Yesterday Josepha and I (and of course Ralph and Owen!) went to Bianca for a top-secret AND meeting...
Already in november/december we had the idea to make video of our training sessions and then turn them into small, five minute educational movies about the exercises of AND for YouTube and the Groundwork section of the forum.
So yesterday it was Bianca's and Josepha's turn and they were great! Owen's golden coat was an exact match with Bianca's yellow sand arena where we trained, and was the best example of a starting AND riding horse. He also showed the first tiny steps to piaffe
and was just looking very happy all the time. The best part I thought was when he suddenly walked away from Josepha, to a piece of white plastic tape that was lying in the corner, after which Josepha immediately understood the hint and turned it into a Tiger, with Owen chasing it it walk and trot. Even if what Owen did wasn't very spectacular of wild, as he had just that week had had problems breathing again, he was the best example of how happy and relaxed horses can be when you train them at liberty or with a cordeo.
Bianca first tried to do stuff with Evita, but Evita just wanted to hang out with the new golden boy and wasn't interested in anything else at all, so then Bianca decided to try it with Imperia instead, who hadn't been trained in AND before as she's only two years old. She did great! She understood the running along immediately and wanted to do nothing else but handing over her bucket to Bianca. After that (and new rain- and thunderstorms) we decided to give Evita one more chance - and she decided to finally join the fun too (having seen so many good examples
), and showed everything that we could possibly want her to do, from collected canter and a beginning pirouette to the bow and kneeling down.
So I'm afraid they really raised the bar for when Blacky, Sjors and I are the victims...
But it was great to see Josepha and Bianca with their beauties at work, which gave me lots of new ideas for training at home too!
And the rest of you just have to wait a couple of weeks for the videos, heheheh...