
And the nice thing about this is, Nilla calmed the hell down. We probably only rode for 30 minutes and that includes warm up, cantering up and down the trail before the arena, and cool down.
She wasn’t perfect, but she settled down and offered some decent work. My husband even commented that she looked much better. We even got relaxed canter work with happy ears:
I think Nilla would really like to be a hunter mule and not have to go collected. If I loop the reins at her and let her stretch her neck out, she’s so much better. Unfortunately for her, mules aren’t allowed in the hunter rings and I hate hunters, so she’s going to have to put on her big girl panties and become a proper dressage mule.