Happy Christmas

We have been having a small problem with Bonitao, our horse. He has gotten into the habit of bolting to the field when being lead there. We had been hearinf reports of this for a while from the girls at the yard, but it was clearly getting out of hand so we have taken on the problem ourselves.
To understand the problem we had to see it so a week or so ago I went to the yard to turn him out myself. The result was that on the first attempt to take him to the field he bolted but I managed to let my hands slowly close the 22 foot rope and slow him to a halt, but at the expense of some serious rope burns on my hands. I immediately took him away from the field and lead him back again (with gloves on !) and again, at the same spot he bolted. With gloves I had no chance of stopping him.
The question now was, why? He is not doing this through fear as can be seen from his expression. He is clearly very left brain as he goes. Therefore he is not showing respect to humans as leaders in this context. My immediate response was to play the falling leave pattern with him, thus walking into his space as I asked for yields on the head collar. These went very well and the next attempt at passing the gate was good.
Ritchie then had a lesson with Becka, who spends a lot of time with James Roberts and so knows us and Bonitao well. She analysed it similarly to us but added in the idea that this was now a learned behaviour and we needed to break the pattern for an extended period of time to cure it. To ensure no repeats she suggested we send him to the field sideways with his head tipped towards us. In this position he cannot get into a power position to pull away from us. If necessary we should even send him backwards. I have been doing this for about 5 or 6 days now and it is working well. On just one occasion has he tried to bolt and as he was in the thick mud at the time by the gate he failed. In a way this was a good thing as he attempted and failed to get away reinforcing the idea that a new pattern is required.
It would be easy to get frustrated by this behaviour, but I prefer to say "How interesting" and then solve the puzzle. In a way I think this defines good horsemanship. Getting frustrated at a horse behaving like a horse is clearly not the way to go, the challenge is to use natural techniques to strengthen the desired behaviours, and diminish the undesired ones. For the horse it is just behaviour, neither good nor bad and we should "think like a horse" and understand this.
 This ideal can be tough to achieve at times but it is an attitude that separates a good horseman, of whatever experience, from a bad one.
On a happier note Billy can now have his leg bandages off in the stable. They have to be reapplied if he goes out to the field or in the school to protect them from sand and mud, but at least so air can now get to the area.
Happy Christmas everyone !!

Just an update

Although it is a while since the last blog I have been playing with both Filly and Billy. I have been somewhat short of time to write about as well though.
Filly and I continue to work on excellence at all the various games and this has been going pretty well. In particular we have continued to work on maintaining gait through the figure 8 and weave pattern. This has improved beyond measure but is still being done with a sour look on her face. In general I have been given the impression by her that she is rather bored with the whole thing which tells me that I have been a little too strong on the consistency with insufficient variety to keep her mind occupied. Remembering that "communication is two or more individuals sharing and understanding an idea" I realised that my responsibility of listening to her communication had been lacking and it was time for a total change of scene. She was telling me she needed a break and a change of scene.
It was not a very pleasant afternoon with gusty strong winds and the occasional light shower, but horses are fairly waterproof and I had a good jacket on so we went for a walk to the big field. Remembering that in the past Filly had been absolutely terrified of open spaces I was pleased when she excitedly but totally left brained entered the field. She was off to explore. The field had recently been muck spread to encourage hay growth next year and it was interesting to observe that she did not want to eat any of the grass where the muck was. This make evolutionary sense for her to be adverse to this as in the wild it would encourage the spread of worms. So we went further and further from the entrance looking for good grass. As it happens the edges of the field had been left un-tainted and despite this being near a noisy (due to the wind) hedge this is where she chose to graze. Slowly we worked our way further from the gate to the end of the field where she caught site of some very large cows in the next field. Head up and attentive. I was pleased to see that she was evaluating them with a sceptical left brain rather than just going right brained and running away. Back to grazing, but with the odd glance in the direction of the cows.
Spending time like this just quietly grazing allows close observation of the small details and I offer up one such detail below for thought and comment.
I have been continuing to read Equitation Science (Paul McGreevy and Andrew McLean 2010) and it raises an interesting suggestion. It acknowledges that horses have left and right brain behaviour and draws an analogy with left and right brained rodents and their dominant paws. It has been found in rodents that left pawed individuals have associated higher stress levels and speed of fear arousal. Left pawed suggests right hemisphere dominant brain which fits with the Parelli horsenality model. When horses graze they tend to have a handedness (hoofedness ?) as to which front leg they prefer to have forwards as the eat. The book suggests that there may be a parallel with horses and we can determine which leg is preferential from observing them grazing and then possibly use this to discover something about the inherent characteristics of the horsenality of the horse. They muddy the waters a little by then asking which leg is the dominant one, the forward one or the supporting one. However it seems to me that in Parelli with so many horse having had their horsenality determined it would be possible to test this hypothesis with enough subjects to get a statistical result. For what it is worth Filly favours her right front leg forward (by a factor of around 2 : 1) and I believe she is a Left Brained introvert, which suggests to me that the forward leg is dominant.
Any comments from others would be of great interest.

Have horse catch you

Another visit to James Roberts yesterday. He doesn't have any courses on a present so it was an opportunity to see him working with his own horses for a change.
The theme for the day was definitely Liberty work, and we watched a nice session of him playing with his own working horse "Princess". In particular he was working on zone 5 driving at Liberty, over emphasising his direction of focus of both the eyes and the belly button as he asked for serpentines up and down the school. As he said, this was to improve her response to his focus when he is riding her so that he has to use his hands less which are normally fully occupied with the lead rope to the young colts he starts. Princess is used a lot for ponying young colts as she can interact with them as a horse and move them around. So James directs Princess who in turn directs the colts getting them to yield to pressure. She is the perfect horse for this as she can look cranky and forceful enough to get the youngsters to respect her without getting aggressive.
In the afternoon he gave a lesson to a young man who has just arrived at the yard as a livery. (Lucky guy !! I'm not jealous at all !). After the usual brieifing on the Plan (see link on right side) they started working on "Have horse catch you". This was the first time I had seen the catching game as played by James. Basically the horse was put at Liberty and then made to move around the school while the student walked with purpose and "crankiness" around the inside of the arena, regularly putting pressure on the horse to keep moving. The result was this fit young pony cantered around the arena for about 1/2 hour with the occassional directed change of direction. From the ponies head tossing you could tell that she did not like this sudden assertion of leadership from a human. As James suggested the pony had been at the top of the pecking order for years and it was a bit of a shock to the system to find that she no longer was. As time progressed however the head tossing reduced and the horse lowered her head and started to show signs of relaxation and submission. The key was to pay close attention to her expression. To start the head and nose were tipped out and away form the owner, but slowly the head straightened. As soon as she glanced at the owner he had to turn and walk purposefully away for her. The mode of his walk was all important. He had to demonstrate his positive leadership qualities and so walk as though he knew where he was going and was thus worth following. The pony stopped and pondered him for a while before deciding that he was not worth following and turning away again, at which point she was immediately sent out on the circle again. Some minutes later and another glance. The owner turned and walked away again and she pondered him for much longer. So he just walked repeatedly past her as she decided whether or not to accept his leadership. On one pass he just asked her to move her front legs to get her "unstuck" and she then willingly followed him. However it was not all over, as he came and sat in a chair she again turned and left him, but was helped on her way to more circles. Only a short time passed and she again turned and asked for permission to come to him and then stayed with him for a long while as we all discussed what we had just seen.
James suggested that the owner do this for another 3 or 4 days to really get the bond and leadership established before moving onto "Halter with Savvy". This is what I mean on my Plan website where I say "don't pass onto the next item of the plan until the current one is solid".
Why is this so important. Well if you horse is travelling around you, looking to the outside and tossing it's head, as long as it is not doing so in fear or right brained, it is in effect swearing at you and giving you the finger. It does not see you as the leader but as an inconvenience that occasionally does things to it rather than with and for it. That is not a healthy relationship to have with an animal you are going to trust your life to.
All in all a very interesting day. On arriving back at the yard I checked out the "Have horse catch you" with Filly and found it was not really up to standard to start with. I therefore played the game and in only around 10 minutes it was pretty good again. I've made a mental note to be a little more conscientious in checking each box on the plan and make sure that each is done with excellence before moving on in the future.

