January 31, 2009
She’s getting more confident with me in the stall, and today I walked around behind her twice without her moving to keep an eye on me! We turned her out this afternoon with Deo, who could almost not care less!, and then let Caspian out with her, too. Wow, he was being just nasty! He’s usually the happy-go-lucky one, but he was running after her and chasing her very aggressively, multiple times.
We ended up moving all three horses to the arena which is a much bigger and more open area so that they could run around. It was much better in there – then Maia was able to run away and Caspian didn’t seem like he felt so threatened by her.
After several hours in there, I took Maia back to the paddock so she could get used to the fencing on her own, without the others. She shocked herself a few times pretty well and then definitely avoided the fence, which was excellent. What was so interesting was that she was following me around, seeing me as the comfort. She wasn’t right on top of me, but definitely wherever I’d go in the paddock, she’d come to be in that general area and not stray too far away. That went on for a long time! It also seems that she responds to body language better than Caspian or Deo, for whatever reason – she’s more in tune, not desensitized to it, younger, what have you – but it’s much easier to communicate that way with her than with either of them.
In fact, we had a little discussion at one point using only body language (the rope wasn’t always 100% slack, but that was more by coincidence; I wasn’t really using it): I wanted her to come into the barn with me to go to her stall, and she said, no, she wanted to go back to the paddock, and then almost entirely by body language I kept on asking her to come and she’d flip her nose and want to turn back, and I’d say no, come with me, and we both kept it up for a little bit. And then, she followed me quietly into her stall!
