5 | Apply this to improve your horses learning and attention | Full Episode Horse Training Series

Hey guys! Welcome back to Mustang Diaries, my series on the training and transformation of two wild Mustangs. In my last video, I gave a brief update on the Mustangs one month into their training. Today's video is going to be on Mustang Frida. In my last session with her, we were on her first day of haltering and we ended with getting the fly mask on. Frida has since made leaps and bounds and you'll be seeing her first bath and her first time loading in this video today. So this video is going to be all about Mustang Frida. Frida is a yearling from the Swazi HMA out in Utah. HMA means Herd Management Area. As you can see, Frida's really been enjoying the grass lately. This is her very first time out of the pen and she did so well. So I'm putting her away here. She does get a little bit nervous about going underneath that gate right there. You can see her being a little hesitant. I'm asking her to step forward and then giving her a big release every single step and then she just walked on. So no problems there. Okay, so I'm going to take you through some of the things that Frida has been working on. So Frida has gotten really good at lunging. She's really good about watching my body position and when I step in front of her in front of that driveline, she changes directions like she's supposed to. So she does a great job at that. I'm really impressed and impressed with how she keeps slack in the lunge line. That just came very naturally to her. Here I asked her for a stop by looking at her hindquarters and she was pretty energetic so she went off the other way. So I just repeat what I did and asked her for another stop and then she faced up. So Frida also had her first bath and she did so well. It was unbelievable. So unfortunately the first clip of me doing this was on my corrupted hard drive so I no longer have it. But what I did to lead up to this point was just put the hose on a very light sprinkle and I just started spraying her shoulder and then releasing spray, release, spray, release and I was trying to pull the hose away before she moved. So then eventually she kind of caught on that I would be taking it away from her and I was just really shocked. Honestly this horse was so good. I just couldn't believe it. She was actually better than one of my domesticated horses. So that was just shocking. Yeah I'm actually shocked at like how well she's just. So I was kind of hoping that Frida would be one of those horses that would just play in the water or try to like drink mouthfuls of it. She's my very playful horse so she's the one that likes to dump my water buckets whenever I hang a bucket. She will play with it and just swing it back and forth and try to dump them. So we'll see what she ends up doing with water in the future. The other thing that we have worked on is loading. Again I lost a lot of the footage from my corrupted hard drive but this is the very first day. I do have more footage of the process of me teaching Libby to load and I'll share that in my video next week. So it took 10 minutes for Frida to load for the first time and then we went on to practicing self-loading like what you see right here. And this is her second day of loading practice and I start by asking her to self-load and she walks right on pretty readily. And on this day I started rewarding her with some alfalfa. I didn't use it yesterday but now I'm just trying to reinforce that being in the trailer is a good thing and that's where I've been just giving her a few little snacks once she loads and does a nice job loading. So I'm not using it to get her on the trailer but once she is on then I give her a treat. And every time I get her on the trailer I really really try to make it a really relaxing experience. I want her to associate being in the trailer as a good experience so it's a place of rest. I might give her a little snack, just positive things that are happening in there. And then I ask her just to get off and we keep practicing. So she goes on pretty fast and I it it's nice that she is so responsive to me but I also want her to to load quietly or just have a relaxed walk on. So that's really important to me too. I don't mind her going fast into the trailer but I would prefer that be me asking her. So I do want to work on just her being quiet and loading in a very calm way. So that was our second day of loading practice. And then Frida passed her official domestication test. I offered her an apple and she actually took it for the first time. So that's all I have for you guys today. Once again thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in my next video.