Playing with Billy again

Just a quick note as it is late and we have to get up early to go to James Roberts yard again.
As the title says I have started playing with Billy again. His legs seem to finally be healing well after some 5 or 6 months. He is certainly full of himself and has spent the last two days testing our leadership relationship again. I hope I am winning !
The remarkable thing is that other than these displays of dominance he seems to have forgotten nothing that he has been taught in the past despite the long layoff. May this give hope to others in a similar situation. Circling game is very good as is sideways. In fact some of his yields have improved. However he is testing my strength of will when it comes to porcupine game on the halter, and given me another learn burn on my hand. Only slight though. The yard girls have mentioned that he is becoming more difficult to lead and as they are using a leather halter I can well believe it.
Sorry this is short but must go to bed now and prepare to have brain overload again tomorrow

Alelomimetic Behaviour

Another fun day yesterday. As I collected her from the stable the food was just arriving. Not a great time to start playing with Filly, but she soon settled down and we had great fun. Due to the upset caused by walking past the food trolley to the school she did not want to roll immediately upon entering the school which is unusual.
We spent quite a while refining her backup as she had started to make the assumption that having backed a few paces she she set off on a circle. Principle number 2 applies. To counter this I just sent her back, made her wait then surprised her by walking to her to give her a carrot piece.
Having sorted that minor problem out we moved onto changing gait from trot to canter on a circle. To start this required an escalation to phase 3 pressure but fairly quickly she learned to transition to canter on only phase 1 or 2. Again I feel one of the differences with Natural Horsemanship is that we start with very light pressure, in this case merely upping body energy and extending the arm out to the side and then slowly increase the pressure until we get the response that is desired. In this case I held my arm out for at least a full circle and to start with released if Filly just increased the speed of the trot. If the arm did not work then I clucked twice followed by slapping the ground with the string behind her. To start with I expect no response at all from the extended arm but horses are very quick at learning "What happens before what happens happens". In other words if I stay at phase 1 long enough and then increase the phases Filly soon learns that if she does not respond to the phase 1 then more forceful phases will follow and therefore it is her interest to respond to phase 1. As training progresses the time interval for each phase is shortened gradually so she does not learn that she can ignore phase 1 for sometime before it is prudent to respond.
Once this was going well online we did some practise at Liberty. I think at one point I must have put a fraction too much pressure on her mentally as she suddenly didn't want to play anymore. Rather than get frustrated I just accepted the situation and set about restoring her trust. Simply done really I just wandered around the school ignoring her, making sure that all turns were made so that my belly button always pointed away from her. After just a few minutes of sniffing the ground, licking the walls (all displacement behaviour) she walked over and suddenly appeared on my shoulder with head lowered. I then reinforced the trust by walking to her favourite roll spot and decided to see if I could get her to roll at Liberty next to me. This is where that forbidding looking title comes in. Social animals will often mimic other animals in the herd and I decided to see if I could use this behaviour to induce the roll. I lowered my head and started pawing at the ground. Within one or two seconds Filly mimicked me whilst standing by my side. I then knelt down and again within 10 seconds Filly had taken a few paces away and knelt near me followed by a good satisfying roll. The speed at which she mimicked my behaviour was actually quite startling as I really did not expect it to work. I had not done any prior training for this other than always kneeling down close to her when she rolled. I had certainly never taught her to paw the ground on command, so this was a true mimicking of my behaviour, or was it just fluke on the timing ? I guess one trial does not make for scientific proof of the concept, but intuition told me she was mimicking me. A man with intuition, now there is a new idea !

Holiday over

Back from holiday with a reasonable tan and a head swimming with the ideas in the book "Equitation Science". Not a book for the faint hearted, but worth a read. Somewhat scathing about Natural Horsemanship but it really just says that the principles are not yet scientifically validated.
Having arrived home I was of course keen to seen Filly and continue preparing for a good audition. Two gentle days later and we are back on track. Playing with a Filly whilst suffering from jet lag is taxing, but keeps me awake and on my toes.
We now have a well established pattern of having Filly roll next to me as soon as we get into the school. She is now very confident with me in close proximity to the extent I have to be careful she does not actually roll onto me. This is a great exercise for building trust between us, and fun as all these interactions should be.
I am still working on getting lightness in the sideways game and have found that giving her a destination, preferably with a carrot on it, makes this much easier to achieve. We can now get to the end of the 22 foot line with only phase 1 or 2 pressure and more importantly with accuracy about the direction. I must start with the 45 foot line soon.
Yesterday we played a bit at Liberty and I found that my hind quarter yield no longer worked. Back to reinforcement online. Even then I had to go to phase 3 or 4 once to get her really responsive. Interestingly as I have noted before she became way more enthusiastic and attentive after a single phase 4 than when I was just trying to be gentle. This is becoming a repeated pattern. It seems that she responds to me better after I have really stepped up and asserted leadership at least once and even seems to enjoy my company more. I guess from her point of view she feels more safety and comfort around a strong leader than a weak one. Still it is hard to have to do this on occasion and I have to take care to use Principle 5 "The attitude of justice is effective" rather than just "Show her who's boss".
Having re established my leadership online I continued to work at Liberty which went much much better. To really reward her for a good hind quarter yield as soon as she started to turn and face I would remove all the pressure by turning and walking away. Within seconds a little Filly face would appear at my shoulder and contentedly walk with me.
All in all a good fun session which softened the blow of coming back to a cool windy England after the holiday.

Holiday !!!!

Just to let you all know that I am going away on holiday tonight and will be away for a week. Of course I am taking several relevant books such as Equitation Science with me.  This is one book that really needs quiet contemplation to understand. I have had to use Google to look up what some of the words even mean. Conspecific for example. But then I was never any good at crosswords having the limited vocabulary of an engineering student.
Filly will, I am sure be glad of the break. The good news is that she is confident enough now that she can be left in a field on her own. A very satisfying improvement from the early days where just being outside the stable block was a cause of considerable stress for her.
Normal service will resume the week after next !!

Quick update

Just a quick update today. I have been playing a fair bit with Filly but it has just been more of the same. We are still working on getting her draw to be more energetic and to be done with a more willing expression. It is slowly paying dividends. She now draws into me with a reasonable effort, but the expression is still a little sour. On the upside this is finally letting us maintain gait through a trotted figure of 8. Only one lap at the moment but the next session we will increase to 1 and 1/2 laps.
We have also been working on lightness in the sideways game. Larisa has set me a target of sideways to the end of a 45 foot line only using phase 1 or 2 pressure. This is actually going fairly well. I place a carrot on the top of a mounting block, carefully line her up on it and then send her sideways to it to get her reward. Once she got the idea that the destination has a reward on it she started putting real effort in getting there ! There are two advantages to putting the reward at the destination. To start with she can instantly receive the reward on achieving the task and thus link the reward more intimately to the task. Secondly it gives me a fixed destination to send her too which means I have to send her exactly sideways with no drift forwards or backwards.
We have also been working on her zone 5 liberty driving by using the follow the rail pattern. In this task I have to be able to walk behind her tail, guiding her with a couple of sticks whilst she has no halter on. To make this easier I started using the follow the rail pattern. This has the advantage that the wall of the school stops her turning one way whilst I use a stick and plastic bag to stop her turning away from the wall. Forwards in initiated by increasing my energy, focussing on where I want to go and then if necessary using the bag right above he tail to create impulsion. As soon as she is walking I go into neutral and walk, with focus, behind her. I placed carrots on cones in each corner to give her a destination and reward for reaching them. After this pattern was established I placed cones and carrots in the middle of the school and we left the safety of the wall and set off across the school. We didn't get to the cones on a dead straight line, but we did get to all of them which was a good start. As for stopping I just use the signal we use when riding. A breath in followed by a long relaxing exhale, drop my body energy and if this fails then a light pull on her tail and we gently stop. Hence the reason I was working on lead by the tail recently !!
We are also have great success with her friendly game whilst lying down. I know she will always roll in the sand when we enter the school so I have used that behaviour to slowly influence where she rolls. Leaving her online I kneel near her roll spot whilst she looks for the perfect spot. To start with I let that be anywhere she wanted and then moved to her. Slowly I have been using the rope to restrict her range. Now I have it to the point that I am using a 12 foot rope and getting her to roll within 6 feet of me. As soon as she is down she gets a carrot. She will even lay with her head flat out and still take a carrot from my hand. Slowly I am getting to the point where I can move around her and rub and scratch on her whilst she is lying down. And the point of all this. 1) It is a real acceptance of me as a partner, not a predator, to allow me to be near and touch her when she is in this most vulnerable position. 2) If she ever gets sick, such as colic, she is already used to having me around her whist she is on the ground. Thus I can attend to her without increasing her stress above that of being sick. 3) It just feels very special to have that sort of a bond and trust with a prey animal. This is supposed to be fun and rewarding after all !

Putting the lesson to use

I have been continuing the exercises that were started during the lesson with Larisa. The main emphasis is still to get Filly to draw towards me with real energy and a lack of aggression on her face.
To balance these two requirements is very tricky. For example is she comes to me with real impulsion but a sour look on her face do I reward her? If I do then I am reinforcing that the attitude is ok. If I don't she will think "I put effort in and still did not get rewarded, so extra effort cannot be the right answer".
In practise I run backwards away from her, encouraging impulsion with a pull pressure on the lead rope and tags with the stick and string on her sides whilst studying her expression. As soon as I see her ears soften I stop and reward her. The snag is that she can twitch her ears faster than I can react so timing the reward of rest and a carrot can be hit and miss. The problem is missing an opportunity to reward her. If I miss such an opportunity I am inadvertently reinforcing the idea that softness is not the answer.
To mix things up a bit I am also continuing to work on her sideways game. Under Larisa's tutelage she suggested that I needed to get to the point where I could get her to drift out to the end of a 45 foot rope whilst I stand still and only use phase one (body energy only) and phase two (very very light use of stick and string wafted in her direction). The key is too walk to her and reward her with a treat as she moves further and further away. So on the first attempts I rewarded her for a quality step or two away from me. Slowly she has to go further and as of last night we were pretty much getting to the end of the 22 foot rope. Quality is the watch word here. I want lightness and straightness. By straightness I mean that if I pick a spot on the wall over her whithers then she should remain on that line. She tends to drift forwards, and if so I just wriggle the rope gently to get her back on line. In contrast to the draw exercises she is learning this game remarkably quickly.

