Howdy in a cheeky moment

The Iowa Horse Fair is next weekend and I am going to present several sessions whose topics will be jumping, eventing and foxhunting.  Fun flyer.  I’ve presented jumping seminars before and I’ve learned that while it is interesting for people to watch an example of very good jumping, they are fascinated, entertained and amused if you present them with an imperfect horse and show them how to react to mistakes and how to train the horses.

And so Howdy and Bravado are going to the Horse Fair to learn how to jump, in public.  Both horses were racing at Prairie Meadows last summer and Bravado has started the very basics of jumping.  Here’s his big accomplishment for today:

Yep, those are 1′ jumps with placing poles.  Wheeeee!

I spent a pleasant hour today helping him to learn how to navigate these jumps in a relaxed manner, and at the end we were both grinning.  Now mind you, plenty left to learn at the Horse Fair.  We never were balanced enough to do two jumps in a row.

Meanwhile, Howdy and I yesterday started with simple poles on the ground between standards.  We started out walking over them and the first few times were actually quite dramatic, with crookedness and a bit of balking and then some over-exuberance.  By the end he was trotting over them in a relaxed manner, about which I was very pleased.  I untacked him and left him loose in the sandy indoor to roll.  I came back from putting his tack away and he was on the other side of the arena.  He was just shaking off from a roll and when he saw me he put his ears up and started cantering to me.  I thought that was charming, of course, anybody would.  But he won my heart, the cheeky thing, when he altered his course so that he would canter right over one of the poles on the ground on his way to me – ears up with a “look what I can do” expression.  This one’s gonna be fun.