Well, I didn't get to work with my mustang for the last week and a half. Between going to a Montana horse sale and building another round pen and corrals at a new location, that didn't leave any time to work with Ali at all. I had a vacationing friend from California help me build my solid wood round pen and a corral. Without his help it would have taken me a lot longer.
I rode Ali the last couple days and was very glad she did well and hadn't regressed any. I taught her to load into a trailer. She wasn't excited to go into the trailer at all...probably because of her last time in the trailer was a long old trip! But aftera stretch of time lunging her, she decided the trailer wasn't a bad place to be. She realized she could rest in the trailer and not have to work. After a 1/2 hour or so she was loading and unloading in the trailer. Eventually, she was turning around in the 3-horse slant and also backing out. She completely retained everything from the trailer loading lesson because the next day, she loaded into the trailer with ease and we headed to the BLM ground behind my house. While I was riding another horse she stayed in the trailer for a while and I was so proud of her because she didn't paw or wasn't impatient at all. You would have never known she was in there.
I rode her out on the BLM desert for a little over and hour. She was very cautious about all of the sage brush and navigating through steep empty canals. She was very watchy and would pause to check things out. We past some grates in the empty canal and she thought they were "the devil." She didn't spook, but she was very scared to walk by them. I had a friend that was riding with me and Ali was not too concerned about other riders. She didn't really want to leave my friend's horse as I tried to ride off on my own because the other horse was her safety net. We managed to go on our own independent route on occasion. She was pretty unsure where to put her feet as we were navigating up and down hills. It kind of suprised me because mustangs are known to be very sure-footed. I know she will be fine as time progresses and we travel out into the big wide open spaces. Tomorrow I hope to go out into the desert again with her.
A funny thing happened that I thought I would mention, I was laying Ali down on Tuesday right about the time the school bus came to drop off the neighbor kids. She went down right when the bus pulled up. All of the kids on the bus had their faces pressed against the windows. And the little neighbor girl ran up all excited, "Is your mustang dead, Matt?!" It was pretty funny. I guess Ali went down and was so relaxed all of the kids thought she had died right in front of them!
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