Can horses laugh ?

We had another lesson with Larisa today. As usual she quickly isolated where my problems lay and then set up specific exercises to improve things.
As I have mentioned before I have had trouble getting Filly to maintain trot around a figure eight. I have tried all sorts of things to improve the issue, boomerang pattern, maintain gait on a circle, weave pattern to name but a few.
I had noted that Filly gave a really sour look as I asked her to change direction at trot but was unsure as to whether this was due to dominance or unconfidence. I had been working to start with on the assumption it was unconfidence. After all I had a 50 50 chance of being right and if I guessed dominance and was wrong the exercises to make her less dominant could really have damaged the rapport with an unconfident horse.
But this was not working. Larisa had me start with the falling leaf pattern. This involves walking in a straight line forwards and asking the horse to perform half circles in front of me as I move. I am therefore continually moving into her space and she has to move to get away from me. Sure enough she showed the sour face at each change of direction, but Larisa noted that she was not very quick at yielding her shoulder away from me and was pushing on my personal bubble. Horses in a herd will often push on each other with their shoulders to demonstrate dominance, especially if their ears are back at the same time. The solution was to continue doing many falling leaf patterns and "tag" her with the string on my carrot stick if she made to push on my space with her shoulder. I was therefore looking for snappy forequarter yields away from me as she came through the turn and a non-agressive look on her face. Lots to take in whilst you are handling stick and rope, walking forwards, asking for changes of direction etc. After many passes up and down the school we started to get the quick yield and she was rewarded with a rest for that. As we progressed I got more particular that not only did the yield have to be good, but the expression as well. Not something to be fixed in a day but we made good progress.
We then moved onto improving the energy she puts into drawing towards me when asked. This is again to improve the maintain gait during figures of 8. Larisa had me circle her around and then run backwards down the school, applying pressure on the lead rope and using the stick and string to tag her on the side until she mode effort to follow me. If she failed to apply effort, or came to me with a sour look I then had to send her back on the circle. If she did put effort into coming to me with a good look then she got a nice long rest by my side.
At the start of this exercise she was really resisting on the rope and I was having to apply quite a lot of pressure, whilst running backwards and tagging her with the string. We worked at this for a while with only small improvements. Suddenly she got the idea and with me pulling on the rope she suddenly broke into canter towards me. Caught of guard and with all the rope tension released the result was inevitable. I landed flat on my back and, according to Larisa, bounced once before coming to a stop whilst Filly overshot me and came back around with her ears pricked, eyes glinting and head tilted to one side as she examined me from an unfamiliar angle. I am sure the answer to the blog title is "yes they can" !!

Audition attempt

Finally a few days ago Ritchie and I had time to attempt to film a Parelli audition with me and Filly. For those who don't know the system to get a levels qualification you film a continuous 10 minute video, upload it to YouTube and then send the link to the Parelli campus. There assessors view the video and decide whether or not it deserves a pass.
I am confident that Filly and I can perform all the required tasks to a good level for a level 2 or even level 3 online audition. However trying to get her to perform all the tasks in a continuous 10 minute take proved more challenging (which I guess is why they want it done in one take). I won't bore you with a detailed description of the session as it is all captured and film and if you are extremely bored you can watch it here YouTube Video .
Comments welcome, but please keep them constructive as I think I know where most of the bad points are already. It has taken some courage to even post this video for all to see !!

Foward walk

The development of Filly's responsibilities continues. We now have a pretty good maintain gait and maintain direction. Her "look where you are going" is very good as well, except for one lapse yesterday. Now I am adding in some athleticism for her. In this case I am referring to "fowardness" in the gaits.
First a definition of fowardness in the walk. The walk is forward when the hind hoof lands at least in the hoof print that was just made by the front hoof. Ideally we want the hind to land 4 hoof prints in front, but that is only achieved by lots of practise. I was at James Roberts again a few days ago and witnessed a very talented event horse with about 5 or 6 over track ! This is an important trait as it means that the horse has to engage it's hind quarters to achieve the over track. Engagement of the hind quarters is important as it is the power house of the horse. If the hinds are not engaged then the horse is just pulling itself along by it's front legs.
So how to achieve this ideal. I put Filly on the circle as usual and ensured that she was maintaining her responsibilities. Then I started looking at her gait and noticed that she had the minimum requirement of forwardness. To improve on this I just asked her to walk on three tracks for a step or two, then back to two tracks. Quick explanation of tracks. Walking straight a horse is on 2 tracks with the hind foot tracking the same side front foot. On three tracks we have the inside front on the inside track, the inside hind tracking the outside front on the second track, then the outside hind on the third and outside track. To ask for this I just have to focus on her hind quarters and walk into her zone 4 pushing her hind quarters over. Once she has managed a step or two of 3 track the reward is to return to two tracks. This causes her to really think about and engage her hind quarters. The result of 15 minutes was a two print over track which is not bad at all.
I also worked on the responsibilities at trot which were pretty good so we moved onto canter. This caused problems. She did not want to canter! I had to put lots of pressure on her to get her to canter at all. Snag is that I don't want to canter her on too small a circle as that is hard work on her joints which is undesirable for a young horse. But on a big circle she knows I can't get to her with the stick and string. The solution was to only send her back a short distance from me and then send her on the circle from a distance where I could tag her with the string if needed. As she starts the circle I can let the rope run through my hand until she gets to the end and can start circling at the full rope distance. I did have to tag her with the string twice, but after that she rapidly made the change to commencing the canter at a very early phase of the ask.
For a while though she would not maintain gait at canter and I had to correct her several times a lap. One of the big differences between the circling game and longeing is that with the circling game I do not continuosly ask for canter to get her to maintain gait. I just send her at canter then go into neutral in the centre of the circle until she breaks gait. It is important to let her make the mistake and then only use the phase that is needed to get her to canter again. The game for her is to find what it takes to keep me at neutral. Thus I am not just working her body but making her use her brain as well to puzzle out what she needs to do to keep me quiet in the middle.
To start with I would reward her by bringing her into me for a rest after she had managed one lap without breaking gait. We slowly built this up to two laps. Thus her responsibility to maintian gait was established, but her maintain direction was poor. She was leaning out on the line putting quite a lot of pressure on my arm. It was difficult to stay in neutral to teach maintain gait whilst she pulled hard on me ! The responsibilities are put in a specific order for a reason. The maintain direction cannot be practised if the horse won't maintain gait and keeps stopping. Thus I was not too concerned about the maintain direction as this can be established once we have maintain gait really sorted out. In fact I suspect that it will all come together at the same time. Once I have her doing 5 laps at canter she will have figured out that pulling on the rope is too tiring to canter for long periods and she will find relaxation on the circle at canter with a nice loose rope.
It was interesting that her last responsibility "Look where you are going" was very poor when she was not keeping the other reponsibilities first. On one circle she suddenly came across a cone in the way. Her reaction showed that she saw it at the last moment and jumped out of her skin. "Who the hell put that there" was the look on her face. This just serves to emphasise that the order of the responsibilities is very important and it would be a mistake to try and teach them in any other way.

Principle Number 3

For those of you who practise Parelli and don't know what principle 3 is shame on you :-) For all others of you it is "Communication is two or more individuals sharing and understanding an idea". A good principle for use in other activities than horsemanship. The essence is that just telling an individual something is not communication unless the other party has understood that communication. Most importantly you must check that the understanding of the idea is also mutual. In other words check the communication means the same thing to each individual.
Yesterday I was playing with Filly at Liberty. We were doing circling game and figure 8. There was a miscommunication as she circled towards the wall of the school and I gave the instruction to change direction. At this point she stopped and started going sideways down the wall, looking very pleased with herself. I was around half the size of the school from her. My signal had been to start disengaging her, run backwards to draw her towards me then point in the direction of the new circle with my stick in the new driving hand. Snag was that if I switched to the driving hand with the stick a fraction too soon she took this as a signal to turn her nose away from me which left her pointing at the wall. Now add in that I had just tried to disengage her hind end a fraction and all the elements were there for her to believe that I wanted sideways along the wall.
Without really understanding principle number 3 I would have got angry and frustrated as my "stupid horse" seemed to defy me and do the wrong thing. But I do understand p3 and as a result I got angry and frustrated at myself for not being able to communicate more clearly what I wanted, whilst actually being proud and happy that Filly was doing her best to understand what to her was confusing and contradictory instructions. Thus p3 was instrumental in me keeping my emotions firmly under control, analysing the problem and then seeking a method of communication that put my desires across clearly to Filly.
This really drives home why it is so important to know AND understand the principles at a level where abiding by them happens at an almost unconscious level. In a situation like this there is no time to systematically go through the principles to see which one is required at this moment.
For those who want to see the list of Principles look at the link to the Parelli Framework in the right margin of this blog.
Just a plea from me. The last comment I got was from Petra on the 24th April. It is getting a bit lonely out here. Please comment if you have time and if you have trouble doing so let me know at Tim@trscott.me.uk and I'll investigate the problem. Thanks.

