Far be it from me, flist, FAR be it from me to do something like learn from my mistakes. You remember that time, not so long ago, when I failed to properly chain the gate to Juno's pen, returned home to find the gate standing open and Juno, bless her heart, just standing in there, not even thinking about leaving? Well, yesterday I came home from a very long day at work to find the gate open again. I did it again and didn't chain the gate shut. I am FIRED as a horse owner.

This time, unfortunately, I also had on my hands a horse only recently reintroduced to that pen -- I moved him back in with Juno on Saturday; she proceeded to terrorize him for a little while, but they're finally living in semi-harmony now -- and completely uninterested in being buddies with me, either. When I pulled in and rounded the sheds to where I could see Juno's pen and the open gate, the most obvious sign of a problem was the little buckskin horse standing out near the dumpster, eating his fill of sprouting grass. I slammed on the brakes on the truck, pulled a halter and leadrope out of my kit bag in the back (thank god for being prepared; the other halter was hanging on the corral fence, and I would've had to go around Laredo -- thereby pushing him further away from his pen -- in order to get at it), and tried to approach quietly and not completely freak out.

Laredo, of course, hates my guts. I really think he does at this point because in the span of our new association, basically all I've been able to do with him is make him get into horse trailers, squeeze him into stocks, force him to associate with horses that don't like him, and poke him with incredibly large needles. So you can imagine that he wasn't big on me approaching him. I was still a fairly vast distance away when he decided to start leaving.

The good thing is, the place I live is perimeter-fenced. So in addition to the wooden corral fences, there's also a barbed-wire fence around the whole property. In case of escaped horse, they only have three points of egress that aren't fenced. The bad thing is, those points of egress are one gate opening into a large empty stretch of cattle pasture, and two ungated openings leading straight out onto a fairly busy state highway. So naturally Laredo starts making for one of the openings that would take him out onto the road. Because he wants me to die and he figures a heart attack would be a good way.

Usually in a situation like this you could depend on the horse's herd instinct to help you out; the horse would generally want to stay where the other horses are. But Laredo hates them all, so he couldn't care less what they were doing, and he sort of seemed inclined to head for the hills. As he moved along the corral fenceline toward the wider-open spaces that would lead him to the opening in the perimeter fence, I moved away, circled up in front of him to stop his forward motion, and very quietly started to herd him back toward his corral.

The corral gate was still standing wide open -- I was figuring more on shooing Laredo back inside than catching him, since he didn't seem inclined to let me anywhere near -- and Juno was standing there just at the threshold, not willing to cross the line where the gate should've been, watching Laredo with a kind of anxious expression. Whether she was stressed because her new herdmate was in trouble or just jealous because he was brave enough to venture out for the grass and she wasn't, I'm not sure. In any event, I gave Laredo a gentle nudge in the right direction, and he suddenly set off at a fast canter, back toward the corrals. The wind was blowing hard and the other horses were all worked up and generally it was just a really bad time and situation for a loose horse. Just when I thought, holy shit, he's going to run and be all excited and I'm not going to be able to catch him ever, he darted around the open gate and shot straight back into his corral.

Sweet. Zombie. Jesus.

I dashed in and closed the gate before either of them could decide to go on another foray, and then I proceeded to lean against said gate and try not to hyperventilate and/or die.

Juno followed Laredo around for awhile with her ears pinned and a mean expression on her face; I think she was giving him a thorough scolding. I like to think it was on my behalf.

Well, I haven't talked about Laredo much here since I got him, but here I am with a report, and a brand new Laredo-style icon. Awwww, isn't he cute? I think so.

Anyway, the on-going Laredo-related drama, which I've occasionally been venting about in my other journal (agentotter) is that pretty much as soon as we arrived in Montana, he started getting sick. There was some waffling -- mostly vet-related -- over what he had or didn't have, but it's turned out that my initial diagnosis was correct (I don't know why I pay the vet so much to tell me WRONG THINGS... maybe it's because my vet's kind of hot ;)) and he's got Strangles. He's a little old for it, though the idea that they get it once and are immune thereafter forever is just a myth. Still, he's presented with more of an odd case than I'd like, and the infection's been lingering much longer than it should've. Right now he's on penicillin and I'm heat-packing the abscess under his jaw to keep it draining; in theory he'll be better in time for me to get a health certificate and ship him back to California with me for the summer. We'll see, I suppose.

