April 12 -13: Practice, practice, practice and Toby gets a Pedicure

Marti Szczur







Continuing to work on my position and doing bending exercises. I am getting more upright and finding it easier to keep legs draped and feet pointing straight ahead. Still a work in progress, though. 

 

Linda introduced “leg yield made easy” where you don’t even need to use your legs! Swivel the headlights on your knuckles, while keeping wrists straight, in direction you want to go. Feeling is sort of like sliding the whole horse over. Horse needs to stay straight (parallel to rail) as does the rider. 

 

Did some canter departs, which Toby does quite well. For some reason, I have no problem keeping my upper body upright when cantering. Linda will tweak a few things later this week or next to get it more refined.





 

In the afternoon, Tony Vaught, who is Linda’s farrier, and gave a talk at the HHHL Conference on April 2nd, came to Happy Horse Haven. He was nice enough to take time to look at Toby and give him a trim. I learned a lot from watching and asking questions. He spends a lot of time examining the horse before he starts to trim. He lays ropes (invented by Jim Crew of Healthy Stride) over the shoulders, barrel, loins, and hips to make it easy to see when anything is out of alignment.  He then uses pads for the horse to step on to help in determining how best to trim the hoof to improve the horse’s balance and/or alignment. Toby was not seriously crooked, but he found that by trimming more from the medial  (inside) of hoof, his leg rested straighter. This was true for all hooves except the left fore, which was even on all sides of hoof, so he just gave it a level trim.

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