Boomerang

I am still working on the maintain gait at trot whilst doing a figure 8 pattern. Filly is good at trot on the straight section but breaks gait to a walk around the corners. Not always, but sometimes. I have been puzzling out how to prevent this for a while. Larrisa got me working on her "follow a feel" in zone one. Put simply this means that when I apply pressure on the lead rope to ask for a change of direction she should follow the feel and smoothly turn in the direction of the pressure. She fairly readily changed direction but the break of gait showed a hesitation as she came around the corner. This suggested that whilst she was physically complying she was mentally resisting the feel. Applying more pressure and releasing as she resumed trot was a technique I had been trying but if anything this just increased the resistance and tendency to break gait.
Following on from the maxim "If you always do what you have always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten" I needed a change of tack. Then yesterday I remembered the David Lichman clinic Ritchie and I had attended a while back. He was getting the participants to use the "Boomerang" pattern to improve the feel in zone 1 and the draw. This is a simple pattern and involves sending the horse out on a circle around an obstacle (I used a barrel) and once around the barrel drawing the horse towards you for a treat. The horse rapidly figures that all they have to do is go out and around the barrel then come back to get a rest and a carrot so they put effort into it. This is then done on both reins to equalise out the direction of turn. Once consistent you can ask for the turn to be around both barrels.
Filly caught onto this game very quickly and with my supply of carrot pieces fast running out we managed an entire figure 8 at trot ! So simple, yet it had taken me so long to find the answer. This pattern is just a breakdown of elements of the figure 8 pattern with a specific place for a reward on each lap. Now "all" we need to do is extend the length of the pattern before a reward is forthcoming to get nice figure 8 patterns at the desired gait. I want to build this up to canter eventually such that Filly is doing a flying lead change on each lap as she changes direction around the barrels. She is going to be a race horse but I want to give her the skills needed for life after racing. Who knows they may serve her well on the race track as well.

Maintain gait with an obstacle

Remember the reponsibilities of the horse ?

1) Don't act like prey animal, act like a partner
2) Maintain gait
3) Maintain direction
4) Look where you are going.

We have now started to combine all the responsibilities in a single circling game. I have been working on the maintain gait for years, maintain direction for the last couple of weeks (at a new level of precision) and look where you are going more or less independently of the others by asking her to cross obstacles.
The maintain gait part is fairly easy. Remain in neutral unless she breaks gait from walk to trot or walk to halt for example. Should she break gait then I just ask for the gait to resume as asked. I have modified this slightly. If she goes from walk to halt to graze I then ask for one lap of trot before resuming walk. She quickly learns that just maintaining walk and snatching a mouthful on the move is much more pleasant.
As I have reported recently I have been working hard on taking maintain direction to a new level. Again if she keeps the same amount of slack in the rope she is left alone and I maintain neutral in the center of the circle, but should she edge in on the circle I drive her out a little further than she came in by walking into her space. Again the concept is to slightly over correct then resume the circle. This has worked pretty well and we usually get good circles these days.
For the look where you are going part I have put a small jump in the way and just to add to the difficulty placed some barrels such that there is a smallish gap for her to pass through at the same time. The squeeze game was used to get her confident and get her to maintain gait over the pole. To start she tended to enter the squeeze at walk and exit at trot as though the squeeze had accelerated her. Slowly we got to the point where she confidently picked each leg up carefully and walked over the pole. Then we added trot as the gait which she managed to maintain immediately so back to walk and she was still happy at walk.

So the latest challenge was to combine all the above so that she could circle accurately at the same gait and pass through the squeeze. I just acted as though the squeeze did not exist and asked for circles having positioned myself so that she would pass the squeeze on each lap if she maintained direction. I am ultimately after at least four laps with no intervention at all from me. To date only two laps have been achieved, but then I am asking a young Filly to concentrate on her responsibilities for quite a long time. It is interesting that we can already manage more laps at trot than at walk which seems to indicate that it is attention span that is the challenge as the total time to a breakdown is about the same.

Bad day Good day

I remember writing a long time ago that at times I feel that I am due a bad day. Well it happened yesterday. Ritchie and I decided that we would try and film an online audition of me and Filly. But it was a bit windy, and there were some things in the audition that I was not happy were ready yet and I felt a bit under pressure to get a filming done. All recipes for a bad day and showed my lack of savvy about setting things up for success.
To start with I wanted to check out her reaction to the bag on the end of a carrot stick. In the past this has been fine, to the extent that I had probably overdone it a bit and got her past the confident stage into the completely desensitised stage. When I had done this I didn't know better and thought that the more desensitised the better. James has put me right on that score and the mere word "desensitised" is more or less banned on his yard. We want horse to be confident with objects because they understand they cannot be hurt by them, not desensitised so they don't even notice them.
An analogy my beer soaked mind just dreamt up. You don't want a bomb disposal officer to be desensitised to a ticking clock so that he doesn't even notice them. You want him confident about ticking clocks so that depending on circumstances he can deal with it appropriately, including "run away" if required.
By desensitising a horse to a bag on a stick it can no longer work as a communication device, it doesn't exist.
For Filly she was certainly desensitised to the bag over her whole body and neck, but flapping in the wind near her face was a different story. Big right brain moment, snorting, rearing, striking and backing away. The act of gaining a horses trust and confidence in these situations is one of the things I enjoy most, probably because with practise it is actually quite easy ! It simply revolves around approach and retreat of the scary object carefully timed to her reaction and that's about it. After around 10 minutes she was chewing the bag thoughtfully which was the point to quit. She was not desensitised as she still acknowledged it's existence by munching on it, but she was also confident enough about it to munch on it.
So far so good. The snag now was that we were in a field of lush grass which happens to have some jumps, barrels etc in it. Her field has virtually no grass in it at all, to the extent that her and Moo often break through the fence to get to the good grass.
Now playing with her in this field and having loads of time is one thing, but filming a 10 minute video is something else. The difference of course is the ability when I have time on my hands to let her graze. In fact letting her stop and graze is a great instant reward when she gets something right. It's a field full of reward treats and they can be given instantly rather than having to go to her or bring her to me to deliver them. Thus the treat can be more strongly associated with the action. To make a film in this environment is beyond me however. To keep her attention on me for 10 minutes would have meant putting more pressure on her than I liked and would have looked awful in an audition tape. So having tried for a few minutes I quickly gave up and Ritchie left to do other things.
I should have stopped at this point as my mind set was now wrong for playing in this environment, but I continued. As a result I caught myself be over dominant, endangering the rapport I have with Filly and getting frustrated. Fortunately I did notice these changes and went and sat on a barrel to think.
She had been circling me with constant pressure on the rope as though trying to get away from me where I usually expect the rope to be dragging in the grass a little. She was not grazing at my feet as she usually does, but some way off. I took a risk and removed the rope. She did not flee. Good. I went to the hedge for a pee and she stayed where she was. On returning I just played lots of friendly game. After a while I asked for a circle, and she set off. I thought she was leaving me then but she just worked her way around the jumps and completed a nice circle. I asked her across the 18 inch pole at walk and she confidently walked across. I tried stick to me at walk and trot and she stayed on my shoulder. Phew. What a relieve. She had made it clear earlier that I was applying too much pressure, I had finally listened and after a few minutes she had forgiven me. Thank God for the forgiving nature of horses, if you don't push them too far of course.
The big test was today of course. I went to the field with some trepidation and set up some cones. There she was on the other side of the fence shadowing my every move. As usual she walked happily at liberty to the gate with me and stood quietly as I attached the halter. We did a bit more work with the bag around her head and played a little with crossing the pole at walk and trot with it even higher. Some changes of direction on the circle whilst maintaining gait and I called it a successful day. It might not seem from the outside to be a spectacularly good day, but to me it felt that I had my friend truly back and what could be better than that ?

