Back at JRFS again!

Here we are again at James Roberts Foundation Station. It's been two and a half years since we were here before and there is now a tidy new hard standing area for parking and unloading so there was no risk of me demolishing the barn this time as I parked up.

This morning, Monday we watched James start to start Smoke, Liz's young horse. It didn't take long. After lunch James talked to us about what kind of horse we wanted to end up with (we all wanted a good riding horse) so he went through all the tools we needed like Passion, Vision, and Knowledge, then about the toolkit we need - we are not talking Black and Decker here and these ones are free.

Then we went to get our horses. Liquorice was standing by the water trough, pawing the ground. He couldn't get a drink from it as he had to partly put his head through the fence to get to the water. James said it wouldn't take longer than 3 days for him to get the idea and it would do his confidence a lot of good if I let him work it our for himself. Gulp!

After we had been through all the pre-saddling stages, James told us to see if we could get to the other side of our horse, withour our horse moving his feet and we could do it in a way he had never seen before we could have the week for free.

In desperation I climbed underneath Liqujorice but James said he had seen that before, There was, of course no way that was possible and that he hadn't seen before. It was a ruse to get us to use our imaginations to find ways to test the relationship we had with our horse. I was quite pleased, though, as I had always wanted to see if I could climb underneath Liquorice - don't know why!

So we have spent the evening doing our homework which is learning by heart the 8 Principles of Horsemanship and the 10 Qualities of a Horseman. James says that tomorrow we have to trot for ten minutes on both diagonals then puke over the gate!
Read about Day Two http://carrotsinmypocket.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/jrfs-day-two.html