En Pointe Equestrian

Session 14 with Tigo - 6/14/25. I’ve been super busy with my day job and not able to get out to the barn to work with the horses, but I finally had some time. I needed to deworm the horses and decided I would work with Tigo on the syringe. The first time I ever brought out dewormer, he knew what the tube was and had a very strong “fight” response before I even got it close to him. He had the same reaction to the vet, the potential for getting an injection, and his oral sedative. The vet described it as a “feral defensiveness” where he turned to them ready to fight for his life to keep them away. He came to me with shoes, and my farrier said there was no way they had gotten shoes on him without sedative, so we know he’s likely had some experience with oral or injectable sedatives to get some things done with him. Since then, I haven’t shown him a syringe and have done feed through pelleted dewormer, and emptied syringes onto his grain. I had to establish trust and a partnership with him before I tried to work on this issue—I needed him to not see me as someone who does thing “to him” that he needed to fight, but as someone he does things with and won’t force him. I started by introducing him to the sight and smell of the dewormer with a fence in between us just in case he wanted to strike out at me. When it was clear it was safe and he knew he could move away from me if he hated the idea that much, I entered the round pen. In total, this session took just under 16 minutes from the start of this video and I cropped out the 3 minutes I spent working with him on the lead with no whip, reminding him of his shoulders, my boundaries, and getting him to use his ‘thinking’ brain. I spent time just showing him the syringe and then petting him with my syringe hand where he couldn’t see it, moved to scratching his face with my syringe hand where he couldn’t see it see it, then went to using our “touch” cue to touch a calm pausing muzzle and released the pressure by petting him where he couldn’t see it, to then moving to where he only got scratches when the syringe was on his face. In the end, he volunteered to investigate and put the syringe in his mouth himself three times: the first I didn’t do anything and praised him, the second I pushed a little of the apple flavored dewormer out for him to taste, and the third time he took all of it. I would have been completely fine putting it in his feed, but I love when a horse offers something themselves. This is something we’ll work on moving forward so he is less weary of it, but I’m super happy with how quickly this turned from a ‘no’ to ‘let me try it.’ Good boy Tigo!

Session 13 with Tigo - 5/25/25.
He was super happy to see me two days in a row and put his nose right in the halter and gave me a soft little cuddle before we left his paddock. I even got to brush him out and scratch on him for the first time without him being mouthy, or needing to work him first!

We did some ground work and Liberty work first to make sure he was in his thinking brain, worked on side-passing away from and TO his handler, then saddled him up. After a free lunge to warm up to how the saddle felt and attaching some reins to his rope halter, I turned on the camera to video our ride!

We worked on his whoa, and noticed he immediately wants to move to the rail to halt, maybe because the trainer before turned him into the fence to stop him? So that will be something we address next session. We made sure he understood direction, yielding his haunches and the forehand in both directions, which is backed up by the ground person if he gets confused, and then we had our first trot!! He was stellar today and such a gentleman, I couldn’t be more pleased for a second ride in over a year. I love horses who are started lightly, and then turned back out to grow up and mature before being restarted—it was exactly what I look for when I look at prospects.