Alice's trip to South Carolina: Week 2

My second week at Avalo has been great. Last Tuesday evening we had a lesson about 'horsenalities' from Gen, a Parelli instructor from Canada who is staying at Avalo for a while with her 3 horses to avoid the Canadian weather! The lesson was really interesting, it's an idea that I had heard about before but had never really appreciated. Horses fit into one of four horsenalities: right brain extrovert (reactive and like to go fast), right brain introvert (obedient but timid and untrusting), left brain introvert (calm and confident but needs motivation to work) and left brain extrovert (confident and playful but easily bored). Each horse normally has traits from more than one horsenality, but they usually have one that they fit into the most, and some horses show the traits in a more extreme way than others. Knowing which horsenality your horse is means you can deal with it more easily, for example if you have a left brain extrovert, you know that the best way of riding or training him/her would be to keep it interesting and varied so that you hold their attention. If I think back to horses I have ridden in the past, I can fit most of them into a certain horsenality and this explains why they behaved in a certain way.

Casanova doing a cross country on-line warm up.

On Wednesday we all went to a local cross country course. Emma and Michelle took horses and practiced over the jumps, I took photos and Anni filmed. Both of the horses we took were great. Before getting on the horses they were warmed up on-line (see previous post), so were jumping the fences without a rider- an unusual sight! Hopefully some time soon Anni and I will be able to take horses cross country.

We went to an eventing competition on cold and rainy Saturday (not that the weather really bothered me, being from England!) Michelle was competing and came 5th, and the other working students and I volunteered. I was dressage scribing (sitting with the dressage judge and writing down her comments and scores onto the score sheet) which was fun. It was really interesting to hear why the judge gave certain scores and what she thought of each horse.

Trail ride

We are located in such a good area for competing- Aiken (the nearby town) is a very horsey place and top level riders from the more northern states spend the winter around here to escape the cold, so there is loads going on- events every weekend less than a 30 minute drive away.

I went for my first trail ride on Sunday with Anni and Gen on the quiet dirt roads near the farm. The soil here is naturally really sandy which is perfect for horses- the kind of surface that people pay a lot of money to have in an arena! We used rope halters on the trail ride rather than bridles (I have only used a bridle twice in my whole time here so far) which is pretty cool, they're different to the headcollars that are normally used in traditional horsemanship and give you a lot of communication with the horse.

This morning we had a jumping lesson which was really good. I rode a mare called Teddy who I've been riding quite a lot, she's 20 and is the horse Michelle started Natural Horsemanship with. I have also been working with a few different horses on-line. Now that I know the 7 basic 'games' I am starting to try them out with other horses of differing horsenalities and levels of practice at the games.

Other than riding, we went food shopping yesterday (its so nice to have the choice of lots of new food in the fridge!), had to do some DIY and use a drill last week to put up some new electric fencing, and I have been watching DVDs about Natural Horsemanship. Emma and I planned to start working out every day but have only done it once so far and that was a week ago, so that's not going too well... I have been listening to lots of country music as that's what is generally played on the radio we have in the barn!

It was a quiet day on Sunday so I took pictures of the horses. Here are some of them: