Way Back Wednesday: 5 years ago

When we lived in Washington, the final barn I boarded at was a wonderful place run by some really fun people. It was a family friendly barn, multi-disciplinary, and truly truly a relaxed place (for me). There was some drama with boarders, but overall it was pretty great.

One thing that I appreciated was that the person who ran the place, Dani, (she leased the property) was a pretty good groundwork trainer (I loathe to say natural horsemanship, but it would apply, she used her own amalgamation of methods). One of the boarders, Beth, was also a good trainer who reminds me a lot of Dom, if Dom primarily rode western. Both of them had some good horse sense and I really respected their opinions.

Dani decided that she was going to host a groundwork clinic every wednesday evening for anyone to attend. It was something like 10$ a session and was open to anyone and she would even provide a horse if you didn't have one or couldn't trailer one in. Gwyn and I did pretty much every session.

What was really cool (for me, again) was that the things I was doing in those clinics were also things that Dom was talking about on her blog at the time, while she was working with Booger, I think. And I also super respect Dom's opinion on horses so to have the ideas reinforced just really made the whole thing very impactful.

At one point, Beth came in to teach us about round penning. They set up the roundpen in the covered arena and used participant horses to teach us about body language and pressure and allowing the horse to come to you and also guiding the pressure release to get them moving where you wanted them moving. At some point, Gwyn got pulled in to use as a demo.

So Beth was working Gwyn and Dani was narrating from the side of the roundpen. She's short, so she was sitting on the top panel pole. I'll quote my livejournal entry for the incident

we were just listening to Dani talk about how some horses will look for any way to escape before giving in and with these big horses they know they're big and might try to head for a panel so we should make a lot of noise to keep her away. 5 minutes later, Gwyn is heading straight for me. I tried to push her off initially, but she was determined to go over, so I went sideways.

I was standing at the gate to the roundpen and Beth put pressure on Gwyn. Gwyn, having had enough of circles, decided that -I- was the way to the escape and jumped the panel, folding it as you see in the picture. I remember having my hands on her chest and ducking out of the way and then just praying that she got her legs free from the panels. She had a small surface scrape, but never took a lame step and what I thought was drips of blood on her hooves was just red paint transfer from the metal.

I look back with laughs now. It wasn't even the first panel gate she jumped over.