Reluctant Jumpers and Hyper Jumpers

We had an interesting horse training session today. We had made some progress last Wednesday night with one of our reluctant jumpers, a horse named Chili. He has a phobia about any kind of object on the ground including his own shadow sometimes. I had pretty much given up hope of ever getting him to jump anything. However, last Wednesday one of our troopers was able to get him to clear a 12-inch jump after about an hour of gradual encouragement. Wanting to capitalize on this achievement I set up some more obstacles to work with today. I also brought the wonder horse who, unlike Chili, does not refuse the jumps but prefers to rush them. Starting with cavaletti poles, Martina was able to get Chili to duplicate his achievement from last Wednesday. However, we kicked it up a notch and had him go through a regular jump with striped, crossed poles set at about 12 inches. Martina was not only able to get him to jump them but did so at a gallop. This was a remarkable achievement and we have no idea why he is suddenly able to jump. Apache, meanwhile, had to be slowed down. With him I'm not concerned with the height of the jump but rather that he is controllable after clearing it. To slow him down I would take him over the cavalettis after the jump. He soon realized he would have to slow down to get through the ground poles that were set for trotting speed. This worked great and I found I barely had to tickle the reins to get his speed down after the jump. We will pursue these techniques do more to see what else we can get these horses to do.