Guess who’s sound without her sneakers? Prize! Last week I tried to take her sneakers off and she wanted nothing to do with that. She kept pushing me away from the velcro so I left them on her. Then earlier this week one fell off in the pasture and she was sound so the barn owners took the other one off.

Yesterday I took Z for a bareback pony ride on her. She was pretty good but was a bit overwhelmed. Prize has a big stride so it takes some getting used to. Prize started to walk and Z clutched onto her. We worked on getting her to relax and sit up while I worked on Prize taking smaller steps. When she does that though she collects and tenses up her muscles so she looks like she is about to blow. There is definitely going to be a learning curve for everyone to learn to give pony rides.

I let Z ride for a bit and then let Prize run around the arena (Sound!!) to blow off some steam and then we did rides again. At one point Z made sort of a clucking noise so Prize obediently tried to trot. We got that stopped in a few steps so no harm done. I can see myself trying to explain to Prize, “Remember how you have been drilled all your life to listen to everything your rider says? Forget that with the short person. Do what she means instead of what she says.”

Speaking of communicating with animals, I’m signed up to take my level one Reiki course with an emphasis on animal Reiki this next weekend. I’m not sure what I’m going to learn. I’d like to be able to use it diagnostically. “Oh, you have a hole in your aura over your liver. Let’s look at that.” The person who did the introductory lecture I went to says that she can feel differences in auras in animals with cancer than in healthy animals and even feel differences in diffferent types of cancer. I’m not sure how to word that in mainstream practice. People will flip if I tell them that I think we need to do a workup on the animal they brought in for vaccines because their aura isn’t right! Why yes, I am a quack, why do you ask?