Tuesday 11th December

Tonight I set up some obstacles in the field and also had the trailer hooked up to play with.

We started of in the field and done a little work on our porcupine game, I haven't been doing this very much the last couple of weeks and it shows. Blossom is now trying to move forward away from the pressure instead of yielding, so we will need to keep working on this. We played with putting a foot in a tyre, she was pretty unconfident to start with but as soon as she realised what I was asking her to do she relaxed! We the moved on to playing on the 22ft rope, we started with the circling game and then moved on to the yo yo game. She trotted back to me tonight, I was so excited!!

We then moved on to the trailer and played on the ramp, using circles and squeeze games. She didn't seem very confident tonight, so we played with this a bit longer than we normally do, until I felt she was confident enough to go in.
She went straight in after the third send, so we retreated and went back to play in the field. We played with the tarp, well the gazebo side. We started with just walking over it, then moved on to asking her to stop and wait on it. Then we moved back to the trailer, she was playing up quite a bit tonight. I'm still not sure if it is dominance or fear.. What I have been doing is letting her leave if she wants as I don't want to make it about the trailer, and so she feels trapped. But then I ask her back round, she tends to run to the other side if the trailer again. Once I get more firm with her and get her to relax again at the bottom of the ramp we play some friendly game, then she tends just to walk in herself. So we then retreated and went to play in the field again doing figure of eight around the barrels, she is getting good at this now. Then we went back to the trailer and she went in, so I played with her going in a step out a step.

She seems to be getting more confident every time we play, but I still don't feel she is ready for the back bar or the ramp up yet..