Haltering with Savvy

You'll find this in the Plan link on the right of this page but I thought I would quickly highlight this section in a post.
I have been really emphasising this since my two weeks with James in the summer. The ability to watch him and his team for two weeks as they so gently and carefully put the halter or bridle on their horse drove home to me the importance of this aspect of my horsemanship.
Too halter with savvy I start by standing by Filly's neck and lightly pass the poll line over her neck. I then move back to stand by her shoulder facing forwards and using light pressure on the line ask her head and nose to tip round towards me in a lateral flexion and lower her head to the level of my tummy. This is of course a submissive and trusting pose for a horse to enter. A predator will try and achieve this lateral flexion pose when it attacks as it removes all the forward drive from the prey. Thus to willingly put herself in this position when I ask shows that she trusts me with her life, and as each time nothing bad happens to her deepens her believe that I won't harm her increasing that trust.
Then with infinite care I pass the nose band over her mouth, gently wriggle the halter into place and tie the knot. Should she try and turn her head away from me I just lightly and persistently ask for it to relax back around. To aid this process initially she then got a treat whilst still in the lateral flexion further emphasising that this submissive position could actually be quite pleasant.
Taking the halter off is also an art. To start with if it is in the field after a play session I always take her to the water barrels. This is where she is apt to go when released and I would rather that her first action when the halter is removed is not to leave me. Thus taking her to the place she is likely to go reduces the chances of her just walking off.
Removing the halter is just the reverse process of putting it on. I stand by her shoulder, ask for her head to come round in the lateral flexion and lower, undo the knot and ever so gently slide the head collar off. I tend to keep my right arm wrapped around her nose as it comes off, allow the head collar to drop to the ground and use my left hand to give her a treat. Then using porcupine pressure on the side of her head I guide her to the water, thus becoming the water provider as well.
This whole process takes no longer than not bothering with this ritual and I suspect less time. We are putting the halter on and off together, it is not something I am doing too her, I am doing it for and with her. I have found that with consistency she offers the positions now and putting the head collar on is easier, quicker and sets up the start of the training day on the right note. Removing the head collar in this fashion is the last impression she has of me for the day and I would rather her overnight thoughts of me were gentle and reassuring rather than having the head collar rudely removed and then her escaping from me.
As James always says at the end of a lesson, "put them away as though they were your best mates".
The result for me ? She now meets me in the field and walks with me at liberty to the gate. The other day we trotted at liberty to the gate. She positions herself to be haltered. At the end of the day she is reluctant to leave me and on occasion stands at the fence as I walk away until I am out of sight.

Another short session

I had not intended doing a short session as I had time and the weather was fantastic. However we achieved all the goals I had set for the day so quickly that I felt it was right to stop early. We spent the remainder of the time just quietly grazing.
Those goal were : maintain gait, maintain direction and look where you are going. No change there then !
We started by just doing some gentle circling, being particular about the distance at which she circled me. She is so responsive to me driving her out onto the circle now that a hard stare is normally enough to correct her back onto the circle.
Once we had managed at least 2 circles at walk on each rein with no corrections from me we moved onto the "look where you are going" part. For this I set up a jump at about 18 inches with low jump wings to allow the rope to pass over it easily. I now asked for circles that passed over the jump. In the past she had often tried to evade the jump altogether, normally barging between me and the upright. This had improved over time but I was not prepared for the sudden change that happened yesterday. One of the more difficult parts of this exercise is to get the horse to "maintain gait" as the cross the jump. If they come in at walk they tend to leave at trot, or arrive at trot and leave at canter. The "squeeze" over the jump seems to act to accelerate them over the jump as the pressure of the jump behind them propels them forwards.
Not for Filly any more. I started by asking for circles at walk. As she approached the jump she slowed down and very very carefully picked each hoof up as she calmly walked over the pole before picking up her walk pace around the circle. She did look at me to see if her effort deserved a reward of course, and the first couple of times it did. After that I required two passes over the pole to get the reward.
I then added changes of gait to get her more engaged in the task. Every time she crossed the pole I waited half a circle and asked for her to transition from walk to trot, or trot to walk and we played the game at the new gait. I feared that having got her to trot over the pole a few times I might loose the "maintain gait" at walk. Not a bit of it. She was very careful as she crossed the pole but really put effort into maintaining gait and actually seemed to enjoy the game.
I also checked out her "lead by the tail" which was passable if not enthusiastic. The grass was way more interesting !!
All in all a very good day in beautiful weather with a very good friend. 

Lesson with Filly

Larisa came to give Ritchie and me a lesson a couple of days ago. This got me focussing on what I need to do to get Filly and more importantly myself ready to attempt an audition test on the Parelli program.
To be honest gaining qualifications and recognition is not so important for me, but the levels assessments have the advantage of a) providing focus for the play sessions and b) making sure that I am on the right track with the development of my horsemanship.
We started with working on Filly's backup. She does go backwards but at the pace of an inebriated snail. What I was after was a nice snappy backup with a relaxed neck. The key was the timing of my phases. In the past I have tended to go very slowly through each phase until I got the response I required at which point I relaxed to reward her for the try. This had caused a niggle in my mind for a while and Larisa brought that niggle into focus. What was needed, at Filly's stage was a slow phase 1 then if I didn't get the response I wanted to fairly rapidly escalate through the phases 2, 3 and 4 and maintain 4 until I got the response. The key on achieving the try was to NOT quit the pressure altogether but rapidly go back to phase 1 and keep asking for the try. Thus the reward is not a complete removal of the pressure but a rapid reduction back to the original command at phase 1. In the case of backup a long phase 1 resulted in her usual snail impersonation. A quick escalation to phase 4 got her a bit quicker so back to phase 1 to maintain her new sloth impression ( a bit quicker ). Thus I now have a strategy for improving almost any aspect of her behaviour through the use of successive approximation.
We then moved onto improving the circling game. If you remember from precious posts I am after 6 laps of the circle whilst maintaining gait, direction and looking where she is going whilst I remain at neutral in the middle. This had been improving for sometime but she still tended to ease in on the circle, getting closer to me. I was afraid of micro managing her but Larisa had me be much more particular. I needed to correct her direction as soon as I could detect her mind or body even thinking about coming closer. Once we had achieved 2 laps at a reasonable standard Larisa had me start to "over correct" her. Thus if she came in 1 foot on the circle I sent her 2 feet out even if it meant moving out towards her to supply the needed rope. This whole exercise took a long long time. The 2 required good laps had to be consecutive, so if she needed any correction the count started again. I know James says I should know the number of laps completed but to be honest I lost count. Sorry James.
If you remember I have also been having trouble maintaining trot through a figure of 8 pattern. Larisa analysed this as her not following the feel on her halter as I asked for the direction change. She was slightly hesitating as she came around the corner resisting the halter pressure. As she hesitated she broke gait. Thus we needed to improve her "follow the feel". The exercise we used was to circle her and apply some pressure to the halter to bring her nose in (phase 1), if she resisted then we used the driving game to drive her hind quarters away and thus bring her nose around. As soon as she yielded to the pressure on the halter all pressures were removed and she could again quietly circle me. Very soon she was becoming very light in zone 1 (her nose) and we managed some very nice smooth flowing direction changes.
I have been playing with these games over the last couple of days on my own and the improvement has been rapid. Today we managed 2 good laps, including walking over a pole around a foot off the ground, in a field full of grass. Very satisfying

Back to work

I am now deemed fit enough to go back to work. So it's Athens and back today. As a result playing with Filly is bound to become a little more sporadic, but on the upside I will have more time to study natural horsemanship in the comfort of my hotel room or cockpit.
I had time for a quick session yesterday before sunset. Again I was playing in the field which adds the challenge of keeping her more interested in me than the lush grass. The theme was just to remain consistent and ask for a little more. We started with touch it game, using barrels with food treats on them. This naturally lead onto figure 8 around the barrels. I am trying to get figure 8 at trot but she tends to break gait around the corners. To overcome this I don't actually do the figure 8 pattern. The direct line thinking approach would be to just do repeated figure 8 and bully her into maintaining the trot. What I do is circling game at trot with the barrels as obstacles. So one circle may go around both barells, the next round one but inside the other, the next might change the circle direction around a barrel and then through the gap and around the other barrel. But that is one half of the figure 8 pattern just thrown into the mix ! Then we circle the other way doing similar patterns until we again change direction around a barrel.
I remembered hearing on a DVD that changing direction can be difficult for many horses to start with and they then need a consistent circle for a while to get confident again. The training I am using reflects this by not asking for a direction change every half a circle, but allowing her to get confident in the new direction first. Slowly I will reduce the time between direction changes to the point that we are actually doing figure 8 at trot. Once that is confident the plan is to repeat the whole process at canter and hopefully get flying lead changes in the middle.
I hate to say this but I must dash to get ready for work now !

Working towards the levels

I have been specifically working towards videoing some an audition to get a Parelli level. Which one I don't know yet, I guess I'll do the filming and just submit it. Even if I don't get a pass the feedback should be useful.
With this in mind I have been practising some specific skills with Filly. Lead by the tail is coming on well for example. I have not lost most focus on developing her however and as such I have been practising the required skills but giving them a real purpose by adding in lots of the exercises James Roberts uses when developing a young horse. Thus rather than "just" ask her to trot circles whilst "maintaining gait, direction and looking where she is going I have also been working on getting her to be straight and forward going on the circle. I have explained these concepts in earlier posts, but a quick recap. Straight means that her body is on the same arc as the circle, which confusingly means it is slightly bent !! Forward means that her strides are such that at walk her hind foot lands in front of where her hind foot just left, at trot the hind is just behind the front and at canter the hind is 5 to 6 hoof prints in front of the hind.
I have also been working on getting her to circle on 2 tracks, 3 tracks and 4 tracks. 2 tracks means that the hind foot falls directly behind the front on the same side so that 2 hoof tracks are made in the sand. 3 tracks means that the inside hind falls on the same track as the outside front so that the inside front forms one track, the inside hind and outside front forms another track and her outside hind forms the outermost track. I leave you to work out the 4 track gait !!
To do this I have to lightly drive the hind quarters out, whilst she is maintaining the circle, thus she is going slightly sideways around the circle. This is not easy for her but we manage to get a step or two when I ask at walk. It will be a while before she can do it consistently and willingly, but then that is horse development for you !!

