Two days have passed since my last post. One evening spent with Filly with Ritchie and her horse Bonitao acting as chaperon and an afternoon with Billy.
Yesterday evening with Filly was fun. We played in the indoor school where Bonitao and Ritchie were also training. Given her past history with other horses I am pleased to report all went very well, even though Ritchie was doing some extreme friendly game with Bonitao and the tarpaulin.
We started with the mounting block which was very easy, she really has the hang of positioning in the correct place to be mounted. She doesn't realise that yet of course, she thinks it's the right place for a good scratch. From there we moved on to dragging the tarpaulin around. Again this started a bit right brain and with the added pressure of Bonitao in the school this was to be expected. After a very short time though she settled down and walked very quietly and a bit bored next to me. The sequence of habituation to a new stimulus is Fear, Curiosity, Acceptance, Ignore.
This makes absolute sense in evolutionary behaviour terms. In the wild being sceptical about everything keeps you alive. Run first and ask questions later. But if you run from everything then there is a massive waste of energy which has taken a long time to eat, so if the stimulus does not appear to threaten then investigate in case it's a food source or a play thing. When those possibilities are exhausted then accept the stimulus and finally don't even waste energy noticing it.
However as soon as acceptance at a walk has been fixed I increased the stimulus by moving up to a trot. Now the tarpaulin follows even faster, so the stimulus increases. The whole process is then repeated, and of course I have to be on both sides of her so that the comfort of my presence and the stimulus of the tarp is seen from both eyes. Desensitisation really has to be done in a very ordered way to achieve maximum effect.
We then started some squeeze game over a pole between jump wings, and surprisingly this caused all sorts of problems with some very very right brain moments. I resorted to circling game over the pole as this seems to be a more confidence building and comforting game. Possibly because she only has one eye on me at a time ? After 10 minutes of this boredom crept in and all was back to normal with the pole. Interestingly she then walked out of the school with me in a very submissive pose with her head lowered, but ears pricked and attentive.
Today was Billys' turn. I had not played with him for a while and it showed to start with, he seemed very uncertain. We did lots of stick to me until he became more confident. His backup next to me was particularly good. We moved onto circling game which again was unconfident at the start but improved slowly. Having established that he was OK with me waving the stick and string when he was at rest and during stick to me I wanted to be able to do the same as he circled. The idea is to be able to emphasise my friendly posture by using friendly stick movements. Again to start he was unconfident about this obviously thinking any stick movement meant "go faster". Towards the end of this game he seemed to get it however and relaxed to a large extent.
We also played some sideways game which is becoming excellent and squeeze game, which whilst being a a bit disloyal I have to say is better than Fillys' now (hope she can't read this I'm ususally in enough trouble with her anyway. A bit like being at home really !).
I was then allowed to ride Bonitao for a while in the outdoor school. My 3rd ride in 20 years. Ritchie however decided to counter my weight by only allowing use of the bareback pad. Good idea really as it is much better for developing a much deeper seat, but my groin muscles are not used to that much stretching these days. She was then concerned that I was pulling on both reins at the same time so took one off. I now had bareback pad, halter and one rein having not ridden much for years. I have to say I had fun, but I think Bonitao was a bit bored. We managed one trot but that was a bit sore on the aforementioned muscle. As you can imagine this got a lot of sympathy from Ritchie. I can only imagine it as well unfortunately.
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