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Delilah
- pony for talented 12 year old
Stop press
26th June 2006.
Before you read this story you will be interested to know that Marcus and Delilah scored 78.3% in a prelim dressage test and 69.2%
in a novice test. Both the best scores they have ever achieved. The judge said it was the best prelim test she had even judged! Now read on to see what Delilah used to be like.March 2006 Fidelis
Semper, otherwise known as Delilah, was quite a handful for talented 12 year old Marcus Watt. Delilah had really nice paces and loved XC as did Marcus, but combined those good attributes with taking advantage of Marcus in any way
she could think of. Spooking was her speciality, she would shoot off after the jump, she would not focus on flat work and she would take off at full gallop in dressage arenas. She even started perfecting a very nifty spin round and
was getting tricky to hack. It came to the point that dressage practice was better for Marcus on an 18hh dressage horse than the 148 cm Connemara x Cob Delilah. The best way to get Delilah to start to listen was to ride her hard
for three quarters of an hour before commencing the real work.
Nothing if not determined, Marcus had his sights set high and entered a British Dressage competition called "Talent Spotting" in Aberdeen, which he won
and was duly booked into the finals at Addington, Bucks. With grit and determination Marcus won the final, apparently the only boy to have won the Pony Section and the youngest that year!
At this point I (Mum) saw a flyer in
the British Dressage magazine for Cool, Calm and Collected. Despite having tried most of the calmers without much success, my nerves were getting too frayed worrying about Marcus's safety and we decided to give it a go. After a few
weeks we were sure we could see a difference. Delilah was much easier to work with, especially in schooling. She would now come straight into her work with no messing and no need for a hard ride in first and would give 25-30
minutes good work before starting to look for ways out of it. She now feels she can cope with situations without having to take flight and run in the opposite direction and is even hacking happily on her own! But the results were
not completely consistent, with good days and bad days.
When phoning up to reorder I had a chat with Malcolm Green about her progress and inconsistency. It turned out I was feeding the supplement seven days a week instead of
five days out of seven as recommended. On changing to this we noticed Delilah became much calmer in her temperament and was generally far more consistent in her behaviour - in her good behaviour that is!
We now feel Marcus
can really start to go forward with Delilah and she has just been affiliated to British Dressage. Marcus would love to qualify for the Nationals and wants to do lots of BYRDS competitions. Now it all looks possible!
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