Thursday 6th March

Well the past couple of weeks I haven’t done anything really with Blossom as I have been having problems with Aicha travelling so all my spare time has been spent with Aicha in the lorry and trailer.

I have been playing with her a bit in the stable when I am grooming her and changing her rugs etc. She seems to really respect me more now when I am in the stable with her, I have been making a point of making sure I get permission to enter the stable before I go in. Instead of just putting her halter on and getting on with what I need to do with her, I have been playing firiendly game with the CS I then porcupine the FQ and HQ then play driving game with her. Then rub her all over with the halter before I ask her to put the halter on. Just spending this extra few minutes with her as really made a difference, she now stands perfect and lets me groom her and rug her up without any problems – which is just great!


Tonight I hoped to go out and play with Blossom, I feel really bad that I haven’t done anything with her. But typical for some reason the outside light in the yard didn’t come on, so I would have been in total darkness if I went out to play. So instead I played with holding her tongue in the stable. I done some pre checks using the carrot stick in her mouth before I used my hand. She seemed to really understand what I was asking her to do and soon relaxed her mouth and allowed me to hold her tongue without any problems.

I didn’t want to do too much of this with her so I decided to move on to asking her to smell her tail – I had never tried this before so I thought it would be a good idea to use treats to encourage her to bring her head round – Bad Idea! Blossom worked out really quickly that if she brought her head round she got a treat, but it ended up she was just interested in the treats and wasn’t thinking about why she was getting them. She then became quite dominant and I had to work really hard to protect my space, as she was just interested in getting in my pockets to get the treats. So we abandoned smell your tail, and I played with the first four games to get her interest back on me before I finished, as I didn’t want to finish on a bad note.