Liberty in a field

Rosie, one of the herd, has left the yard leaving just Moo and Filly together. This leads to a small problem if I want to play with Filly, Moo can't be left alone. Solution : play in the field next door which has jumps, dressage markers and lots of lush grass. A real test of Filly's respect for me !
We started playing on line which was progressing very well. With a light bow in the line as she circled me she was giving me all the green lights to play at liberty.
Taking the rope off I was ready for her to just ignore me and eat grass but remarkably this was not the case. We started with the easiest task, "Stick to me" which is a bit like heel work with a dog. This is the easiest as she is close to me which keeps the bond strong. Walk, trot and halt worked perfectly with very little tendency to try and eat.
Emboldened I decided to try circling expecting a long walk to get her from the far end of the field. To start she did large circles which actually pleased me greatly. If she could stay connected to me and circle at a distance I was not going to nag her to get closer.
At one point she did apparently leave me. The circle took her to the fence and she just kept maintaining gait but along the fence not around me. I just stayed relaxed and contemplated the long walk when suddenly she turned and faced me, still trotting, and came straight as an arrow to me. I think she just got a bit confused when she got to the fence and never actually meant to leave. On a second occasion she did leave and I did have to walk to get her, but she readily re-connected and stayed with me back to the work area.
I have recently started to work on "lead by the tail". This just consists of lightly pulling on her tail and asking her to follow the feel of pressure backwards. I have tried this with limited success in the past but at last it is coming together. The pressure on the tail is of course applied in phases and released on the slightest try. In this case she started with her ears pricked and pointing forwards as I applied the pressure. One ear twitching to face backwards was the initial try and rewarded with a release. Three of four attempts later we had a front leg moving backwards, followed by a pace or two. I tried this in the field at liberty and it worked !
In many ways, whilst we did nothing spectacular or new, this was one of the best training sessions we have had together. Having that sort of connection in a lush grass field felt very special.
It was only topped by what happened as we walked away from the field. Ritchie looked back to find Filly a long way from Moo and as close to us as possible looking over the fence at us with her ears pricked. We were at least 100 meters away before she turned and went back to grazing.

Level 1 at Liberty

I have been continuing to work with Filly. She really seems to enjoy these play sessions walking to me in the field with enthusiasm and ears pricked. In itself that is a most gratifying feeling.
As the title suggests I have been playing mostly with Level 1 concepts, but trying to do them with excellence at liberty.
YoYo. Filly started to make the assumption that whenever I sent her back she had to circle. Not liking to go backwards she would take a few steps and then turn to commence the circle around me. Difficult to prevent with no line attached so I added the use of one of my new tools, the 3 meter fishing pole with a flag attached. Of course with no rope she has to be driven back with my body language and the carrot stick and string adding pressure to zone one. I held the pole vertically in neutral as long as she was going back straight. I was looking for the slightest try to turn away from the straight line and immediately correcting by lowering the pole so that she was turning into it, thus driving zone one back onto the desired straight line. It did not take long for this to really make sense to her.
People who have not experienced Natural Horsemanship may think that a plastic bag on the end of a long pole would badly frighten her. In fact this was not the case at all. She started to look at me with real questions in her face, ears pricked forward and very attentive to my cues. The use of the pole and bag has actually allowed me to reduce the pressure I place on her to get the same result simply because I can be so much more precise in my communication with her.
On the subject of "slightest try" I find it is natural to look for the slightest desired try and release the pressure, but I often miss the slightest undesired try such as the nose tipping onto an undesired circle. I have started to make a point of trying to see these tries and correct them quickly. "Do less sooner rather than more later" is the relevant quote which I am sure we all know, but often miss. I guess the reason is that we are concentrating on seeing the one correct try that we miss the many hundred possible wrong tries that could be occurring. This YoYo pattern at least enabled me to isolate one of the negative tries and correct it in a timely fashion, and boy did it work well compared with the "more later" alternative.
Having established a good YoYo we moved onto more circling. The aim has been very simple. Two circles of trot whilst "maintaining gait, maintaining direction and looking where you are going", during which I remained in neutral in the middle. Should I have to correct any of the above then the circles count resets to zero. As you can imagine this actually means we do many more than two circles in a session before we get the required two consecutive good ones.
Maintaining gait. If you watch Pat closely if a horse breaks gait and slows he makes a point of turning in the direction of the circle "adding energy" to the circle and then  resends the horse to restore the gait. This little detail really makes a huge difference to the response. Pretty soon she restored her gait as soon as I started to move.
Maintain direction. We don't have a round pen at the yard, so if she changes direction I have to time my correction so that she is close to a wall and I can block her sending her in the desired direction. To be honest I found the fishing pole ineffective for this and the stick and string much better.
Look where she is going. This is simply achieved by just placing a few objects in the school, poles, jump wings, cones etc. This aids in analysing her state of mind. If she nearly runs into an object she is clearly not thinking with the left side of her brain.
This would get very boring if that is all a play session involved, so sideways down the wall has also been practised. After lots of attepmts where she generally just turned and walked down the wall away from me I finally came up with a solution that made it clear to her what I wanted. The key ingredient was again the communication tools used. In this case I tried stick and string, stick and flag, short stick and flag all of which failed. The most effective tool was just my body and my hands. Not touching her, just gesturing was the best method, using one hand to "push" zone 2/3 and the other to keep zone 4 going. Pushing zone one was a bad idea as she just turned and walked in front of me. Now you may wish to porcupine zone 4 of Filly whilst walking behind her, but I'll just watch if you don't mind !! She really does not like zone 4 porcupine, she responds very well but with the attitude of don't do that again or else !

Liberty works again

First an intriguing development in the Filly's herd. Initially when Rosie was added to the herd Filly was the boss moving Moo around at will. Rosie was shunned by the other two and forced to keep her distance. Rosie is now boss ! She only has to give Filly a stare, maybe backed up with the flattening of her ears and Filly moves away at the trot. Rosie is definitely not a benevolent leader, she is and aggressive alpha. On returning to the field after a play session Filly always wants a quick drink, but Rosie drives her away from the water. I have utilised this situation by keeping Rosie away whilst Filly drinks, thus placing myself as a benevolent leader towards Filly by protecting her from Rosie. She tends to stick close by me in the field whenever possible. In this respect I have become her place of safety and comfort.
I have been working, as I said before, on figure 8 at trot and frankly not getting that far with it. Figure 8 is ok, but keeping a trot going round the corners is difficult. I therefore decided to fall back on our best savvy, Liberty. Filly is particularly happy at liberty, probably highlighting my lack of skill with the rope, and we tend to get more achieved when she is free.
I spent one evening just working on getting a consistent figure 8 pattern at libery which was fairly easy. She does try to cut inside the cone on my left, but is happy to go around the cone on my right. Thus most of that session was spent sending her around the left hand cone and drawing straight to me for a treat when she got it right. The session ended with me really reducing the cues I was giving to a minimum to get her to perform the pattern. Again I discovered the power of focus. Looking in the direction I wanted her to go really gave her more of a sense of direction, particularly at the point I was asking for the change of direction as she rounded a cone. The end result was some very nice relaxed figure 8 patterns at walk.
One of our principles is to separate, isolate and recombine. We now had a good figure 8 at walk and can do circles at trot. The problem is changing the direction of circle and maintaining the trot. I decided that we would walk the tight circles around the cones and trot the straight lines between them in the hope that the trot would slowly extend its range around the cone. I have only spent a session working on this and it is starting to pay off. To start I only got a stride or two of trot, but slowly this is increasing to the whole diagonal of the pattern being at trot with just the ends at walk. Of course this is also meaning we get to practise lots of gait transitions at the same time, and it is making the pattern more interesting for Filly.
I don't just work on the one thing of course, that would get too boring for both of us ! To mix things up a bit I have also been working on Liberty sideways. The breakthrough here was the choice of tools. Rather than use a carrot stick and string I have been using a short piece of fishing pole, around 2 foot 6 inches with a rubber "flag" tie wrapped to the end (cut up rubber glove). This is way more effective as I can be very accurate as to which zone I am asking to move away from me. As it is short and light I can also move it very fast to the correct position as well. Thus if she tries to step forwards it takes a fraction of a second to position it in front of zone 1 (her nose) to ask for a step back and then return to either zone 2 or 4 to "push" her sideways. She is not the least frightened by the tool, but seems rather grateful that I am finally being precise in my requests !
One very nice result of this is that almost for the first time I feel we can really communicate and have a conversation. Before, with the stick and string, it has felt a bit one sided with me calling the shots, but now I can see questions in her expression, and get the impression she is really trying to work out exactly what I want. She in turn has got better at communicating to me when she is finding something difficult and we can then take time working on the problem (or maybe I am just better at reading her now ?). This has been my aim all along. I don't want to give the impression that we have never achieved this before, it is just that it seems to suddenly be on a much deeper level.
Personally I have to say this is a great feeling which can get rather addictive, so if you strive for this you may find that when it is reached nothing else between you and your horse will ever be good enough again !

