Snakes, ducks, and more, oh my!

What are snakes and ducks?? Snakes are cut up garden hose and ducks are rubber ducks that squeak from the dollars store! Just another thing for my horses to walk through and build confidence with! Sometimes they step on the pieces of garden hose a certain way and it can flig up and touch the back of their legs, and the ducks can squeak when they're stepped on. Really helps with horses who are funny with their feet as well. I had the barrels on the wall to play Parelli squeeze game. Lots of horses are claustrophobic and don't like to squeeze through things. Kaspin hates the squeeze game and as you can see he is mastering it pretty well with the barrels now.

Next, was the red turtle. Inside the turtle there is a weasels that rolls around. But unfortunately before I taped, my batterise went dead in the weasel. I'll try to show it better on next post. But horses usually don't like furry things rolling around! Kaspin today thought things looked pretty safe and he had to check the furry weasel out. If you want your own rolling weasel go to ebay(about 8 dollars). And you can use a garbage can top for it to roll in. Or a child's round sled to roll in. I just happened to garbage pick this child's old turtle sand box and used that. 

Lastly, was the scary black bag of returnables(plastic milk jugs and pop cans) that made lots of noise. I always walk away from Kaspin when I show him NEW scary items. It builds a horses confidence to follow something at first. Later, I will progress to touching Kaspin with the returnables on his body.

All three of these obstacles were totally brand new to Kaspin and this was the very first time he had seen them. I went really slow and I think Kaspin did awesome!

Here is a video of Enzo playing with the snakes and ducks. Enzo has seen this obstacle 2 other times in his life. So this time I asked him to trot through the snakes and ducks. You can actually hear one of the ducks squeak! How funny! What creative things to you expose your horses to?

Keep it fun! Janine~Enzo~Kaspin!