Today is the first time I've been relaxed, really relaxed since we moved. Most of the barn and fencing projects I complained about last month are finished. The gross waterers are still in the stalls but at least we know how the water system works and may contact a plumber to take them out. In the meantime, the waterers are covered with buckets. It's unlikely Odin will even go in a stall when I make them available. Beege will and he'll fiddle but after he scares himself when the bucket flips and discovers the gross water, he'll leave it alone.
The million tiny little exercises I did with each horse over the last 6 weeks or so paid off on moving day. Six weeks ago my trainer suggested I take the trailer over and lead each horse to it and see how they feel about it. Beege walked right in, pooped, and backed out. That's my boy! He hadn't been in a trailer since he was hauled over to this boarding place in November 2017. Odin was very reluctant but agreed to put his front feet in. He'd been trailered more recently but really didn't like it. Neither particularly like it.
After that session, I worked on the basics, particularly with Odin: leading when asked, get out of my space, back up, move shoulders. Then I heard a podcast about target training for trailering by Shawna Karrasch, who is the founder of On Target ® Training. Beege loves to target it's easier to ask him to target then it is to tell him we're finished with the game, mostly because I've ran out of rewards. Odin picked up target training very easy when he saw that Beege put his nose on a specific item when asked then got a treat for doing so.
Then I heard another podcast, probably by Mary Kitzmiller where she said preparing for trailering didn't always require a trailer. Just having the horse go into a narrow dark space, like the barn, would be very helpful. So we worked on that. Beege, again, went right in at liberty, target the haynet with a flag on it, then backed out when asked. Perfect. It took Odin a while to even approach the barn but after several sessions of targeting the haynet with flag on the door of the barn and looking inside the stall, he eventually agreed to go in the stall and target that haynet then back out when asked.
The week prior to the move, I had to make a business trip so didn't get out there but the day before the move. I set up the target exercise and watch Beege walk all the way down from the upper pasture and play the target game at liberty without my asking. Odin started to come down but stopped only part way down so I thought we'd skip the game and work on something different. Instead we worked on him accepting his fly mask more easily. Then I left, feeling a little bit confident that we had prepared as much as possible without getting annoying with drilling.