But, since he's been sick I haven't really been able to do much with him; anything he's exposed to has to be disinfected so to save myself time and bleach I've mostly been keeping him isolated in his pen. He has gotten to have some fun adventures, though, like me poking needles into his neck and butt (poor little man is getting very sick of this treatment and usually when the needle goes in he doesn't want to stand still long enough for me to get the drug into him), and when we went to the vet he got to walk inside a building and go into a set of stocks and it was OMG fun! Yay! Unless you're Laredo, in which case it sucked.

His behavior's been about what I would have expected; he has much the same issues as he did several years ago when I was working with him prior to his last failed adoption, plus a few more new fun behavioral issues probably resulting from the handling he got in that last adoptive home. (I would guess that they didn't know how to handle it when he decided to test the limits of their position as herd leader, and so he learned to progressively take more and more liberties.) He pitches a fit when asked to load in a trailer, pulls back and tries to split, but he's kind of small so it doesn't actually work out well for him. Then once I get him loading he'll go in and out and in and out and it's no huge deal. He also pulls back when tied, but not to the terrifying extent that Juno does. His attitude is the same as I remember, for the most part; he tries to pretend you aren't there, doesn't want to be touched, doesn't want to be handled, etc etc. Considering that he was, if I'm reading the paperwork and such right, adopted as a yearling or long yearling, and that he's now 9 years old, that's a pretty sad statement on the kind of handling he's gotten in his life. Still, there are some things I'm seeing in his personality that I really like... he pretends not to be inquisitive at all, but he is, and he's a lot more curious about things than Juno is. And I think he wants to try hard, he's just suspicious of what you're going to do to him. So I really don't think it's going to take that much to turn him around. I remember that when he was adopted before, he was just starting to connect with me from having me work with him all the time... so I think once he's better and I'm finished with school for the summer, and we can spend some time working on things, that I'm going to see a huge improvement with him.

Pragmatically I keep thinking that if we don't really get somewhere together by the end of the summer that I'll leave him at the rescue (because the last thing I need is another horse I can't ride), but realistically I'm facing up to the fact that I still love the little bastard just as much as I used to, and it's very unlikely that I'll be coming back to Montana without him. (Damn him and his adorable ways.)

Anyway, I've also been thinking... new life, new name. I'm not sure that Laredo really suits him, and I think it'd be nice to give him a fresh start with a new name. I'd really like to give him a really old-style cowboy kind of a name... since he's a little buckskin western wild horse. I was thinking along the lines of like... Ennis or Josiah or something like that, but I just can't seem to find anything that suits him. He doesn't really seem to be an Ezra either, so I've just exhausted all the interesting options from that crappily fantastic The Magnificent Seven TV show. Any fans of old western movies or pulps or anything? Any awesome ideas? It'd be an added bonus if his new name is also a place name, so he'd sort of match with Juno ('cause it sounds the same as Juneau ;)).

Well, I've brought my new horse home. I suppose I should make him his own journal or something, but I haven't quite figured that out yet. Anyway, his name is Laredo and he's not even 14hh and he's adorable. He's a 1999 buckskin from the Fish Creek HMA in Nevada... which is kind of funny because Juno came from a rescue operation in Fish Creek, too.

Speaking of Juno, I introduced them a few days ago, put them out in turnout together to get acquainted. They seemed very peaceable with each other; they sort of sniffed at each other for a bit, but they didn't bother to duke it out or anything. Juno lifted her head once and made a little offended noise, but that was it. After a moment, Laredo walked off and she followed him, and they sort of stuck together on a tour of the turn-out, and then proceeded to mostly ignore each other. It was a different story when I put Laredo into Juno's corral with her, though; at first they ignored each other, but when I returned that night after work I found that poor Laredo had bite-marks all over his rump and a big chunk of hair missing over his eye. There was quite a sizeable piece of his mane lying on the ground next to the round-bale feeder. I guess several years of being fed separately from other horses and everything has made her a little food-defensive.

