Quarter horse meet draft horse

This is what I found when I got to the barn to bring in the quarters tonight, quarter horses and draft horses communing (Okay, yes, only the horses without blankets are drafts, but those were the horses the quarters were talking to). They sure are a super friendly pair of horses.

Coriander has thoroughly caught onto me. He has figured out that Gwen always goes in first and he's not happy about it. Normally, if I act fast, I can get Gwen out the gate and keep him in. Not tonight. He squirted around me and got out of the pasture before I could catch him. He then proceeded to proudly parade himself up to the barn while I scrambled after him with his halter and Gwen. He really was quite pleased with himself. I've said it before and I will definitely say it again, he's a crafty thing.

After we got in the barn and I got him corralled back into his stall I took Gwen back out to the arena to work on targeting at liberty. She wasn't great today, it took her a while to chill out and come to me. She's all riled up about being in a stall next to her brother again and has backslid a bit. But that's okay, maybe this can work to my advantage. I want to try targeting with her in her stall while her brother is cross-tied at the other end of the barn. If I can get her to target while he's taken away from her instead of her being taken away from him maybe we could make some real progress. That might be the key. Then again, it might not but I won't know until I try.

I pulled my crafty boy out tonight and worked on setting up for halter. I need to remember to keep doing this. It takes us a few minutes to get square and if I want to show him we need to get it a heck of a lot quicker than that. It's going to take repetition, repetition, and more repetition. But he's got a good start on ground tying. I square him up, tell him to "whoa" and step back. I can actually get a couple steps in before he moves. My goal is to square him up and get him to stand still for long enough for me to get a conformation picture of him while ground tied. I think that would be pretty cool.

I tried a bit of the exercise yesterday that Mary commented about and I'll work on it again for sure. I can see how it'll work to keep her from mugging me and teach ground tying at the same time. Good stuff.