Progress

Progress on several fronts today. First we worked on jogging in hand - it was embarrassing when the farrier asked to see him trot last week and I couldn't get him to trot in hand. I think part of that was just how sore he was, but part of it was lack of training. We started out with a dressage whip today until I got a "yes ma'am" from just a cluck and me starting to jog. Although I clearly was not jogging to assess lameness, I at least didn't feel/see him majorly head bobbing beside me. So there is that. 

Casted on clog 

A little bit of the dental molding is visible between his heel bulbs there. You can also see just how much material there is between his foot and the ground. 

Bottom view with the casting material at the edge. The plastic base is visible although dirty. 

Magical clogs. He also started his gelatin today. Hopefully in 5 weeks we will have more foot. It's weird not being able to see part of his foot, although looking at these pictures, I can at least look for new growth from the top (and make myself crazy doing so...). I guess weekly progress pictures wouldn't hurt, what's a little chunk of my google storage space. 

We also had our first clicker training session where he seemed to really get it. He was much more interested in playing this time from the start. He understood that head straight in front of his body but paying attention led to a good stream of click-treat. A few more sessions like this and we can hopefully move back to the actual target. 

Grooming was also much more pleasant today, no pinned ears. He's also mostly healing from his huge number of bite marks, which is probably helping his attitude. He does have one new wound - a puncture just dorsal to his right eye. I'm not sure if he got bit there or if he found some errant piece of fence to stab himself. He was a very good boy and let me hose it off and apply swat near it. My friend checked on him over the weekend for me and reported that it looked much better today, so at least we're headed in the right direction. Good to hear because it is very close to his eye and makes me a little twitchy. In addition to being good for grooming and wound treating, he tolerated camp kids running up to him and petting his face, shoulder, and barrel (before I nixed the first and last). I groomed him in the outside wash rack to start, but brought him into the barn aisle to keratex his hind feet and take pictures of the fronts. I thought the camp kids were all outside riding or watching the other group ride, but he got ambushed by a few. The kids got a lesson in asking before approaching strange horses and then in horse facial expressions and body language. He was overall pretty good, mostly thought they should feed him treats since that's what they had been doing with the other horses. I shooed them away before we could run out of kitty minutes, his and mine. It makes me nervous to be responsible for children around a horse that I don't trust completely. This camp is only a week, but last summer there were about 3 weeks straight of camp with kids there from 8 AM - 4 PM. Weee!! I usually tried to get in and out by the time they were getting started for the day. Helps that it was about 80 degrees by 8 and 90 degrees by 10, extra motivation to get done early.