Actually, when I got home that night I found Laredo hiding inside the shed that they have for shelter from the weather, and Juno standing outside, pinning her ears at him every time he tried to walk out. I have no idea how long she kept him in there for, but I solved the problem by scattering some food around the place and running Laredo out of the shed; that way every time she pushed him off one hay pile he could go to another and eat. He's a very non-combative little horse and he's very eager to get out of her way when she makes a threatening gesture, but she still seems to feel the need to push him around. It's kind of funny, coming from Juno, since she's always been such a mellow horse and gotten along with everybody so well. I'd been hoping that she'd partner up with Laredo and then when I turn them both out with the other geldings, she'd keep him from getting beat up too much. No such luck, I guess.

I'll have some pictures to post at some point, but I forgot to bring them with me to campus today, so I have none at the moment. Woe. He's awfully adorable, though. And Juno's face is going all white again as she prepares to shed out. It's awesomely cute.

Today I nearly gave myself a heart attack.

So I get home from my job on campus -- no night shift at the gas station tonight, luckily -- and it's a beautiful day (February in Montana is so not all it's cracked up to be, cold-wise), so I grab a quick bite of lunch and then I go out to clean stalls. As I'm walking over to start fetching horses to turn out in the arena while I clean their corrals, I notice that the gate to Juno's palomino neighbor's pen is standing open, and the horse is gone. No big deal; it's Tuesday night and that palomino's owner has a night class in the college's horsemanship program, which means he's taken his horse to class tonight. I carry on with my stroll toward Juno's pen... and stop, absolutely dead in my tracks, because that gate's open too. For a second I stand there with what must've been a completely flabbergasted look on my face, like I couldn't figure out whether there was some optical illusion at play, whether I was just seeing things because the other gate had been open so maybe mine looked open too...

No. The gate to my corral is standing wide open, and from the look of the chain, I can only surmise that when I went in after work (at around 11pm last night) to feed Juno her grain, that I went in through the gate, didn't fasten the chain because I'd figured on going out through the gate again, and then ended up ducking back out underneath the fence, and so never did actually fastened the chain again.

Luckily I'm in the habit of draping the end of the chain around the fence post, even when I don't fasten it; otherwise the wind would've blown it open sometime in the night. As it was, I wasn't even looking at the gate when I drove past Juno's pen on my way in, but I don't think it was open then -- I really hope I would've noticed -- and so it probably stood open for less than fifteen minutes.

Juno, bless her little unadventurous soul, was standing calm as anything in her usual corner, hanging out with her buddy across the fence, and couldn't have cared less that the gate was open. Which didn't, I'll admit, stop me from hugging her around the neck and saying "thank you thank you thankyouthankyouthankyou for staying" about ten billion times. Not like I think she made some kind of conscious choice, like, "Oh, the gate is open! I could be free again! But no, this poor pitiful human would be distraught and depressed if I were to leave, and so I will remain, attached as liaison with the Canadian consulate and be a domestic horse forevermore, the end." I think she just stayed where she was comfortable, and where the food was, and where her friend was, and didn't see any point in leaving. But I appreciate that she didn't, all the same.

It got me to thinking about lost horses, and how we deal with that situation... there's a whole essay in there -- nay, a whole book -- which I will one day post on my horsey website, if I can ever get it going. But that's a topic for another time, I guess... I've got a final in my equine selection & judging class tomorrow (and I have to do good on it because my research paper was TERRIBLE) that I need to study for, and one tonight in my driving class on parts of the harness. So I guess I should study instead of writing some lengthy thing about being prepared for the worst.

In better Juno news, though, after I'd finished with stalls I went out to the arena and played with her a bit and she did awesome. I've been teaching her to stand next to my "mounting block" (which is really a pair of scrap chunks of 4x4 wood, stacked one on top of the other, which also serves as part of a "jump standard" in our arena), so that I can get up high enough to drape myself all over her back and rub her all over from on top of her. I did it tonight with the other two geldings loose in there and she did fantastically; I kept getting down to chase the other horses off, or to make them stop chewing on logs and whatnot, and Juno just stood still and calm as can be, waiting patiently until I got back, no matter how much I was whooping and hollering at the other horses to run them off. That's one of the things I like about horses -- particularly mustangs -- that've been raised in a more natural environment; they often understand body language better, and are able to tell when it's directed at them and when it's not, and so they don't tend to go to pieces at every little move you make.

