Cob Jockey

Thank you all for your kind words on my last post. That was one of the toughest and scariest things I've ever been through, and while I wouldn't say things are back to normal, things are definitely trending in the right direction.

So where did we leave our intrepid heroes? Up first, baby Disco.

Very unofficial weight/height tape reading of 12.3hh and 575lbs this week

Baby Disco continues to be a good baby, with no complaints whatsoever from any of the co-op members. In general, our current training "themes" right now are 1. giving humans personal space, and 2. beginning to push him outside his emotional comfort zone.

He finds humans utterly fascinating and often chooses to stay with people over being with other horses, grazing, eating dinner or playing with his toys. Which is awesome and I don't want to dissuade him from that, but he does need to learn that he can't be all up in your business. Which is hard, because it's genuinely difficult to spook him, lol. I can come at him with my arms above my head and he just throws his head a little higher and stands there like, "...and?"

Baby's first snowfall

I'm also starting to push him outside his comfort zone. For the first 90 days he was here, my goals were to get him settled into the routine, teach him that this is a safe place, and develop only the skills he needed to be a solid co-op citizen (leading, catching, etc). And it's worked - in mid-January, Mary noted that he finally has the old swagger back that he had at Lisa's before he was weaned.

Doing proprioception exercises with Mary

But now that that's established, I want to start pushing his boundaries a bit, helping him think through new situations and learn how to handle his Feelings. It's not something I'm just throwing him in the deep end on, but at least once a week I try to introduce him to a new object, concept or place on the farm.

New toys:

New feelings under his feet:

No videos of it, but he crossed this bridge with me the very first night I introduced it. Since then, we've worked on putting front feet on and backing off (simulating a straight load trailer), and we've started working on putting his front feet on and having him move his hind feet.

Um, MORE, new toys:

This one's not gonna last long and that's okay.

Adventures in hard tying:

With Mary there to help, I hard tied him for the first time yesterday, with the help of a Blocker tie ring on the lowest pressure setting. He was absolutely perfect with the right instinct to step forward to release pressure when the line went taut, he just got mad when he realized tying was 1. boring and 2. not something he could get out of. But he needs to start getting used to confinement, and he needs to learn how to manage his emotions related to that, so I was happy with the whole session.

Clipping: 

Rubbed the running clippers all over his body with no problems, even his flanks!

Although I didn't expect him to be so ticklish about trimming his goat beard! Lesson learned.

Bonk, lol. Totally not malicious and not Disco's fault.

Can't really ask for more from such a good baby!