The plan of action!

Muriel asked a question yesterday and this is my answer. The concensus of opinion among my very experienced friends is that they would have sent him back before two months were up! A professional showjumper or eventer couldn't afford to waste the time on him, he'd have gone long ago while they concentrated their efforts on something that made progress quicker. Jeanette Brakewell (British Team Member) said she'd get rid of him when I asked her, but she'd never heard of anything like him either!

I've not found anyone who has had a horse like this one, never mind actually worked through the problem. I ask everyone I meet! The real experts get rid - not because the horse won't be great in the end, but because they simply haven't time to wait without knowing for certain that they will eventually succeed. The ones who keep them give up jumping and stick to dressage. It's only idiots like me that actually try and see it through!

Superhubby and I had a long talk about him today. The thing that makes him so frustrating is how much we have achieved. Before the operation you'll remember that I was doubtful that he would actually enjoy jumping. He does now, and is very confident of his abilities. He will even jump when he doesn't much feel like it, when I tell him to. That's an enormous distance from where we were in October. What we have left is this over-reaction where he takes an enormous dislike to something apparently innoccuous, and insists that he has the right to decide what to do about it. That's a pretty fatal flaw in an eventer if we can't sort it.

But we have almost cracked that out riding. It's taken over a year, but each battle we have reduces the length of the next one. Our disagreements these days rarely last as long as half a minute and are usually over in seconds. They used to be 45 minutes and sometimes more!

He's such a good horse and such a wonderful character that I can't give up yet. Not while we are still making noticeable progress, however slow. As soon as the rain allows, I'm going to get him out more, to the farm ride and then the cross country course the moment it's available. Then in the showjumping training, it's time to change our methods.

We have him at 3 inches higher than the vast majority of what he'll see at Intro. He's more than competent at that, he's fantastic. Going outdoors he should transfer to even bigger with no problem because of the extra space. At least that's what's happened with every other horse I've trained! But we don't need more height anyway.

Our problem now is that he takes an instant and extremely strong dislike to unpredictable things, and he does not accept that I have any right to make him do what he doesn't want to. Out hacking, he recognises my right to do that now. Showjumping, he recognises my right to ask him to jump when he is unfocussed or a bit tired. We have to get him to recognise my right to tell him to jump things that look odd to him, even if we can't work out why they do. I don't get fifteen minutes in the middle of a showjumping round to persuade him that a two foot high blue filler isn't going to eat him!

So next time we are going to warm up as usual. We are going to get him jumping fluently over four good fences. Then SH is going to put the travel rug on one and I'm going to jump them again. Once he's done that, the rug moves to fence two, and so on. So that he realises that he can't expect things always to look the same every time, and must jump them anyway.

Hopefully, over the weeks, that message will sink in and the fights will get shorter, as they have done at home and hacking.

Regarding buying another horse, there is a complication - it's Zip. We don't want him developing similar problems, and I had planned to spend this year getting him out and about locally. I think that would also be great fun. If I buy a third that will simply have to go out of the window. Something to think about ......

C