Tarma was so soft and engaged when I went out into the pasture after work today, and I wanted to stay with this calm, open energy. Instead of working at speed in the round pen, we stayed grounded and worked on some ETS obstacles.

After our last dressage lesson we really struggled with opening and closing the wide arena gate while mounted, and I realized that while I’ve opened and walked Tarma through plenty of gates, I haven’t shown her from the ground how I expect to handle a gate while mounted. She doesn’t like sidepassing towards the gate or having it follow her, so we broke it down into steps and every time she did a section well, we went and grazed for a minute before adding another step. She still has some stickiness about it but our overall group energy was much calmer and more thoughtful about it, instead of racing through it to get to the next best thing.

Next I tied her up while I set up one of those sneaky, deceptively simple ETS exercises: sending your horse through a pair of barrels without you, turning around on the other side, and coming back through. Easy to say, but it can be tricky for horses used to just following their person through things, and it requires precision to not bump into the barrels. We had it going pretty well from one direction, but when I switched sides Tarma got a bit sticky. As you can (hopefully) see in the video, my first attempts to send her through don’t work, she gets mentally stuck, so I had to try a few different things, including leaving the obstacle and trotting a bit to bring her energy back up. On the last try she went through so we called it a good day. I also practiced asking her to stand square each time. I have no interest in showmanship, but having a horse stand square is always useful, and it gives me another way of influencing Tarma’s feet and her decision making in a non-confrontational way.

Short, sweet, progress, I need these calm nights. We both do, considering our dressage lessons can sometimes be sweaty and emotional and challenging. Thank you, sweet mare, for a relatively straightforward night!