Saber Dancing

I got stuck in the office for too long today dealing with budget wrangling issues and other nonsense. The cool thing about my job is when I start getting frustrated with administrative matters I can jump on a horse and take my mind of my problems and focus on completely different set of problems. Today, I jumped on Duke to work on yielding to the bit and not being afraid of the saber. We started out working on the horsemanship course to teach him to respond to rein and leg cues. He was doing okay. He was pacing instead of trotting a lot of the time which complicates matters but he was reasonably responsive to the cues and making good progress on transitions. He stands beautifully during mounting and walks relaxed which are both big point-getters in competition. After that I pulled the saber and tried to desensitize him to a piece of sharp metal waving around his face. He wasn't bad as long as we were moving. I had him trotting and cantering past some hay bales on the ground so I could stab them as I rode by. He did pretty well but sometimes gets his wires crossed and moves in the opposite direction he's being cued into. I still haven't figure that one out yet. The next task was to try and get him to stand still while I drew the saber. He did not do that very well. As soon as he heard the sound of the saber sliding out of the sheath, he moved away from the scabbard (he did not understand that it was attached to him). Not much movement, mind you, but enough to annoy me. We tried this for a while using different techniques to get him to stand still but he just wasn't getting it. Therefore we went over to the jogging track instead to work on his physical conditioning. He continues to get stronger and seems to like galloping (although he is slow by golly). He still tries to run me into that damned tree though. There just has to be some wires crossed somewhere in that horse.