It was the moment of truth as I walked up to Axel in the pasture yesterday. Sound or lame? He chased me around, tried to eat the halter and the fly mask, and tried to knock me over. Sound! No head-bob at all at the walk! I groomed him and took him in the arena. I lunged him for 5 minutes at the walk in both directions. Still sound! I asked for a trot. He cantered a bit then trotted out almost sound. Way more sound than he has been for 6 months. I'd put him at 75% for the trot. And the fact that there was no head tossing was a nice treat. So now we begin a slow increase into some work. Granted my guys don't really have to ever work. We dink around the arena for a few minutes, maybe ride down the road a bit, and sometimes we hit up a trail for a few hours. But I'm hoping easing him back into some sort of shape other than round-bale-green-pasture-blob will help loosen up those joints and keep him sound longer. After he did his tiny bit of work I did a little horsie massage which he seemed to enjoy tremendously. I can only imagine how most of his muscles must be sore from limping around for half a year. So that will be the ritual for a while, tiny bit of moving at the walk and then some massage. We'll add in a tiny bit of trot in a couple weeks. He's still dragging that right toe a bit so hopefully that will improve as we work. I might try some polo wraps just to give him some attention to the fact his has front feet. Works with the bell boots in the back pretty well ;)
Cody and I did end up riding along with J and the big guy, Logan. He's just been started under saddle and thought Cody was maybe going to chase him down and get him in the arena but even so he was darned calm about life. Cody was a bit less than energetic as usual so I had the dressage whip for inspiration. After a few lazy trips around the arena at the trot we ended up the evening's ride by working on turn on the forehand. So far it's "leg, leg+whip taps, leg+whip taps+voice cue" to get him to move that back end away. But it was enough to keep me working on it and I hope to get him to move away from leg eventually. Then maybe this lateral stuff will start to become more easy. If he doesn't want to truck around at any sort of speed then we'll concentrate on moving body parts instead. Especially easy to do on a hot day or bareback or heck even a cold day that we don't want to sweat. At 20 years old I think maybe we'll concentrate on trail riding, staying sound, and learning as much as possible to be a good kid's horse someday.
We spent a lot of time in the cross ties with Diva just hanging out and chatting. Cody's personality is really starting to show. I cleaned his nose with a baby wipe and he spent the time trying to eat it and then giving us the nice "that smells" face (flehman response) despite it being an unscented wipe. He was generally just being goofy. He's getting more and more comfortable with me scratching around his sheath. I'm hoping he'll eventually let me clean it because, yuck, he's a dirty dirty boy.
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