Hey, We Learnt Something

We are riding back from our usual haunts on Sunday morning lamenting how people are dumping garbage all along our riding area. I can't figure out what makes people think it's okay to dump their shit anywhere they want. We all pay for trash pickup through our property taxes. They can't use that system?

Anyway, we are riding along and there is this wooden frame thing that is about two feet wide by three feet long. I make the joke that we would try and do a spin inside it. Ranae says we could do a turn keeping two feet inside the box. So, we turn around and I try it first with Jessie's front feet inside the box. She does well and we go both directions.

Ranae wants to try it with Dusty's back feet in the box. Ah, much more challenging! She gets his back feet in the box and starts to yield the forequarters around. At about the halfway mark he steps one of his back feet out of the frame. Ranae stops and tries to get him back in the box. She does and finishes the circle in that direction and says how hard it was to tell where Dusty's feet were and how she needed to move only one back foot. I remembered some Pat Parelli (I think) show a long time ago where he touched one side of the horse's muzzle to move the opposite back foot. I told Ranae as she was in the box, that when Dusty's foot came out, let's try asking for a backup and picking up the opposite rein of the foot we wanted to move. It worked! She needed to back his left rear back in the box. She asked for the backup while picking up the right rein and he moved his left hoof back in the frame. We tried it with Jessie and it worked on her too.

It's still hard for us to figure out on our own which foot needs to be moved, but it was fun figuring out we could move just one back foot at a time.

Here's a thirty second video of how Jessie goes back to her pen after her bath at the end of our ride: