Stabbing Things

I've been working on making Wonder Horse less excited about the things we do. It is quite a contrast riding him as opposed to Duke. With Duke you have to constantly spur him to keep his energy up. With Apache, you have to do the opposite--find ways to keep him calm. Everything excites him. An object on the ground, an open field, a deer in the woods, a drawn saber. He is a horse with ADD. I constantly have to work on keeping him focused. Today we worked on ground saber targets. We had a problem with this at the NCC. I leaned over to stab a target and he decided to put me on the ground next to it. No problem. After warming him up on the dressage arena we worked on stabbing hay bales. We walked at first until we could ride past the targets without getting excited about it. Hay bales are fun to stab. The tip of the saber goes in easily and comes out clean. It's like checking a freshly baked coffee cake by sicking a toothpick in it to see if anything sticks. When we could walk by safely, we went to a trot. Then a canter. You can't take a saber course at anything faster than a canter or you will miss the targets. Head targets you can take faster but the action of leaning over your horse's shoulder to stick a target on the ground takes a slower speed. It went well and Wonder Horse was pleased with himself or he would have been if I hadn't made him go over the cavelettis.