No, I won't work today.

Today was rather an adventure in training. Felipe didn't want to be caught at all. It took five minutes of three of us chasing him to get him to a place where I could put the rope around his neck. Once we caught him though, he was easy to halter. Training started with the usual leading. Then we practiced "back" for a while. He actually took a few steps back this time with quite a bit of coaxing. He still doesn't understand the command, but at least he's showing improvement (or maybe he totally knows what "back" means and disobeys to push my buttons). So after a couple minutes of that, we moved on to the most challenging part of today: the tarp (dum, dum, dum). The tarp is simply obstacle training. It's supposed to represent water. Hopefully, if Felipe will walk over the tarp, he won't balk when asked to walk through water. I was thrilled we got soo close to it. Flint freaked out and dragged his trainer away. Felipe was a bit scared, but I finally got him to sniff the tarp and even place a hoof on it. This earned him a ridiculous amount of scratching and praise. "Oh, you're not stupid are you? What a good boy! So smart! ...." But that was all he had to do with the tarp. After he checked it out, he proceeded to try to drag me around (mostly away from the tarp). Ha! I know he was pushing in to me on purpose. Rotten little guy! Personal space is a big issue. I'm going to have to be pretty rough with him to get him to obey and back off. He pays no mind to elbowing, so I'll just have to jerk his halter instead. Let the battle begin. After the scary tarp, he was pushy the rest of the period. I was suprised when he walked over a PVC pipe no fear what-so-ever. We ended our training session with a long grooming since Felipe likes that. It's important that Felipe associates training with something he enjoys. So we try to end on a positive note. He's so cute while I'm grooming him. He closes his eyes and thoroughly relaxes. There's a spot right behind his ears that he loves for me to scratch. He's so adorable! I'm really glad he's so mild tempered. Flint kicked his trainer today. again.