A good draw

I have had very little time recently to play with the horses. Lots of physio for my hip and shoulder and a short non-invasisve operation on my shoulder have seen to that. However I still try to at least visit most days and managed to get some nice photos of Filly. The snag is her draw to me can be so strong at times that getting far enough away from her to take a photo can be a problem ! But then I shouldn't complain, the horses draw to you can never be too strong.

 

Off form

Filly's turn yestreday and she served up an interesting challenge. Ritchie watched this session to give me feedback and it was just as well she did.
Filly was extremely unmotivated. I had planned on working on figure of 8 at trot with the ultimate aim of figure 8 at canter. At canter she will need to do a flying lead change between each cone of course and this will in turn help her find balance at the canter. But trot is needed first. Snag was she did not want to trot around the cones. More pressure to maintain gait just resulted in a really sour ears back look from her, not good for the rapport.
At this point Ritchie aksed "What's missing ?". Impulsion obviously. "What horsenality is she showing ?" Left brain introvert. "How do you fix impulsion in a LBI ?". Ah.... go slower. Then  it also occurred to me that I needed to apply the Parelli formula of Rapport, Respect, Impulsion, Flexion. Well I was certainly not getting Flexion around the cones, Impulsion was only possible on a straight line, Respect was not to bad, Rapport was suffering from the pressure I was putting on her. Slowing down was thus going to help the Rapport and she was then more likely accept my leadership thus increasing Respect. I threw away the idea of figure 8 at trot and concentrated on seeing how slowly she could walk the pattern.
This really grabbed her attention and the inquisitive look returned to her face. We played with this for some time, whilst trying to discourage her from picking up and moving the cones as she crawled past them. I then played with all sorts of other games at a very very slow pace. Sending her backwards on the YoYo one leg at a time got her full attention with a lovely expression on her face. Sideways over a cone slowly meant she had to accept the cone under her belly for an extended period of time. Circling slowly was a real challenge, she kept wanting to walk faster !!
This showed the value of someone on the outside looking in. Ritchie could spot what I had missed and then leave me to figure out the solution. It also showed the value of knowing Pat's various lists in his framework. Their use as a diagnostic tool is invaluable. There is a link to my web page describing them on the right hand side of the blog.

Playing with Billy again

I did not intend to play with Billy at all until the bandages came off his hind legs. I don't want to be thought responsible if he hurts those legs again before they are fully healed. Yesterday, however, I had a spare hour and so went to spend some undemanding time with him in his field. Things don't always go to plan however. In his field there is his good friend Prince and next door are Bonitao and Naz. Ritchie had collected Bonitao to ride him which always disturbs Naz a little so tensions in the area were already slightly elevated. Then Prince was taken away, again to go riding. This left an agitated Naz and a deserted Billy. They fed off each others nervous energy and Billy started to show why he is to be a race horse. This was not a desireable state of affairs, afterall I was not playing with him to avoid him getting anxious and hurting his legs again.
The only solution I could think of was to get a halter on him and try to calm him down. Fortunately he still sees me as a leader, even after four months of not playing, so haltering him was fairly easy. The only downside was that I was now having to use the only halter to hand which was a wide webbing type with a typically short lead rope. (Why do people use 6 foot lead ropes ? If a horse is getting upset I prefer to send them to the end of at least a 12 foot rope if not a 22 foot one to get over it. It seems that with a 6 foot rope, particularly if they rear you are drawn in towards a dangerous animal. Geometry dictates this has to happen. With a 12 foot rope even if the horse rears you don't have to get so close). With the halter on Billy settled fairly quickly and I lead him to a nice grazing spot. If he got agitated I just sent him on a circle at walk until he calmed down. If that failed then we changed the direction of the circle with a indirect/direct rein manoeuvre. This is quite a complicated task for Billy to complete with the hind legs crossing over then the front legs doing likewise. Thus I got him thinking to his feet to get it completed. The important word here is THINKING. It forced the left side of his brain to kick in and start working which let him think through the current situation a realise that he was not in danger not having his field buddy as I was there to look after him. A few indirect/direct reins and his head lowered and he relaxed and started to graze. I had to repeat this on several occasions, but it worked consistently.
He did try to push into my space whilst in a confident state but a little wriggle on the rope, or a waggle with my stick backed him away again thus preserving my personal space.
I was very impressed with the fact that he could still remember all the aids I had taught to play the seven games him despite not having been played with for four months. But then the games we play are just slightly modified versions of the games horses play naturally which of course they are unlikely to forget and the aids are designed to also mimic horses body language to the extent that a tall two legged being with a stick can.

Clinic and Party at James Roberts

Last weekend was epic on many levels. James Roberts ran a two day clinic for all the people who had been on at least a two week course with him over the last year. This ensured a high level of horsemanship for all involved and thus allowed him to progress them quickly secure in the knowledge that they would cope.
Knowing this Ritchie was a little nervous as to what James was going to have them all doing, to say the least. The briefing on the Saturday morning gave an idea as to what was coming, but we weren't sure if he was pulling our leg or not. We should have known better, James rarely makes jokes about such things ! The ultimate goal of the weekend was cow herding, brideless and halterless. Thus the training was centered on arriving at the skills needed to achieve this aim.
Day 1 Morning
As they were going to be riding brideless and cow cutting James asked what skills might be needed. The suggestions were a good draw, a good sideways game, good YoYo game and all the above at Liberty. Thus the morning was spent initially online practising all those skills. As this was to be ridden bridleless there was particular emphasis on getting them done using porcupine rather than the driving game. The only driving that was really necessary was in zone one to allow the use of carrot sticks to direct the horse should "eyes, belly button, and legs" not have the desired result.
It was amazing to see 20 horses all being played with at Liberty with very few leaving their human. There was one that did have a problem with this and James had an interesting solution. He got all the participants and their horses to form a circle around the errant horse and its owner. This is actually called a Rodeo. Whenever the horse approached the edge of the circle it was gently driven back towards its owner, who just sat on the ground. Thus the horse found that the only place of safety and comfort was in the middle near its owner. This quickly established the desired bond.
The afternoon was devoted to riding. To start he had all 20 horse just trot the rail, but try to use the reins as little as possible. Then as each of them looked calm and confident he asked them into the middle and quietly removed the halter/bridle, asked them to do some patterns such as figure 8 and sent them back on the rail. Soon nearly all were bridleless and quietly trotting the rail.
The evening was PARTY TIME. And some partied long and hard. I believe 5 in the morning was the latest ! The fact that there was a fairground broncing horse added to the entertainment and several sore muscles in the morning.
Day 2
Late start the next day with the morning being basically more of the same. 20 brideless horses trotting the rail and doing "straight lines and circles" for 15 minutes on each rein was an unforgettable sight. What was interesting was the change in demeanour of a lot of the horses. When given trust you could tell they were going to respond in kind. There was not a single problem for the whole session. To grow that trust James had them do all sorts of other gymkhana type games such as round the world, half scissors, crawling under the horses belly and through its front legs.
For several the focus of the day was to get through the riding without to much pain as a result of the previous nights entertainment. Josh looked particularly fragile which prompted lots of goading from James.
The afternoon was devoted to Cow penning as promised, except the cows were us spectators dressed up with cardboard horns ! To start with the aim was just to drive as all around and get us into a Rodeo. Then they had to split us into fast and slow cows. With my bad hip I was a slow one of course. We were then corralled into two corners of the school, and the real games could begin. Each horse and rider selected a cow and had to drive us to the opposite corner of the school. This was done individually. The rules for the cow were that they could go across the school or down the school towards the penning corner, but not back towards the herd. The rider and horse had to manoeuvre such that the cow had no choice but to progress towards the penning corner. All this had to be done brideleless of course. Again there was an interesting transformation in the horse and rider. They were no longer individuals but started acting as a real team. In terms of precision positioning of themselves it almost seemed better than with the bridles on. The horses rapidly understood the game and locked onto their cow turning almost without being asked in some cases. What is more they seemed to love the game. As for the riders it was noticeable that those that had been initially nervous about riding without headgear on their horses soon forgot those nerves when they had something to focus strongly on. I am sure they were not even thinking about the "driving" or "porcupine" games, they were just instinctively working with the horse to get to the required position to get that cow to move on. Everyone succeeded in the task, some quicker than others, but speed was not the objective. Team work was.
Special mention must be made of a demo from Kim. Kim has worked as an apprentice for James for the last year, and this was her last weekend. To show what she had learnt in that time she put on a demonstration with her friends Becka and Josh. It was very very impressive, with some synchronised work with all three, just two together and finally Kim solo. Again lots of it was bridleless, but you would hardly have known. James loss is our gain however as Kim is moving to work about 30 minutes from our house so we look forward to seeing her even more than in the past.

