Honey - Owner Update - Nov ‘24

This is a video for the connections of Jador Cooley, including the owners Tammy Pollard, Deborah Halliday and obviously Liz. Well, girls, Honey's turned up in good order at the farm. She's settling in really, really well. She was a bit spicy and excited the first week in her new setting, but she's starting to settle down well now. Obviously there's a lot to love about this horse. She's got beautiful paces, a real athlete as well. She looks like she's got a huge amount of endurance and stamina. She's a good blood horse, which I love. The, the flat work that we've been doing has been very, very simplistic. It's very straightforward. That's sort of pretty much with all, all of, all of the horses. We're sort of just going through this period of just getting to know each other and it's very, very basic throughness work, just walk, trot, canter, getting the horses used to the new, new farm and basically just gently building up a little bit of a partnership. She's a, she's got a great mouth. I love riding her. She's very straightforward and a forward thinking horse. She's a little bit quirky. Obviously when you go to get on her she, she doesn't like standing still. So we're slowly but surely mastering the art of quietly hopping on her without her getting too spicy. My horse Bruno is exactly the same where it takes a little bit of finesse to hop on her, but she's a, obviously she's a sensitive horse which I'm, I love and so you, I found that you can't sort of take your jacket off or quickly hop on while you're on the phone or anything like that. She, she takes a bit of care, a bit of tlc. So basically we've been doing, we did a couple of weeks of hacking and then slowly but surely introducing a bit of fitness work. So she goes out on the, the track and every day she works, walks for 30 or 40 minutes and then every day she either goes on the track and goes jogging and trotting non stop for 20, 25 minutes and then the next day is sort of just simple basic flat work like this. From what I understand, she's, she's been out of work since she, since she got, since Liz's accident. So she, she had a good break and she's, you know, she's feeling good. My plan I think would be to, to take the horses down to Aiken, South Carolina about the middle of January. I've still got A fair bit of getting to know, go home, getting to know her to go. We're getting a little bit late in the season in Pennsylvania and I don't think I'm going to start jumping her a little bit next month. I probably won't get an opportunity to cross country school until we're down south. So I think in December and early January we'll just be doing some simple jumping exercises a lot in the indoor and well, the weather's quite good still, so we're still using our outdoor. And then I think Peter might probably come up here in early January and give me a hand with all of them. Obviously he knows her very well and it'd be good to get a bit of advice and training off Peter. We're slowly sort of training her to the treadmill. This is one of her first days on the treadmill training. Now she's quite confident on there and pretty soon she'll go on there every second day for about 30 minutes after breakfast. Just. It's got an incline. And then she was a little bit nervous and wary of the pond at the beginning, but she's got the hang of it now. We, we put her in there with a friend. She's more happy if she's sort of just following along behind another horse. And it took her just one or two times to get an understanding of it, but she's, she's got the hang of it now. I feel like it's good sort of resistance training again. It's a little bit different, but she's in good shape, girls and I really, really like her. She's fitting in great. Her weight looks good. She's happy and healthy and looks very, very sound. So should be, should be an exciting season next year.