Continuing the Starting of Zeke

I am continuing starting Curly Zeke which I began as a long 3 year old, after the diagnosis of this gelding missing his lateral patella ligaments on both back legs. So the plan is to work him on the ground to build up his endurance and muscularity and minimize or at least carefully watch how much time I spend on his back as to reduce the burden on him. I give him one to two days off between sessions to let him rest and any residual inflammation from his patella joint injections and Adequan IM injections, I am reminded every time I work him that it's a shame that such a good minded horse, with otherwise great conformation, had the bad luck to born without these ligaments.

In exposing a horse to new things it is easy to overload the horse and when the fear and flight instinct dominate it is practically impossible to change his thought or reaction process until he can come down from the height of his fear. Generally, when beginning to expose the horse to a scary object, his body language lets us know that the horse is beginning to exhibit concern or even fear, and, it lets us know when to stop, retreat if necessary, then proceed (sometimes by inches). Such body language is stopping forward momentum; tension in the horse's body and even weight leaning backwards about like he's going to do a turn on the rear end; head comes up to elevate line of sight and see directly of the center of the eye; ears turned and pointed forward; and, the horse quickly and nervously looking left and right and to his rear. These are major things the rider or handler on the ground can observe.

So the reason we expose horse's to things that are bothersome or fearful to them is to try and exercise the thinking side of their brain as opposed to the reactive side. Horses are doing to be different and the level on what scares them. Working in our favor is the horse's natural sense of curiosity. One of Zeke's really good points is his curiosity and acceptance of new things. In between short session of lunging or riding him I have been experimenting on what he accepts and just how fast he does it. The ever present West Texas wind was blowing a meal bucket against a tie rail making a lot of racket when I had him tied to the trailer using a Functional Tie Ring. Zeke would glance between himself from time to time, so I untied him and led him to the offending bucket. And even though the noise and movement of the bucket was pretty loud, he walked right over and punched it with his nose. We just stayed there for maybe 30 seconds until he was distracted at something else, then we went back to what we were doing.

During breaks in the working sessions, I have sacked him out with a crinkly bag, pulled a cans of tin cans and with minimal ground work with ropes all over his body and legs, I have thrown loops off of him. The videos below of exposing him to the crinkly bag and pulling the sack of cans were the first time each that he had been exposed to that stimulus. In the video throwing a loop off him, that was the second time I had done so.