First horse a wild horse-what was I thinking?

Shazaam!

I've ridden horses since I was five. Generally school horses. Some were really nice expensive Andalusians and I'm half Spanish and that particular breed of horse has always been to me a horse far above many other horses for their high intelligence and the bar by which I measure all horses I've ever delt with. My last horse experience was a trail ride on a mare with a nasty attitude (the ride was uneventful) when I was about 23 years old.

Fast forward 12 years. I'm married to a wonderful military man and we are stationed in CA- the desert no less! I find that owning horses out here is fairly inexpensive given the fact that there is no pasture to feed them with and after being here a couple of months and turning down a couple of offers for horses that are middle aged and green broke I buy a 3 1/2 year old Strawberry Roan Mustang Gelding named Shazaam for the price of his adoption and his gelding.

Shazaam was captured by the BLM August 15, 2002 out of NV-504 Miller Flat and was adopted out March 3, 2003.









When I got him August 29, 2005 he did not look like a coming 4 year old, he looked like 2 year old. He had had minimal to no work done with him and although he did have a bit of ground work on him he was barely leading on the near side and not at all on the off side. He looks cresty here and the answer to this is that he was gelded at age 3 and he doesn't really know that he's not a stud colt anymore. Well I've never trained a horse before. Honestly, a few good horses taught me how to ride and a few bad ones taught me to ride better. Given that he'd had over two years of just having food tossed to him, any fooling with him I did was better than nothing. So I groomed him alot and started despooking him by tying an American Flag to his pipe corral, tying plastic bags to the bushes around his pen, walking him through tires and over planks of wood.

He was a very spooky horse and is the type that drops and then jumps sideways before he spins to run away. All I could think was "I gotta fix that before I get on and getting on seems like it will be a long ways away from now".

Shazaam is a very interested and intelligent horse, and his curiosity and supple mind, along with his wonderful friendly personality is what would accelerate our progress. Ok so I had to be there to present the lessons.

I got my hands on books and videos and horse boards and lists to learn as much as I could soak up (and still AM- I'm a ways off still on being a good horsewoman).

My learning materials so far:

Clinton Anderson: Downunder horsemanship for western and english riders and longing for respect video
John Lyons: Roundpen reasoning video and perfect horse magazine
Monty Roberts: From my hands to yours book
Marv Walker: Everything the man has on video and his email list.
Alexandra Kurland: The click that teaches in pictures
Bill Dorrance and Leslie Desmond: True horsemanship through feel
Mark Rashid: Horses Never Lie
Sgt. Rick Peliciano: Bombproof your horse

As you can see this is a very broad base for learning and I think every resource is valuable for putting tools in my training tool box. Since I train dogs and rehab shelter dogs I like having many tools to pull from because some methods are excepted better by different individuals and to me a good trainer has many possible answers to a single problem. Perhaps its going back to Dorrance's "feel" and having a few ways of presenting things can help the trainer offer a better feel to the individual.

Roundpenning has been the most difficult thing to get Shazaam to accept. I found out, talking with other mustang owners that mustangs are harder to roundpen because of their heightened flight instinct. Marv Walker has been the only trainer out there who's methods of roundpenning work for me and my horse. Since using Marv's methods in the roundpen Shazaam is more respectful, compliant, and patient. He also trusts me more to take care of all the potential scary things in life instead of having to determine for himself that a thing is scary or not.

Before this, it took me a month of desensitization work to get a winter blanket on Shazaam, so convincing him that I'm a good leader really pays off! Here he is being "Bondered" as Marv calls it in a 120' X 120' foot pet in December of 2005. The pen is too big but it worked fine for me this day.

Now that I'm up to speed journaling over the last 4 1/2 months I'll post our lessons as we have them.