Mountain Horse Training 1: Ground Tying

This post is more or less a re-post, but I've separated it out from my previous one in an effort to make things a little more coherent. When you're riding the back country, horsemanship follows some different trails. You have to assume nothing will be possible to do in the way you might normally do things. One of these is tying your horse. There just may not be room or a place to conveniently tie a horse to but you need the horse to stand still while you work with it. The solution is to ground tie the horse. It really is nothing more than having the lead rope on the ground with an appropriate command to let the horse know he's "tied."

So how do I proceed? Start at the beginning and train the horse to stand still while attended. Using a vocal command (I use whoa) and body language (stand tall just off to the side at the front of the horse) I step back and put some slack in the lead rope. If the horse attempts to move forward, I shake the lead rope with my hand clearly visible to the horse and give my vocal command.

Continue until the horse doesn't move when you are at least one horse length away. The next step is to do the same thing while the lead rope is on the ground. Drop the lead rope to the ground and give your vocal command. If the horse tries to move, hold your hand up in a stop attitude and give your command. As the horse progresses move around all the sides of the horse while he's ground tied. If necessary, go back to the lead rope in your hand portion of the training until he gets it right.

At this point you need to get the horse to stand comfortably while you proceed with other business. Ground tie the horse and do a small chore. Keep an eye on the horse with your peripheral vision and admonish it with your vocal command if it tries to take a step. Keep working on it until the horse can stand comfortably for 10 to 15 minutes without taking a step and with you at least once going out of sight of the horse. This should now be a regular part of the groundwork you do with your horse. As always at the end of the session praise the horse and give him a lot of positivity when he gets it right.

Mountain Horse Training

I've been remiss. It seems I haven't written a thing here in months and I also have failed in putting my thoughts down on mountain horse training. 

A friend of mine sternly reminded me of this recently. So, without further ado I have posted a list of things a good mountain horse should be able to do and in subsequent posts I will provide some rationale and the methods I have used to meet these requirements. As usual, this is my list and others might want to add or subtract as deemed necessary. Here we go:

1. Ground Tying

2. Tack/Untack Both Sides

3. Flapping Objects

4. Startlement Horse

5. Startlement Rider

6. Wildlife Encounter

7. Chain Saw

8. Obstacle Crossing

9. Backing

10. Sidepassing

11. Weight Drag

12. Load/Carry Saddlebags

13. Don/Doff Clothing

14. Lead/Follow

15. Firecrackers

16. Gunfire

17. New Trailer Load/Unload

18. Cross Water

19. Cross Bridge

20. Ground Leading in Harsh Terrain

Horse Trailer Wrap-Up

My horse trailer is finished, registered, and road worthy. I've given it its maiden shakedown cruise carrying a one ton load and then did a complete re-inspection. Everything checks out so I'm good to go. Of course, my horses, even though they've been trailered extensively before, see this new trailer as an existential crisis so they have to be re-trained. Pain in the... A few pictures of it are shown below the jump.

Cleaning Up Some Old Work

I was going through some old work and thought I would update some of my programs in a recent version of Microsoft Visual Studio. Old dogs and new tricks so to speak, but Visual C# is sufficiently similar to Visual C++ so it wasn't too bad. One of those was a program to fit curve parameters. The routine and the results are shown below the break. I will be making the executable file available on the Google Drive in the Downloads area in the very near future.

SIR Model Revisited

It has been about 15 months since I first did my original SIR modeling concerning the progression of Covid 19. That post is here. I thought I would re-visit the model and the data after all the things that have come to pass since that time. In my initial simple model I used a scaled population  (1 being the total U.S. population.) I have subsequently made some numerical changes  such that I could use the actual U.S. population and compare the confirmed cases and the estimates from the CDC.

As was mentioned in a previous post the CDC has esitmated that the total disease burden is off by a factor of 4.0 due to a variety of reasons they have published. That post is here. To my knowledge no one seems to take real issue with their estimates. In my model I used the multiplication factor published by the CDC and re-plotted it. It is shown below the break.

It's About Damn Time

My horse trailer is finally ready to be titled and registered. I'll be going to the DMV on Monday and we'll see how that goes. California handily allows for the registration for an own built horse trailer and the paperwork seems to be straightforward. I'll temper my enthusiasm until I have the temporary tags in place. I'm really pleased with how it came out and I like the color scheme. Here's a picture of the interior, and a second one showing the outside.

Wildfire and Other Things

What a month. Through August and the first two weeks in September it's been busy. I must have made two dozen trips evacuating other people's animals from the mountains. Wildfire. Every time there is a wildfire in California my mother phones me and asks "is everything OK?" Usually the fire is nowhere near us, well except this time, and she didn't call. Needless to say I get quite a few calls from my mother during wildfire season. The last drought caused a lot of tree kills due to the bark beetles, as I mentioned in a previous post, and often leads to an intense fire season.

It was quite the season this year and it was a near run thing at my place in the mountains. After the break is a photograph from the road up at about the 5000' elevation. The red dot is the approximate location of my place up there. The fire also threatened a small community at the base of the mountains.