Halter Training Wynnie

 From the first day Wynnie got to go outside with Arwen, I taught her walk quietly with me just using a soft lead looped around the bottom of neck. As small foals I feel that their tiny necks are just too soft and the growth plates just too fragile to take the pressure if they were to leap back and pull on a halter (and let's be real, baby horses do these things), so we use the rope around the neck instead; if they pull then they pull with their shoulders or withers against the rope, so it's just safer.

Anyway, so this was what Wynnie grew used to, and quite a wrestling match it became too once she got a bit bigger and more fiery - she dragged my poor grooms around in the last couple of weeks. What's more, we have her first ever show next weekend, in the youngstock classes at Horse of the Year Show. So it was time for a major step in any baby's life - halter training.

By this point Wynnie is actually pretty used to almost everything. It was very cold right after she was born, so she spent her first few days bundled up in a dog jacket because I couldn't find anything else that would fit her tiny little self. She's groomed every day, has her temperature taken twice a day (something that is definitely easier to teach them when they're still small enough to restrain, lol) and I spend a few minutes each day on picking up her feet. I also bought her a fly mask, which is comically too big for her but did stop her from getting runny eyes from the flies. So I didn't expect the halter to be a big step.

It wasn't. I bought her a cute little purple foal slip and hung it on the stable door thinking I'd put it on for the first time that evening. When I was teaching that afternoon, I was somewhat surprised to see the grooms bringing Arwen and Wynnie into the stable with Wynnie obediently plodding along in the halter. Apparently they had thought that me leaving the halter on the door was a cryptic sign that Wynnie was now halter trained, and she didn't give them any reason to believe any different.

Of course there is a difference between walking into the stable next to mama and actually being halter trained, so last week we cracked on with real halter training.

I thought we would need someone to lead Arwen at first, but when I went over to do a little session with her after lessons last week, she had let herself out of the stable and was gambolling around in the yard. So I put a halter on the little monstrosity and started walking her in a little circle in the yard. She was so relaxed and happy with that, seeming to enjoy the stimulation, that I led her over to the dressage arena (still within sight of mom) and we started working on a circle there.

She was amazing! She didn't call out to mommy at all (if she had, I would have taken her back - she's much too young to be forced to cope with something like this). Instead, she seemed excited to be doing something, showing the first glimmers of a work ethic very much like Arwen's. She got a bit overexcited walking back towards the stable a few times, to the tune of the odd leap and buck, but after five minutes or so we even had a little trot in hand. It was so adorable.

Later that week, her newfound halter skills were really put to the test when a pelting hailstorm came blowing up out of nowhere while my grooms were on lunch. The fields do have shelters in them so I left the grownup horses out, but I couldn't stand the thought of my poor Wynnie being rained on, so I went racing down to the field to grab her and Arwen. To their credit, they both actually came to me (Arwen has sometimes taken a storm as an opportunity to run wild laps around the field), even though the rest of the herd was bolting for the shelters. I wrangled Wynnie into her foal slip - she wasn't standing very still and those foal slips have the worst, fiddliest little buckles - and set off with Arwen dragoning in one hand and Wynnie dragoning in the other. This meant that I didn't have hands to spare to put a hand on her bum to move her forward, and we had to negotiate two gates.

Wynnie didn't put a foot wrong. In fact, once the gates were behind us, we jogged the rest of the way into the stable, and Wynnie didn't even pull me around or jump at all.

their matching expressions though

As for Arwen herself, she is doing just fine. She has attacked motherhood with the same aplomb as she does everything. Of course, she'll accompany Wynnie to HOY, and to tell you the truth I think she might be more of a handful than Wynnie herself. She's going to be very excited to be out at a show for the first time since late 2020.

She is a little on the lighter side still, but holding steady. I did switch her onto a nicer hay now that fresh-cut hay is finally available but I'm not pushing her hard feed. She's not going back to the stallion this year and tends to be overweight besides. I did think about making her nice and fat and then showing her in hand again at HOY, but to tell you the truth she doesn't look her best - a year off from riding has stripped much of her topline, and she's won the in-hand too many times to go and do badly now. So she'll just look after Wynnie this time and return in full splendour at HOY 2023.

Wynnie continues to find halter training to be wildly exciting. She stands quite nicely, although I need to do a little more work on her reining-back skills, but I'm not particularly worried about getting her to stand herself up square yet - she is only a baby and it doesn't matter if she doesn't go perfectly. Of course I do hope that we'll get a ribbon at HOY since she is the product of some careful breeding and hard planning, but truth be told, it's a foal class and anything can happen. The main goal is just to give Wynnie a nice first show experience and to get some pretty pictures.

Her trotting up needs a little more work, too. She trots beautifully until life gets far too exciting, and then she starts to plunge around madly. The little dragon somehow contorted herself in such a manner that she managed to kick me squarely in the left buttock while keeping her head nicely level with my shoulder. I have no idea how. It was just high spirits, she wasn't aiming for me, although she did get a little telling-off because it won't be cute once she's bigger.

I was delighted when Saturday dawned chilly with a thin, drizzly rain, a perfect opportunity for Wynnie to finally wear her tiny, purple waterproof blanket. It was a gift from one of my liveries when Wynnie was born in the cold, but it didn't fit her at all back then. Now she's somewhat grown into it. She was super adorable about standing patiently for me to put it on and seemed ready to tackle the day all bundled up.

The grooms are also very grateful that Wynnie now leads like a grown-up horse - BabyDragon was starting to be quite a handful. There's no question about it that she's a sassy lady with plenty of fire, a very different kettle of fish from my two sweet geldings. But I loved it in Arwen and so far I love it in her, too. There's just something about a good mare... even if it's a very smol mare right now.

God is so good.