Sideways Towards with Filly

Progress has been made with Filly over the last week. She has not been neglected !
There were several goals that I had with her, sideways towards me being just one of those. I'll write about the others in subsequent postings. Sideways towards is useful for many reasons and on many levels. So far, apart from "draw" on the YoYo all other games involve driving her away from me to some extent. With Filly having a fantastic draw this has not been a problem as the driving away games have at least taught her to respect my space to some extent. But all things need balance and sideways towards creates some of that equilibrium. In addition of course sideways towards is useful in purely practical ways, such as lining her up to load on a trailer.
Get her to hind quarter yield towards me was achieved a long time ago when I was teaching her to present herself for mounting next to a mounting block. Now I wanted to take this a step further with the forequarters also stepping towards me and progressing on me backing away as she continues to side pass towards me.
To get the fore quarter yield whilst online is of course easy, just a light pressure on the halter. At the same time I ask for the hind quarters to follow by using the carrot stick in phases. To start I just hold the stick horizontally over her hind quarters, then I rythmically move it up and down, then allow it to rhymically bounce on the far side of her hind quarters, then firmer as necessary. As always I started by looking for the slightest try of a weight shift in the required direction and stopping the stimulation immediately it occurred. Slowly asking for more it was not long before I could get a leg to step towards me. Timing this with pressure on the halter we had a step sideways towards. Using the principle of successive approximation this slowly increased to 2 steps, then 3 etc. Last night we achieved around 4 steps with the added pressure of being in a field full of lush grass which kept attracting her attention.
One tip is tieing a plastic bag to the end of the stick. This provides a big visual stimulus for her to yield from. In addition I could tickle her with it as an additional phase rather than immediately using the stick itself.
All in all it took about 3 short sessions for her to get the idea, not without a few fast hind legs kicks at the pressure from the stick. She has always hated the idea of having her hind legs directed and this proved to be no exception.

Trailer Loading Bonitao

Sorry for the delayed updates, but things have been a bit busy. Physio for my hip injury soaks up a fair amount of the day, but it is going very well.
I have been having great fun trailer loading both Filly and Bonitao. Now we have our own trailer this can now be done with some consistency which has allowed real progress to be made.
Bonitao proved to be particularly challenging. It was actually relatively easy to get him to load into the trailer, but getting him to remain there long enough to put the bum bar across and tie him up took a long time. I admit I was slow in diagnosing the problem. Standing in the trailer was fine as long as I did not approach the interior myself. So the issue turned out to be the presence of a predator in the cave on wheels, not the cave itself. Loading him whilst I remained on the outside of the trailer, the usual Parelli way could not fix this problem, time to switch games from circling and driving games to the YoYo game.
I switched position from standing on the ramp to standing in the trailer itself and then using the draw to request his presence in the trailer. This relied strongly on timing and rewarding the "slightest try" by relaxing the pressure. The slightest try could be as small as a small weight shift in my direction. Slowly I upped the definition of slightest try. The movement of a hoof, foot on the ramp, all four feet on the ramp, foot in the trailer etc. Between each try he was rewarded with being allowed to back out of the trailer. If he fought against the request the response was to out persist him in his evasion attempt and use the carrot stick and string to make the wrong response uncomfortable. This could just be picking up the stick and swinging it, all the way up to tagging him with the string on the zone I wished to influence. Again timing is crucial to the extent that if he should give a try when I am in mid swing I can convert the tagging by the string into a friendly stroke.
Influencing his motion was of course only part of the solution, the other part was to gain his trust in me whilst I was stood in the trailer. One of the quickest ways to Bonitaos heart is through food. Using food in this way has to be done with care so that it acts as a reward, not a bribe. In particular I kept the food out of sight and only produced it when I had achieved a correct response, or he had shown a "try" in trusting me. As a method this really worked well, and soon he was standing all the way in the trailer and munching on an apple, carrot or pony nut. To prove to him that this was about the YoYo game and not the trailer itself I also regularly used the driving game or porcupine game to back him out of the trailer without merely trapping him inside. I tried to time this backup so that it was my idea for him to leave the trailer and not his. Having backed him out I made sure that his rest out of the trailer was much shorter than his rest in the trailer, again a way of rewarding him for remaining with me. Of course this exactly how you would approach playing the YoYo game with a horse with better drive than draw.
This highlights the use of Parelli games. I feel too many folk just play the seven games with their horse without a purpose. That is fine whilst the games are being learnt, but there real value is in being able to use the games to succeed in a particular task. If the games are just being played at a level 1 competence for long periods of time without there being a purpose behind them they can rapidly become the seven tortures for the horse. After all the seven games are just the ABCs of a language and I am sure you would have found it boring and de-motivating if your secondary school teacher had still been using the ABC chart instead of using the language to study more advanced and interesting topics.
What was the result of all this playing. Well the first time Ritchie tried to trailer load him she stuck to the task and her principles for 5 hours ! The first time I tried it took 3 hours, the second 1 hour and yesterday about 15 minutes.
The ultimate goal is to get him to trailer load first try at Liberty. In fact an even higher goal as suggested by Linda Parelli in a DVD is that if you happen to pass the trailer the horse should ask you if you want him to load or not. THEN I think you really have not only trailer loading sorted out but you also have a fantastic rapport with the horse.

Getting back on track

Finally I have played with Filly on my own, from getting her from the field to putting her back with her herd.
The first challenge was separating her from her herd. On entering the field she trotted towards me but stopped a few feet away. Then Moo caught sight of the carrot stick and halter and trotted away. Filly naturally went with the herd to the end of the field. I just kept cool and adopted the "Catch me" game. In fact it was kind of fun. Normal formula, if she showed me no attention I stalked her, if she put an ear or eye on me I relaxed and turned away. After five minutes she caught me and politely waited until I had fastened the rope halter, turning her head towards me as she should.
One frustration I have is that talking to non Parelli folks they seem to think that Parelli is something we do once the horse is caught and in the school. It is way beyond that. Every interaction has to be completed whilst sticking to the principles and using savvy. In this case it would have been easy to sneak the halter on her and, today, I would have saved ten minutes, but at the cost of making her difficult to catch and halter in the future.
Once in the indoor school (it was wet outside) we started on a new exercise taught to us by David Lichman during a clinic last weekend. The esscence is to get the horse to lower it's head when it is bothered by something. The psychology is split into three parts.
First, lowering the head when bothered by something, as a conditioned response, gives the horse something positive to do rather than rearing, bucking, bolting etc.
Second, a lowered head is a position of relaxation and submission for the horse. As David explained it, adopting a relaxed pose like sitting in an armchair at home does not necessarily result in you relaxing into a good sleep, but it is a precursor for it. Standing to a tense attention is unlikely to result in any form of relaxation. So causing the horse to adopt a relaxed pose when bothered is the first step to getting a relaxed mind.
Thirdly it gives the horse a means to communicate with us. If the horse is clearly bothered, using the conditioned response, it can now lower it's head to say "please stop doing that, I am worried". Far better than the more traditional methods of rearing, bucking, pulling back etc. How we respond to that request is now determined by the circumstances, but at least we have some important information to work on.
To achieve the response I started by lightly bouncing my carrot stick on the side of her back. This clearly bothered her as the swishing tail and thrashing head showed. By lightly asking for her head to lower at the same time by pulling down on the halter I helped her to learn the desired response. Removing the pressure on the halter and stopping the stick as soon as she even thought about lowering her head soon had the desired response working well. I now wanted to generalise the response. To do this I needed another way to worry her. She is still very sensitive to being porcupined in the flanks for a hind quarter yield, so this is what I did. Again as soon as she lowered her head the stimulus was removed. Progress was rapid again. Not only did she lower her head but she soon accepted the porcupine with much less fuss.
She now feels in control of unpleasant stimuli and I think this has empowered her to accept them with the knowledge that she can influence when the cease. I really look forward to seeing how far we can take this method, and enjoy the fact that we now have another level of two way communication.
As a brief summary of the rest of the session we worked hard on straightness on a circle. Now I am mobile, for the first time since I learned the technique, we made real progress. I again used the 3m fishing pole to signal which zone I wished to move away to get the proper bend in her body. I also found that I could observe the footfall pattern with much more accuracy now I am standing which aided in the precision of my signals and hence her understanding of them.
Finally we did a little liberty which we clearly both enjoyed after such a long break from it.
Putting her back in the field tested my adherence to good horsemanship again. The herd came to greet her and she was very keen to run off with them. I insisted on removing the halter with savvy however, and after a brief "conversation" on the topic with Filly, she agreed. She waited patiently, with a lowered head (there's that lowered head again !) turned slightly towards me as I undid the knot and slowly removed the halter. After that the conversation was over and she could rejoin her herd. Again Natural Horsemanship does not end as I leave the school, but when I leave her line of sight.