Day 42: November 30 - Big and Little Circles

Well, to look on the bright side today, Poncho didn't get completely mad at me when we worked on the circles. It's hard because he seems to really hate the circles, but he's also not very good at them. I called my dad and asked him how we've gotten our horses to go in round circles, because I honestly don't remember having much problem making a round one. I think my biggest problem when I was in 4-H was making them round instead of oblong, but that was my fault, not my horse's. He told me that it just takes a lot of hours of doing circles, and they will eventually figure it out. That's basically what Brother Twitchell said too. But, I think the difference is that when we trained our horses, we did a lot more lunging in the round pen. In the round pen, they were forced to make circles around us. I know that Parelli says that lunging is brainless, and that it doesn't really do anything to help the horse, but that is one thing that I have to disagree on. If you were to just run them around one direction all the time, and never let them stop and have a reward, then yes that is brainless, and it doesn't help him at all. But, the way we do it is a lot better. We ask them to go different speeds, which helps them to maintain gait, we switch directions very often, and we stop them often. And, if we have driving reins on them, which we do after the first part of training them, then we also begin teaching them to back up. I know that the same principles apply when we are riding, and asking them to do circles. After so many, they will eventually figure it out, but I believe that it is much easier to do that work before you get on, so by the time you ride them, they are already starting to figure out how to go in a circle, and it doesn't take nearly as much work or energy on your part to get a nice round circle.

Anyway, my point is that Poncho needs hours of work on circles to get them to be truly round, but it only takes a couple of "circles" before he mentally checks out, so I'm not really sure what to do about it. He's getting better, and they are almost round most of the time, but they still aren't up to the standards that I'm used to expecting. After quite a bit of trying though, we did eventually lope a big circle and trot a small one. They still weren't actually round, and he was unhappy about it the whole time, and he broke gait some while loping, but at least we got through it without completely messing it up. Again, I really hope we can get it better before the final.