Anyway, after we played around with that for awhile I climbed up on the fence and worked with her from there; she's getting a lot better with the fencework and it's pretty easy to get her to swing her hip over to the fence now, so I can climb on from there. She was a little nervous but did really really well, and I sat on her bareback for quite a bit, and she even bent around to sniff my shoe, which is big for her... usually when she's really scared she'd just stand there staring ahead and pretending nothing traumatic is happening. So that was a big deal. I was just so pleased with her that I could've hugged all her stuffing right out.

Next month she'll be getting a new boyfriend, as I'll be bringing another horse home, but I think they'll get along pretty well... they're both mellow horses and both were born in the wild, so they had some time to learn how to behave from their mothers. If they decide to hate each other, things could get interesting around here... but I think they'll be good. Maybe they'll bond and have some kind of karma-chi-love thing happening. ;)

Here are some pictures of Juno, showing off all her various forms of majesty.

( She is quite majestic, really. Even when it's wintertime and she's all fat. )

I guess it's been awhile since I posted any updates on good Juno-times. I keep meaning to post pictures but then I forget to put them on my thumb drive. Such are the perils of no home Internet access, I guess.

Anyway, there are amusing anecdotes to report from the land of Junonia. Firstly, Juno has new neighbours. (Heh. Neighbours.) A pair of horses have been dropped off at our place for boarding while their owner is off on vacation. Before they arrived, my landlord and I spoke about their housing arrangements; he moved his own horse into another pen so we could put these new arrivals next to Juno, since the mare side of this mare-and-gelding duo has a history of showing extreme aggression to any other geldings that get too close to her gelding.

"Well," I asked my landlord, "how is she with mares?" At the time I was thinking, hrm, if she's that bad with geldings she's probably ten times worse with other mares. Apparently my landlord was thinking that this mare's thing was just against geldings and that having another mare next door would be hunky-dory. Yeah, right. We both agreed, however, that we could depend on Juno to be the level-headed one; generally if another horse is trying to pick a fight with her over a fence, Juno just doesn't stand next to the fence.

I think, however, that Juno was somewhat sore about having her buddy from that pen moved way to the other end of the row, where she couldn't visit with him all day. In addition, Juno and the mare next door seem to have developed a mutual hatred for one another. The first few days were pretty quiet; the next few were marked by high-pitched squeals of aggression from the other mare, and the sight of Juno repeatedly charging the fence with her teeth bared, trying to go for the throat. It's quite uncharacteristic for my mellow little live-and-let-live pony. I have to get a picture one of these days because it's quite stirring, seeing her charge into the fray. Frankly, I wish I could just turn out those two horses with Juno and the boys for awhile, because if they could just work out their pecking order issues without a fence in the way, I'm willing to be this would all just stop.

Most of the time, though, it's pretty quiet in there; when she's not feeling antagonistic, Juno just ignores the horses next door. Her protective instincts mostly seem to kick in when I'm around... I'm not sure if she's trying to defend me as part of her herd or if she's just practicing some sort of preventative policing because she thinks I'm going to give those other horses attention or treats or something, but she definitely kicks it into high gear when I'm around, especially when it's grain time at night. It's actually given me a nice chance to get a little training in, teaching Juno that it is not okay for her to display threatening or combat behavior when I'm in proximity or when I've got her on a lead line. She's doing good with that... hasn't needed too much correcting to get that she's not going to be allowed to behave that way when I'm in there.

In other training news, I've been working with her a bit on clicker-training. It's the kind they do with dolphins, where they use a noise signal as sort of a "yes, that is the right answer" cue before rewarding with a treat. I'm not sure I'm doing it entirely right, but Juno loves it because it's treat time like crazy. I bought these cheap little orange cones at Walmart, which have these slits in the side of them to make them collapsible if they get run over or whatnot, and they've turned out to be perfect training tools; the slits make it so Juno can easily pick them up in her teeth, and I've been teaching her to pick up the cone and hand it to me. She's been doing great, though it takes her awhile to get around to giving me the cone (I don't think she's worked out yet that that's what I'm after). She's given it to me three times in two sessions, but I think she's still figuring out what the clicker means and whatnot. When we've got it down a little better, I'll be able to introduce a cue and teach her to do this on command, instead of immediately going to grab the cone as soon as she sees it (I'm thinking the cue word will be "fetch" ;)), and then we'll work our way up to being able to direct her to a specific object and have her hand it to me. Then if I drop a brush or something I can just go, "Juno, fetch," and she'll get it for me. Mwahaha! Haha! I do have to be careful, though; one of the guys who recommended clicker training in a mustang group I read said that when he was first learning to do it, they were teaching their horses to play soccer and kick a ball around, and the horses were so into the game that they kept trying to get rewarded for kicking all sorts of things, like dogs and chickens. Heh.

