One thing I've discovered abut Maya is she is ALWAYS in heat. Every time that I have taken her to the arena to work with her and she sees Skeeter an admittedly gorgeous quarter horse she has to stop and present herself and spray. Ewww... This is almost as much of a distraction for her as her obsessive need to eat anything that she sees that even resembles vegetation including branches from the pecan tree and any misc leaves or weeds that happen to be in the arena or on the way to the arena. It's the first day of Autumn and it's been a dry summer with a CA drought not permitting extra watering so I get that she is really missing having grass to graze on. I hope that we will have enough rain this year to keep the fields green for a bit.
So I brought her out, no chase to get her caught, she seems to come to me eagerly now. Max blew through the gate after us... Must start locking the middle gate so he can't get past me, he's too smart for his own good. Surprisingly Maya didn't react much to a loose Max just rummaged around looking for grass to eat while Mathew caught Max and took him back to their shared pasture.
Standing still for grooming is an issue for Maya. She wants to be into everything, she moves around and looks at stuff and if I walk away she follows as far as she can. This is a little unnerving due to the potential for her to get her head bumped or caught on something.
We fly sprayed with success.
I was able to scratch inside both of her ears and apply flyspray to her right ear. Her left she is far more wary of though. So I will work on it.
In the arena we worked on:
Friendly game with stick and string
Porcupine
Driving
Yo-yo
Circle
Skeeter got into the arena and decided to run around bucking and to my delight Maya startled just a tad but did not pull away or attempt to take off. Once again I called up Mathew to catch the naughty horse and get him out of the arena.
Once Skeeter was out I put the bareback pad onto Maya and proceeded to do friendly and circle games to see how she would do.
She was great. I did the friendly game extra long because she appears to allow me to do things without actually relaxing or accepting so it took a bit to get her to lick and chew.
Then I took her to the mounting block and practiced having her stand close to it with me on it. I messed with her, jumped up and down, put weight on her. All of this she took in stride, no craziness.
After I let her touch things and made various weird sounds to see if she would startle which she does but doesn't go crazy, just looks up and then if I do it enough calms down.
Progress is being made for sure.
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