A chilled Filly

Saturday 29 October 2011

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.

Friday 28 October 2011

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.

Monday 24 October 2011

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.

Saturday 22 October 2011

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.


Wednesday 19 October 2011

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 ?

Friday 14 October 2011

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. 

Wednesday 12 October 2011

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

Tuesday 4 October 2011

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 !

Monday 3 October 2011

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 !!