Generally though, Juno is doing good. For Christmas I bought her a too-expensive invention called the hoofjack, which is basically a high-end farrier stand. It's turned my incredibly amateur hoof-clipping job from an hour-long ordeal for Junos into a ten-minute affair, and with much less chance of me getting crushed by my horse, so I'm very much into it.

Me and Juno had a pretty okay weekend. Well, it was good for me anyway. I don't think Juno was quite as enthused about it. Mostly we worked on her saddling issues, which seem to grow in magnitude every time I turn around. It's funny, because when I first started saddling Juno, way back before she was even officially my horse -- way back when I could hardly even lead her anywhere without losing her -- she was completely unconcerned about it. I remember that the first time I put a surcingle on her, I went reeeeally slowly because I was sure she was going to blow up, but she just acted like it wasn't even there. Same deal with the saddle (though I was robbed of the first saddling, damn it, when Pokey just went ahead and did it without consulting me at all). This bucking and going totally crazy issue has only happened since that third ride when Juno got scared of something and bucked me off. Which just proves to you, I guess, that horses do have good memories... she was obviously traumatized by the incident (that makes two of us) and is still trying to avoid a repeat. That's okay, though. She's getting a lot better. I saddled her up on Friday and she did the usual running/bucking/holywtf-it's-on-my-back! routine for a little while, then settled down. She was really up and really nervous that day for whatever reason, so though I'd originally intended to maybe get on and ride a little bit, I ended up just standing in the stirrups, sitting in the saddle a couple of times, and helping her to calm down. She's very much not ready to start riding again.

Yesterday, though, I saddled her up again -- I have a scheme now to just put a saddle on her every day and then do whatever groundwork I want to do with the saddle on, or put her in her pen so she can eat and go on about her life with the saddle while I do chores -- and didn't get a single buck out of her. She was scared shitless, but she was handling it really well. I also had her following me around a lot, which is nice because it means she's looking to me for direction when she's scared instead of just deciding to head for the next county. In fact, every time I entered her pen yesterday she'd come up to me like she was waiting for me to do something fun with her, and every time I left she'd stand at the fence and wait for me to come back. She is the most adorable thing ever.

She's apparently gotten used to the deer-hide in her pen, too, because I've often seen her just walk right up to it and sniff it like she's checking to make sure it's still dead. Either that or she's just wondering why I've thrown a bit of a carcass into her pen. It's hard to say.

Juno continues to be the awesomest. A couple days ago, after working with her some more on getting her to step up broadside to a fence (we call this "fencework" for obvious reasons), I went ahead and climbed on her back. The awesome thing about fencework is that you can be on the horse and at the same time you can be clinging for dear life to the fence. And pretty much any move that poor spooky Juno could make -- shying off, bolting, even just taking a step or two away from the fence -- puts me in no imminent peril. If the horse leaves, you just slip off them and hold on to the fence. This is practically an art form, because you'll see a lot of people do this and though they're trying to keep from dying, they're essentially just using the fence as a mounting block to get on, rather than using it as a support in case they need to get off again. Unfortunately I have no photos of me doing my amazing spider-monkey-like clinging act, with one leg thrown over Juno's back and the other propped up on the fence. There's nobody around here to take pictures for me when I'm working. (Damn it.)

We had no incidents, though. Juno's learning to sidle up to the fence very quickly with little prompting, and when she does she's really looking for comfort; she steps up to the fence and puts her nose against my leg or her chin on my knee, just looking for a nice rub to the forehead and me to tell her she's a good girl. It's funny, with this horse, because sometimes she'll be so standoffish that I'll wonder whether she'd even notice (in her own horsey way) if she never saw me again, and then other days (usually when I'm teaching her something or otherwise traumatizing her) she'll literally shove her head into my leg or my stomach or whatever part of me is most handy and just sit there, hiding her face against me like I'm the only thing standing between her and the big scary world.

