Evenings Glory
As of 2008 "Glory" has been my current mount and is a true character! He definitely is a horse that will keep you on your toes but will still watch out for you when something is wrong. He is seriously a big puppy dog, in the sense that he will follow you around and really just wants to be with you.
Come the first winter that we owned him, we decided on having him on full turn-out. That's when he ended up in the ten acre pasture. At first is seemed to be a huge problem for me because that winter was really cold, and I was the one to go out there and fetch him. It happened to not be so. Because he now had the chance to socialize with other horses, and the fact he now had the room to run aroung, he became a lot safer for me to ride.
Now I didn't have a trainer anymore, but I was perfectly fine with that. I started taking over my own horse's training, and we eventually reached a point where he was show ring ready. By now, I could ride him in a smooth snaffle, but because he is a little too strong, I have him in a pellum. Soon after, I started his jumping training, and he seemed to really enjoy it. But, because of where he is stabled, fininshing the training was almost impossible.
When I first bought him, he was a green broke 6 year old that my trainer said would be safe enough for my timid sis to actually ride. That didn't even seem to be possible, even when he was in training! He was a horse that had too much energy, and then was kept in a stall for almost the whole day. He had to be ridden in a twisted wire snaffle bit, and if placed in anything else, he'd take off. It came to the point where this horse seemed to dangerous for me and my sister.
By now, I'd started training him to go huntseat. There were many issues that I had to work on, and probably the worst was the fact that he had initially been trained to raise his head higher when rein pressure was applied. For this, I spent a few months breaking him of this habit. We started by actually using downward pressure from many different positions on the ground, and eventually he had that down enough to actually go under saddle. For this I used a martingale (one with with rings to put reins through and it fell about the shoulder area), so I had a lower base to ask him. I managed to get that to the point where i didn't need it, before i left the trainer.