Trigger Update

Today, Trigger had his feet trimmed.  The final step in Project No More Excuses.  But first, since I beat the farrier to the barn by about 30 minutes, I did a quick picking of his feet and brushing of his coat before heading to the round pen.  A while back, someone on the PNER group on Facebook expressed interest in him, and asked about his resting heart rate.  I'd measured it as low as 28 in his stall, but was curious to make him work, and see how high it got and how fast it came down.

I warmed him up a bit:

Then made him canter (though he kept breaking into a fast trot) for a little over five minutes straight.  His heart rate after the few seconds it took me to get to him after he stopped and find his heart rate, was just 96 when I counted for 10 seconds, but it was slowing rapidly, so let's say it was over 100 for sure when he first stopped cantering.  In less than a minute, it was down to 60, a common requirement before the hold time starts at endurance rides.  After a few more minutes, it was 40 while he was grazing and he was paying some attention to Nathan and the dog playing fetch.  Later, after the farrier had done his thing, I measured it as low as 32 in the barn aisle, but he was moving around a bit, so I'm sure I could measure it as low as 28 again if I was patient and took it on his home turf instead of in the barn aisle where he kept being tempted by the nearby hay.  :-)

Before we left the round pen, I took a bit of video showing how he acts afraid of the whip with the ribbon attached (you should see him when I lead him with the whip in one hand and let it whap around wherever it wants to), but is actually fine with it being played with all over his face:

While I was waiting for the farrier, Trigger got the chance to grace in the little holding pen, and Nathan was playing in the grass with a dog, and I was relaxing in the shade with some country music playing.  It was quite pleasant, so I was inspired to take a snippet of video to memorialize it:

Here's a photo from while he was hand-grazing:

And finally, as we were driving home, I noticed the moon looked really cool.  However, my iPhone doesn't do it justice:

So I ran home and grabbed my real camera.  Here's the photo straight out of camera (it's got a prime [i.e. non-zoom] lens on it right now):

Still SOOC but cropped:

And with final editing (punching up the color a bit), better than the iPhone, no?