You Get Out What You Put In

The past few days Sonny and I have been doing a whole lot of nothing. But... everything means something and nothing means nothing. I really felt the affects of that today when we had a short play session at liberty.

Liberty is by far my favorite savvy; there is something special about not having anything but a bond connecting you and your horse. Especially an LBI, who would much rather be rolling, eating, or not moving at all. To think that Sonny would rather stick with me and do things together rather than stand over by the gate is extremely rewarding and a huge compliment...especially when the arena you are playing in is bigger than a dressage arena which provides a huge amount of area to get away from me if he wanted. Sonny and I never 'officially' started liberty like we did online and freestyle. Since I have never had a round pen, what liberty I do is very minimal and mostly just small things. But, today was definitely very special.

Rather than go off and roll when we first got to the arena, he stuck right with me even though he was at liberty. We started with small things like sideways over a cone or played with our new 'Up' trick. We were really connected today, like he was reading my mind but not in the way that he was assuming things.

There was a small jump set up, only like 6 inches high. Sonny is an expert at getting out of doing things that require energy, so I haven't asked him to jump at liberty since we haven't mastered him offering to jump online. So I started to walk him up to it and was going to go sideways in front of it, but we were so in tune! I just leaned my body and he went sideways so he would be in front of the jump. It was like we were completely in sync. I pointed to the jump, he trotted right over it then came back to me with BOTH ears forward! I was blown away! Not only did he happily go over the jump when he could have so easily went around it, he came back to me respectfully and happy! WOW!

I really believe that today was a direct result of all the time we have spent together just grazing recently. Not only did it give him (and me!) a break physically and mentally, it strengthened our bond and helped him put more effort in the time we spend playing together. Now I will put more effort into making it easier for him to put more effort in. I see a lot of undemanding time in our future!