Make up with Billy

 Filly happily back in a box

Nasty day weather wise, damp, cloudy but calm. I went to the yard after work and having checked on Filly who seemed happy to see me, collected the halter, rope and carrot stick to play with Billy. As he is kept in a field away from the farm at the moment I had to play there, but once I had started became so engrossed I forgot about the weather, except for the very wet rope !
Like my other sports, ice climbing and gliding, training horses using Parelli methods requires such concentration that everything else becomes blocked out. You have to be focused. The weather just becomes one of those inputs taken into account to try and see the world from the horses point of view and adjust my actions. I expect the same is true of other methods as well, but never having used anything but Parelli I cannot compare.
I decided that after yesterday a more gentle rapport building day was required. We are taught to balance "love, language and leadership" and suspecting that I overdid it on leadership yesterday I concentrated on love and language today.
We started with friendly game. What I wanted to achieve was the understanding that when I waved the stick and attached string with rhythm and relaxation this is just friendly. Thus we are building language as well. I spent a long time just walking around, with Billy following, waving the stick around, with as low body energy I could manage and remain upright. By continuously moving the "threat" away from Billy it reduces the pressure and after a time he was walking alongside me very relaxed. I then turned to face him and waved the stick again. Now of course my eyes added to the pressure and it took some time before he could just stand quietly and watch me in a relaxed way. Slowly I am building the word in the language that stick waving with low body energy is friendly. It can then be used as a reward when he performs an action correctly.
I then moved onto porcupine game, finding that hind quarter was very good, fore quarter a bit tricky and backup non existent. It was interesting watching him trying to puzzle out what pressure on the chest meant. He tried knocking the stick away with his nose, which was inventive, chewing it which was annoying, moving sideways which required some "ninja" stick moves on my part to keep the pressure on, and finally... backwards.
We did a little bit of circling game which was good to the left, but challenging to the right. He got quite unconfident and would only go about 1/4 circle and then stop and face me, and some of that prancing sideways. I worked on being very very slow in the initial phases of pressure and slowly this got results, and we got one full calm circle. Time to stop circling.
It is SO hard having achieved the aim to not have "one more go" just to see it work again. I have found the hard way that is almost always the wrong thing to do. Giving him a chance to have a long long think about it means that the lesson sinks in deeper.
We finished with lots of scratches and he cuddled his head into my chest, with no pushing and remained there for a long while breathing gently. On removing the halter he stayed with me until I walked away, at which point he remained in the same spot and starting eating. No running off today !!