Day3: training begins

On the morning of day 3 my sister, Hilary, sat outside the pen while I sat inside where she always paces to try and discourage the bad habit. I was reading a book on training called Bringing up Baby by John Lyons (highly recommended if your training a young horse or any horse at all, it has some great tips.) and had a ‘carrot stick’ of sorts. All it is was an old medium length whip that you have to have for driving in 4-H (my sister used to have a driving pony) with some bailing twine on the end; you can use it for desensitizing and using it as an extension of your arm while working with horses. If Reece began her pacing routine I would stand and wave the whip if I had to so she would go in a circle, instead of pacing back in forth, which would bring her around to her hay and she would stop to eat. It worked very well. After lunch, I went back into her paddock with her and closed the door to her stall to minimize her ways of ignoring me, just something to say ‘hay look at me’. Then I used the carrot stick to pick up her lead rope and get it into my hand. She looked at me but then began ignoring me once again so I ran the rope through my hands steadily applying pressure and if she looked at me I would slack the rope and take a step back. We continued this routine until she was turning and facing me with the tension. I began to reach out with the carrot stick, if she tensed up, before she moved from me I would bring the stick back a few inches and allow her to relax some, and then I would reach out again and brush her shoulder with the stick. Soon she was allowing me to scratch her with the stick on both sides and I could also reach out and scratch her shoulder with my hand some.
By the end of the day I could walk to her side, pick up the lead rope, look at her hind quarters and she would turn and face me. I could also scratch her under her belly, down all four legs and around her tail no problem. If only people knew that the places horses don’t like to be touched, they love to be scratched.
We also worked on haltering some. The halter she had on had some metal on it and was rubbing really bad so it took a few min. but I got a new rope halter on her that we made a while ago so it would not rub as bad, we also removed the drag rope because I can now touch her and there is no need for it (although since she is a wild mustang we decided that leaving the halter on at this point is a good idea in case of emergencies we will have some sort of control.)