Demo Day

Fun day today. After finishing shovelling 9 tons of gravel onto my driveway I joined Ritchie, my wife, and my neighbours granddaughter Isabella at the stables.
Isabella is just starting an degree in biology and animal behaviour and wanted to see how we worked with the natural language of the horse in order to train and communicate with them. Ritchie had done a demo of the seven games before I arrived, so I took Filly to the big field again to get Isabella to try and identify when Filly was left brain, right brain, dominant, etc.
 All the time I was trying to describe what was happening and what I was doing as a result. What a great exercise. I HAD to be so more analytical in my approach so that I could try and commentate in real time what was happening. As it happened we saw all sorts of interaction between Filly and horses we passed in fields alongside the track to the big field. What gave me most pleasure is that for the most part she saw me as the herd leader and followed my lead past the other horses rather than concentrating on them. I did let her stop a couple of times for a longer interaction all of which neatly demonstrated aspects of bevaviour, all the way up to one horse using both hind legs as a porcupine game to get her out of their space, from a distance I might add. It was clearly a mock attack and did not impress Filly at all, who looked at me and went back to her grass eating.
A quick trip round the field enabled demos of LB, RB, dominant and partnership behaviour, with slightly less confidence than previous outings, but OK.
We then went indoors for a few more exercises. I knew that I would provoke a little porcupine from her if I porcupined a hind quarter yield, and so it proved. The head came round on the attack, but a bit of Ninja arm work saw it off in a passive way.
For the first time we managed a complete 360 degree front quarter yield with the hind legs staying in one spot. Again a little passive resistance from my arm was required to prevent being porcupined myself, but such an improvement on recent tries. Maybe my switching from active resistance, trying to match dominance with dominance, to passive resistance which just does not rise to the challenge has made that game less important and in fact meaningless to her.
Isabella left with much to think about muttering about getting a horse.