I don't want her to be needy and scared, mind you, but when she turns to me for comfort and approval it certainly is good for my self-esteem. And it's nice to know that, if only occasionally, Juno likes me just a little bit. She is the cutest EVAR.

One of the local customs that I've come to recognize -- though I was a bit shocked by it the first couple of days here -- is preparing horses for carrying game out of the mountains. It would be, after all, a really bad idea to take a horse that's never seen a dead animal before and try to strap that bloody bull elk to its back. And though I have no interest in using Juno to pack dead animals around, I do figure that it's important for her to be exposed to everything; if we're out riding in the woods and come across a hunter packing out game, for instance, I don't want her to smell the carcass and decide she needs to high-tail it before she becomes the next victim. The usual solution around here seems to be throwing some piece of carcass in with the horse -- usually just the hide -- and letting them get used to the smell. (The other parts, like the ribcage and the occasional leg bone, are usually thrown to the dog, who never has any problem digging right in. My landlord's lab has what amounts to half a deer in his pen at the moment.) My first couple of days here I was almost afraid to ask why some folks had the mangled remains of dead animals in their horses' pens, but I get it now. In fact, my landlord offered me a hide -- he's taken something like four out of the eight whitetail he has tags for his season -- so I took him up on it. He dropped it outside the corral for me last night so I could put it in with Juno whenever I wanted. It was just the hide of a very small doe. Plus the head. It made me feel like a horrible person just to be looking at it. I've killed things when I've had to (okay, mostly just mice), and my landlord is what I would call a really responsible hunter... he does stuff heads and keep trophies every now and again, but he basically kills for the meat, and he's very serious about felling an animal with one shot; he likes their deaths to be instant and doesn't want them to suffer.

Anyway, I dragged the hide into Juno's pen and then took her in there. She snorted and leaned away and really wanted to leave. I don't blame her. But hopefully she'll get used to it and that'll be one less thing I'll have to worry about her freaking about. I'm trying to get a little more into some hands-on crafty kind of arts, including woodburning and leatherburning, and some of the stuff I might eventually do (with my landlord's help, I hope) is collect shed antlers and things like that for carving and whatnot. So I'd like for her to be used to all kinds of deer-smells, and that way I could use her for packing and everything. Because Juno is the coolest.

On Saturday I spent some time working with Juno on tying, and she did really good at first, until she started getting pissed at me trying to spook her, and pulled the round pen (which I foolishly thought was plenty sturdy for tying practice) all out of shape. So I took her off that, put the round pen back to rights, and took her in to the arena and dallied her leadrope around one of the fence posts, which are telephone poles and well-buried. When she pulled on that the whole post groaned. So really, the problem I have with teaching poor Juno to tie is that I never live in a place with a proper, safe tying area. When there are sturdy tie rails, they're never actually high enough (to be really safe, a horse should be tied above withers-height), and when they're high enough, they're never sturdy enough. Trying to train horses as a renter is a pain in the ass; I really wish I could have my own place and install my own facilities. I also wish I had a million dollars. And a dog. And a green dress (but not a real green dress that's cruel). (Also I don't really want a green dress. I don't wear dresses. But the million dollars would be swell, and the dog would make a nice footwarmer, since my house is constantly freezing.)

The tying debacle was unfun because I ended up getting into one of those ruts where I'm all goal-oriented and I start going, "Dammit, we're going to do this until we get it right!" Which as you may imagine, with 1000-pound animals that don't speak English, isn't really a good way to go. They get frustrated with you, you get frustrated with them, and before you know it it's all tears and heartbreak.

