I had not taken Lily out on trail ride in several months. It has been one of those “ought to’s” in the back of my mind, but there has just been too much going on. I usually trail ride with my trainer and she has been too busy with her summer camp.
However, she takes Wednesday as her day off, and asked me if I wanted to go out. Lily had been a little too enthusiastic on Tuesday, since I hadn’t been riding her enough last week due to the heat, but had chilled out again today, so I agreed to a 20 minute trail ride and worked for a while in the arena while my trainer got Havoc ready. Havoc is her 22 year old Thoroughbred and former show hunter. He looks like an old dude horse on the trail most of the time these days, except when he doesn’t. My trainer would probably let me trail ride Havoc if I asked her, but I haven’t ever quite gotten up the nerve to do so. I’ve seen Havoc forget his age and do airs above the ground too many times over the past decade. If I want to trail ride a Thoroughbred, I’ve got Hap.
Lily at six is a better trail horse than Hap was at sixteen. It must be all those quarter horse genes: she is just so sensible about it all. She strolls along calmly looking around at everything, but rarely worried by anything. Hap used to walk along looking for the next thing to be spooked by. On one extremely calm day, he couldn’t find any of his normal triggers. He finally spooked at butterfly drifting up from a bush.
Our 20 minute stretched into much longer because we stopped to let the horses graze occasionally. A lot of people won’t let their horses eat with a bit in their mouth, but I have never known a horse to have trouble choking. Horses that would rather graze than move can be a problem, so I am very clear about when grazing is permitted and when it is not. For horses on dry lot, it is nice to let them get out and graze on “wild grasses” even if they get plenty of good hay.
We did a few little training exercises while we were out. We worked on walking through ditches, which doesn’t sound very exciting. Lily is good about this: I am the one who needs help. While working on crossing ditches not long after I got Hap, he bucked me off and sprained my ankle. I’ve been paranoid about ditches ever since, and not just on Hap. The basic rule for ditches is that when walking, the horse must walk down and walk up, with no scrambling or breaking into a faster gait. When Lily gets to the top of the opposite side of the ditch, she gets a click and a treat if she stayed in a balanced walk throughout.
On the way back, we had another unscheduled training session when Lily abruptly dodged left, almost going into Havoc’s right shoulder. I realized that she had avoided stepping into a slightly damp stretch of darker soil on the path. I asked my trainer if we had time to work on it, and she thought it was a great opportunity for me to learn to direct Lily where she didn’t want to go, and for Lily to learn that she could trust me not to direct her into danger. At first, I couldn’t get Lily to go to the end of the patch, so we started by crossing one end where it was narrow at a ninety degree angle.
Each time she went nearer the worrisome spot, I gave her a click and a treat. One of the advantages of clicker training is that the act of eating itself tends to calm horses, and a clicker trained horse learns to enter a psychological safe zone during a session, probably a form of classical conditioning.
After she started calmly crossing the damp slice of trail at a ninety degree angle, I started approaching it at increasingly oblique angles so she crossed the trail for slightly longer periods of time. Each time she crossed quietly she got a click and a treat. If she scooted or jumped, I just brought her around calmly and made the same approach again. Within ten minutes of the original shy, she walked calmly down the section that had spooked her initially. She took the last treat standing on the patch that had so worried her.
Did she wonder why, with thousands of acres around, I was making such a big deal of walking on one small stretch of trail?