So I'll start with my star project... Sierra. I met Sierra in late October 2011. She's a Morgan, a brood mare from a well-known local Morgan farm. Through a series of different owners, she wound up with my current client, who requested we work on an easy canter. Easy enough, but what followed has amazed us all...
As I'm given to do, I first taught Sierra initial language skills using SATS technology... the four cardinal directions of left, right, up, and down. Total elapsed time 120 minutes, divided into three days of two twenty-minute sessions per day. The three following days, we did ground-training: learning body parts, targeting my dressage whip with her newly named body parts. By day-six she had the basics (on ground) of shoulder-in, leg yield, step up, back, leg-lift, and turn on the forehand. During this time she began to communicate with me... she has a sometimes-bothersome allergy that irritates her distal sinus cavity and that her bit, gentle though it was, bothered her upper palate.
The allergy is a chronic thing I can't do much about, but the owner is administering herbal therapy that has seemed to help.
My favorite-bit-ever, a loose ring french snaffle didn't fit her, so I fell back to my next favorite, a loose ring hollow mouth snaffle. No more head tossing, and she clearly communicated in five different tests that she preferred the feel of the hollow-mouth to the curved-mouth eggbutt she was using.
With these problems out of the way, we began learning the basic skills of dressage... bareback at first, and then translating ground-learned vocabulary to in-saddle cues. At six-weeks she had all the movements of a level-III test except the flying change, which more recently, she has demonstrated she can perform with ease.
So there's the Reader's Digest version of Sierra. From here out I will blog her progress, with a slight detour to my experience with Easyboots (next blog).
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