Trust In The Partnership

It’s been a considerable amount of time since I’ve written anything of substance.

Sure I’ve been posting on various social media outlets, but I haven’t exactly maintained the blog. Lately, the horses and I have been drifting, just enjoying our time together through basic flatwork, trail riding, and excessive amounts of groundwork.

While none of this is helping achieve any of our goals, it has served as a bonding experience. I’ve developed better relationships with both horses and we’ve been able to overcome a multitude of groundwork and trust issues that existed from a simple lack of truly understanding them.

Yesterday, Cupid and I went on a field trip to our trainer’s facility, as I finally have the time to start back up with consistent lessons. I was an absolute nervous wreck about what could possibly go wrong and what kind of horse I would have on my hands.

A year ago, Cupid was extremely reluctant to load. She would load but it never failed to be a production that took an embarrassing amount of time and resulted in an unhappy horse. She would balk and eventually drop her shoulder to try and run. If you ask anyone who has ever trailered with us about loading her you would be met with a laugh and description of a terrible loader.

Yesterday, Cupid impressed me both ways by self-loading and standing quietly while I fumbled with the butt bars and ramp on our trailer. There were no dramatics, no bolting, and no fussing once loaded. Just a horse who understood the assignment popped onto the trailer and settled in for a ride with her hay net.

A year ago, I would have had a fire-breathing dragon on my hands at a new facility. There would have been snorting, lots of head raising, and “fruit bat” moments of not listening or respecting me. While she was never dangerous on new properties. she was looky and trying to take control of the new situation. Almost as if she was the one wearing the pants in our partnership.

Yesterday, Cupid calmly stepped off the trailer, looked around, and then looked to me for direction. We did have some reluctance towards walking into the dark barn and then walking into the wash rack after our lesson, but both of these were drama-free. Just a pony hesitating, evaluating my body language, and then deciding that she still trusted me enough to follow.

To think that taking time off from being serious about my riding, and instead deciding to focus on our relationship has created this level of change still amazes me 24 hours later. While I have always loved having Cupid as my partner until yesterday I never felt like our partnership had the level of trust it deserves. Yesterday, truly proved to me that the last year was worth every minute we spent together. We may not have progressed in our riding but we developed into a partnership that I am extremely proud of.

It takes time to develop the level of trust that Cupid and I now have in each other and I am so excited to see where we go from here!