Nilla and I had another lesson on Wednesday last week. I have been very busy at work and wasn’t able to leave very early so I didn’t have as much time to lunge as I would have liked. Nilla wasn’t quite as on the bit as our previous ride, but we had some good moments of connection.
We started by doing some shoulder yielding which she did not want to do. In most things Nilla may not initially understand, but she learns really fast when she gets it right and is praised. She loves praise. With shoulder yielding, I get the sense that she just doesn’t want to do it. I’ll praise her when she finally takes a step and she’ll just sort of sulk like “I did it but I didn’t want to and I don’t care if it was good.”
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| Nilla’s feelings about shoulder yielding |
She really pulls out all the evasions. She tries to do turn on the forehand, or sidepass, or go backwards. All I want it for her to just move her front feet. I ended up parking her by the fence to at least stop her from going backwards. We did finally get some good steps of just her front feet to the side in each direction.
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| Not happy even after praise |
We moved on to lots of circles and bending. Unfortunately, a lot of the pictures came out blurry. We also did some trot poles, which she was much happier about.
We ended by doing a little cross rail a few times, but it was so low it was really more of a raised trot pole. I didn’t want to really do a jumping lesson, so we ended on a good note instead of pushing things. I’m hoping to start taking lesson with the trainer my husband rides with again if work ever stops trying to destroy my sanity and I have a sound animal at the same time.
