While this girl's registered name will be Bit-O-Wy Blonde as that is the name
she was given during her initial processing by Mitch Wilkerson and crew
in the Nevada BLM pens, I call her Peep. She
arrived on April 1, 2009, and as I worked her I called her "sweet-pea" which
morphed into "sweet-peep" given that Easter was right around the corner and this
was shortened to Peep.
Working
with Peep has been educational and fun. I have not been and still do not
consider myself a trainer; however, I have been working on training my own horse
for a number of years and frequently work with the weanling/yearlings. Because
of this and because we wanted to have a Damele range curly, we adopted Peep, and
I get to train her.
It is definitely different working with a 4-year-old wild caught horse than
it is working with a younger model, yet the principles are the same. To date
Peep has had a minimal amount of training/handling as the weather turned to
monsoon season as she arrived. I would find a day to play with her in between
rain storms. So, she would get some round pen work when the pen was dry enough
and then it would be another week or more before the rain would quit long enough
to get another session in. Even with this sporadic interaction, Peep progressed
beautifully. She understood turning to face me, she would follow me around the
corral and would let me rub her all along her right side. At this point, we
decided we wanted her bred to Mellow and as the weather was still wet wet wet
(very strange for Cheyenne) ,and as she has a slight defect in her right front
hoof from an old injury to the coronet band (which does not seem to affect her
soundness but we wanted to get her more exercise and drier conditions) we
decided to turn her out for breeding season with Mellow and a few of our other
mares.
The next time we had Peep in was post breeding season and 6 months post her
round pen work. At this time, we decided we wanted to remove the BLM
tag from around her neck. We expected it
to take several tries/refreshers.
However, I put Peep into the round pen
and when I walked in with her, she
immediately turned to me, walked
half-way across the pen to me and then
let me walk up and scratch her. While
she was nervous -remember this is a
4+-year-old wild mare who has had about
15 hours of work and 6 months back out
running free - she tolerated/trusted me
to reach up with both hands and remove
the tag. So what we expected to take
days took less than 10 minutes. And our
impression of this girl was solidified.
We feel she is solid, sensible and a
high-standard curly both in disposition
and confirmation. Peep's first foal is a
smooth coat palomino who looks to turn
into a chocolate palomino when he sheds
his baby coat. For more on Dagwood see
him at "Dagwood".
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