The Colt Journal, day 10: Wilson Arena

Here we are, 1/3 of the way through our 30 day summer program.
My herd is spending some time at Robin's place so they can get nice and fat on fresh, green grass, so I drove over after work, Robin and I loaded up Smooch and one of her youngsters, Darby, and we headed to the Wilson arena near her house. Darby is 4 (?) and hasn't been ridden in two years since she was started.
I did a little ground work on Smooch (not enough, but it was getting late) and then took Darby for a while. I worked her long enough to determine that 1) she is a lot like Smooch in that she is confident (although not quite as much as Smooch) and dominant, and has 2) forgotten so much that she needs to totally re-ground school before this buck-a-roo gets on her. She had absolutely no respect and tried to run me over just like Smooch had done his first days of ground school. I didn't let her, rest assured.
With not much daylight left, I rode Smooch (rope halter) around the arena working mostly on trotting. I tried a little loping, but will leave that for later when I start driving him on a 20 foot line from the ground (those ropes are expensive, so I don't have one yet....I'm stealing Robin's for now). There were some barrels and poles in the arena so I took him through those a few times and then left the arena.
To finish the evening with, I decided it was time to start side passing so we can do gates without any fuss. Outside the gate (we managed to get it opened) Smooch didn't want to press back into the gate so I could pull it shut. It's pretty typical of a horse just learning....it is not natural for a horse to press into anything other than another horse. Plus, what have I been teaching since he started in May? "move away from pressure". It's the basis behind controlling a horse, but at some point the horse needs to learn that although he is moving away from your pressure, you may be moving him into something else. That something else could be a fence (to mount or dismount from), a gate, a cow, a trailer, a person or group of people such as a police horse may encounter, etc. It's not any easy thing to teach. So I started by placing him in front of the fence line, head towards the fence and body at a 90 degree angle (perpendicular)to the fence. Then I worked on passing him down the fence, first to the right and then to the left and back and forth until he had is reasonably well down. Then back at the gate that we never finished closing, I tried passing him into it so as to grab hold and shut it. It took a few minutes because Smooch was really determined that he didn't need to be pressed into that gate. It's like a tug of war against the horse, and it's an attack (approach) and retreat kind of thing. You gain some ground, lose some ground, retreat, get the horses confidence back, attack again, gain some ground, lose some ground and so on until he learns that you mean for him to press that gate. He knows how to side pass now, but not in this context. It's less of a matter of him understanding at this point than him just not tolerating being pressed to that gate. It's the same thing with anything that a horse won't tolerate such as touching an ear or desensitizing him to an object such as a plastic bag....approach and retreat until sooner or later the approaches outnumber the retreats. But you have to be fair and know what you are doing. In the end, the horse must win, just not on his terms. So after about five minutes of approach and retreat, I had him standing within arm's length of the gate, pulled it shut, called him a good boy and called it a day.