Guess what?! I found another thing that Poncho likes to do! He likes jumping! The focus of class today was for the horses to maintain gait. So, they had some ground poles, and a jump set up around the arena. We started by just trotting over the poles. Once they were doing a good job of maintaining that, we went into two-point and trotted over the poles that way.
It didn't take too long for us to get that pretty good, so then we went over the jump. We've jumped some before, but he just seemed to really like it today. He started getting tired because by that point we'd been trotting for quite a while, so after we went over the jump, I let him just sit for a while. Once he'd rested a little we went over it a few more times. Eventually we loped over it, and it wasn't even hard to get him to lope! He was excited to jump, so he loped happily from one end of the arena all the way to the middle where the jump was set up!
So, I think I've figured out how to get him to have more energy, and to be happy about going faster. I just need to find things he likes, and get him to do that. If he's not focusing on the fact that we're loping because he's having fun, maybe it'll help him be ok with loping when there's not a jump or some other obstacle.
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