No More

Well, at least the benefit of having two horses is that you almost always have at least one sound/uninjured horse.

Misty injured herself again. She is a definite escape artist and has figured out how to get out of her paddock that she usually goes into. We started using her lead rope to tie it shut as a safe guard, but now she just unties that as well. I guess today when she busted her way out, the part of the latch that sticks out caught her in the shoulder and ripped a little hole in it. I've asked that she no longer gets put in that paddock because it's the one with the crappy gate. 

Blue Kote'd owie

Over the weekend, Jetta had a lovely, HUGE bug bite that my BO texted me about. I guess she turned her out without her fly sheet and she had three bites right next to eachother which triggered a big reaction. And that is why she wears the sheet...

Oh mares, what am I going to do with you?!

Injuries aside, I had a good ride on Jetta today. After the last show I decided I needed to tweak how I'm riding her. While I always ask her to go on the bit, with her head on the vertical, tracking up and using her back, when we show, sometimes that doesn't quite happen because Jetta gets tense and she comes above the bit and we get dinged. And the light bulb finally went off in my head that at home I need to ride her a little more round than I would show her as because not only will that help her engage the correct muscles in her neck (some day we'll get rid of that awful under neck muscle she has, but I blame that on her constant head bobbing) but it will give us a few more degrees of flexion so when she tenses and wants to come above the bit at a show, she'll actually be right where she should be.

I believe this is something that I heard Steffan Peters talk about when I audited a clinic with him. That: "Every horse should be ridden with a different headset in training depending on their needs. If they want to carry their head high, ride them with a lower neck and if they want to keep their neck too low, then ride them higher." It's also something I've had trainers drill into me, but for some reason it never stuck...

Today however, I think it was a success. I rode Jetta a little more round and afterwards her neck sweat pattern went much higher up her neck than just the underside and she was even sweaty at the base of her withers which meant she was lifting the base of her neck!

Foamy lips

I also gained a new appreciation for my farrier. She's not able to come out until next week but both horses are starting to chip and since I have the trail competition this weekend I thought I'd clean up their edges so they don't look so raggedy. Holy cow. I never want to be a farrier. I did a slightly less than mediocre job smoothing out Jetta's hooves and managed to do all four before I called it a day. My back hurt, my knees hurt, Jetta was being a jerk, sweat was dripping everywhere and my smoothing job was barely passable. It does actually look better than it was though. Tomorrow I attempt to tackle Misty's hooves... I can't imagine doing more than one horse a day.