Whisper Whinnies

Last Wednesday I took Zoe out by herself.  Sometimes she whinnies as we are going away from the barn.  When she was younger it was whinnies and a not quite so calm attitude.  Now it's just sometimes a whinny.  I usually ignore her and we keep on going in the direction I want to go.  Sometimes I say "hey, hey, hey-none of that".  Well today she tried to whinny, I said "hey" and she ended up with a whinny under her breath- a whisper whinny.  It was so funny I had to laugh out loud.  She does have personality.

Our ride was a practice of our riding lesson that we had the night before.  Yup we started up lessons again. Boy did I miss them.  There were just 4 of us and we mostly worked on getting our horses to listen to us just by using our seat-in various ways for various things.  Anyway it was a chance to use the lesson out on the trail.  So I didn't go very far...did a variation of the hour loop.  She did good at paying attention to what I wanted-just using my seat.  I usually use my seat to convey my directions but was even more conscious of it after last night.  We did need some work on trotting-staying in the slow trot after going faster.  At first she will stay there for about 10 strides then kick it up to a faster trot without me asking.  Maintaining the same speed without me getting on her case (either faster or slower) would be good.  She finally did it much better and we stopped working on that one.

There was a tree down on the trail.  As usual-most horses do this-she gave it the evil eye...it wasn't there last time we were here.