I apologized with some clicker-training games. Juno's starting to learn that pretty well, although I don't think I'm doing it quite right... I really need to read more of the book I got on the subject, and maybe get up to the Petco in Butte and buy myself an actual clicker. Juno's a smart cookie, though; she gets it figured out pretty quick. I trained her to target on the end of my "training stick" (you know, those stick things... Parelli calls them carrot sticks, but mine is a Clinton Anderson model so it's probably called an "aussie stick" or something). I figure it's a tool I have around a lot, and will be using a lot more if I get into that natural horsemanship program here at school, so training her to that would be a good idea. I taught her to touch the end of it (when I tell her "target" and she touches the end of the stick with her nose, she gets a treat), which allows me to take the stick and touch it to other objects -- logs or tires or whatever I can find around the place -- and tell her to "target", which gets her to touch the other object, which also gets her a treat. I'm hoping to be able to use this to teach her that instead of running away from things that scare her, she should touch them with her nose to get a treat. We'll see how that goes. She's liking the treat aspect of things, though.

( Here are some pictures of Juno, who is the cutest Juno IN THE WORLD. )

In more positive Juno news than my last despondent entry, I've been working with her a little bit most every day (when I get home before dark, anyhow) and she's been doing really great. I've been teaching her to step up sideways to a fence so I can climb on her from objects (like fences and mounting blocks and whatnot), and to help her get used to me being up there and everything. She's been doing really well with that. And then I got a book on clicker training and tried a little bit of that with her, and she seemed to pick it up really fast. I need to get an actual clicker though, probably. And get some kind of ball or something to put on the end of my training stick, so I can use it as a targeting stick. She was really learning to touch her nose to the end of the training stick when I cued her, but I think she had trouble seeing it sometimes because it's such a little target. I dunno. She's been doing good, though. She's a smart cookie. And now I need to run home between jobs and clean out some pens. w00t!

Some days I ask myself why exactly I just had to get an untrained wild horse.

This is, of course, a stupid question. I didn't just have to get that sort of horse at all. What I wanted, what I should've gotten, is a really dead-broke 15-year-old gelding or something to help me learn to ride and rebuild my confidence. The trouble was, I couldn't not get Juno. Because she's Juno, and that's basically all there is to it. Out of all the horses I ever worked (and there were a lot of them), she's the only one I absolutely couldn't let go. And of course I can't afford to have a second horse, so that dead-broke gelding is out of the question.

The problem, then, is one of experience, both hers and mine. We seem to have reached a sort of impasse. I'm not really afraid to get on her and saddle start her again, if I can get her properly prepared for that. The trouble is that I can't, because she's still too scared -- she spooks at pretty much everything -- and I don't know what to do about that.

I don't exactly blame her; that spookiness kept her alive for many years in the wild, and it's hardly fair to get a wild horse and expect it not to be spooky. (Still, I sigh wistfully every time I hear somebody tell a story about how they adopted a mustang and were riding it within a week and it's never batted an eye at anything on the trail and blah blah blah. I hate those people, the lucky bastards.) I just don't know what to do to help her get over it. I don't know if she'll ever get over it. To tell the truth, I'm starting to feel a little hopeless.

Lately I've been doing everything I can think of to get her used to scary objects. I've sacked her out like I've been taught (I've done that about ten billion times, with plastic bags and tarps and a host of other objects, including but not limited to giant foam noodles), and lately I've even tried things like putting the surcingle or saddle on her and tying all sorts of plastic bags and tarps and things to that. She never relaxes, she never gets used to it, and the next time I do it, whether it's an hour later or a day later, we're starting from square one again. I've been doing various sorts of sacking out with her for over a year now and there's hardly any discernable improvement. She's only just now allowing the saddle pad on without flinching.

I've even tried tying plastic bags around the feeder on her round bale, so she'll have to put up with them flapping in order to stand there and eat food. She seems to be choosing instead not to eat. She seriously would rather go hungry than go near the scary thing. I'm completely at a loss.

All of which is in aid of saying that I think I'm doing this entirely wrong, I don't know what to do about it, and I have no money to hire somebody to help me, even if I could find somebody good out here. Even if I were able to get into the natural horsemanship program next year -- and I'm not feeling good about my chances there, after talking to the program advisor -- my horse wouldn't be ready. I can't afford to buy another in the meantime.

I'm thinking I might email Bryan Neubert and ask his advice, but this whole thing is just driving me crazy, because I think the solution must be easier than I'm making it, and I'm just not seeing the way through it, and there's nobody here to help me because everybody around here thinks that cowboying your horse is the way to go. I'm completely depressed and at a loss and once again feeling very in over my head. Typical.