Return of the Australian Cowgirl

Before I go on to new and improved Australian adventures, I thought I'd share a few videos from my Jillaroo week!

During our Natural Horsemanship lessons, we learned techniques that Tim used with the horses. It was interesting to see the way he trained the horses to respond to both touch and gestures before riding them, then translating what he taught them on the ground to foot and reign gestures while on their backs. One of the important things I learned was that in training a horse, you don't keep going until you reach the perfect movement. If they make one right step or give one little indicator that they are starting to understand what you want them to do, stop. Go away and let them think. Whether it takes one minute or three hours, the point at which you stop with the horse will teach them more than the amount of time you work with them. Interesting and makes a lot of sense.

So in order to make it fun for us while he showed us a few ways he trained the horses, we played a few games in our Wednesday class. One was a limbo match between us and the horse. If you spot me, pardon the fact that if it were a subject in school, I'd have failed Limbo long ago. But in any case, here is one of our feeble attempts to out-limbo the horse. (We had a music section, but they were slacking during the video. Tsk, tsk.)

On Thursday, we took turns catching and "wrestling" calves (in groups of two or three since the calves were very strong). Here's a video for the sole sake of showing you that despite what you shall soon see, I am not a wimp - these calves are strong! Even Collin and Ben found some difficulty in catching and keeping one.

So in case you wondered how many people it takes to throw a calf to the ground, the answer is two, plus a little time, effort, patience and possibility of failure. For my group, the answer was six. Three to handle the calf, two to direct, and one to take a picture. Hehe, calf wrestling, I fear, also does not seem to be in my future. Good thing I have other aspirations, because otherwise I would have had to try, try again. And that would annoy any self-respecting calf.