This post was supposed to go up in November. I’m not sure what happened!
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I really need to make a new video documenting Midas’ and my continued skill development at liberty. I imagine it would show improvement “come” in particular. I haven’t been able to think of how to teach him to go to x spot and stay there, and I’ve been debating about trying things like rearing or laying down–not sure I want those tricks in his arsenal! But it could be cool.
You can watch a video of us here, I made it last November with the help of my mom. It’s been hard to get something like that in since I’ve been traveling a lot or bringing my friend’s little girls to ride him.
It’s good for him to be socialized with the tiny humans, he’s definitely fond of their visits. And, I gotta say, having a horse trained such that I can control him from across the ring makes me feel a lot better about putting a tiny 6 year old on a 16hh Midas. He’s been nothing but a gentleman to her, which is so fun to watch.
I digress.
We got started on this journey because, well, who wouldn’t want to walk a horse without a rope? Also, it was the only thing I could think of to do to teach the freight train horse to stop without pulling on him. I went to a Tommy Turvey clinic, showed my trainer how far Midas and I had gotten on our own, she told me to buy Clinton Anderson’s Down Under Horsemanship, and away we went.
I really found the book Down Under Horsemanship easy to use and understand–though when I have looked up Anderson’s training videos I wasn’t wild about the way he uses his own methods.
