Billy frightened of his own shadow

A good days training today. Started with Filly with the intention of riding her. It was only about an hour before her dinner so she was not in the quietest of moods.
She is now very confident in rolling when I am close to the extent that as she tries to roll over I have to be careful not to get knocked by a flying hoof. Today she "exploded" as she got up with shear exuberance. This is fairly common and I have to watch carefully as she stands again to see what sort of mood she is in or risk being run over. To date she has always been careful to run around me, but I don't want to take any chances.
I turned this outburst of energy into a circling game which I continued until a bit after she had had enough. Thus I am not shutting her down and being the bad man saying no all the time, I am allowing her to do what she wants but asserting my dominance by making her move for just a little longer than she really desires. This calms her down really quickly and gets her in a learning frame of mind.
Next came the modified figure of eight game which enabled me to check all the driving games were working well, which they were. Then I moved into the preparation to ride.
This starts with getting her to stand still and be touched all over. To give this a purpose I gave her a quick groom. Then came placing the feet to establish control over each hoof. Again purpose was generated by picking out the hooves. Next would normally come saddling but we aren't using one at the moment. I then ask her to move around and establish the fore quarter /hind quarter yield pattern which she is getting very good at. Initially she tried to come through me when asking for the forequarter yield section but she now nimbly skips around out of my way.
At this point the feed wagon arrived and Filly got very very excited. Thoughts of riding were dropped, but with the yard girls watching a bit of showing off at liberty ensued. Not her best session, but still, compared to a traditional horse, pretty good for a 2 1/2 year old.
After a break to catch my breath Billy was brought in.
I wanted to do lots of circling with him to get him more relaxed and confident with a simple task. All I am asking for is him not to change gait, not change direction and look where he is going WITHOUT me continually nagging as many people do when lunging their horses. Ideally having set the direction I just stand in the middle and pass the rope around me as he circles. Should he break any of his responsibilities then I correct as gently as I can but as firm as required to get him back on track. To make this more interesting I ask for the occasional change of gait from walk to trot and back to walk. Walk to trot is easy, just requiring me to raise my energy and extend my arm in the direction of the circle a little. Getting him to walk again is trickier. Gentle wriggling of the rope applies pressure on zone one which should slow him down. I also have to make sure that I am looking in front of him and my belly button is pointing in front of him. That way he is having to push into all sorts of pressure. Unfortunately horses have what is called opposition reflex, they tend to push into pressure. That pressure maybe a lions claws, so pushing back is probably a good idea, but not what we desire. As a result applying pressure in zone one tends to make him speed up as he pushes against it. The wrong thing to do at this point is take the pressure off as it would teach him that pushing works. Thus I have to keep the wriggling, gaze and if needed a gentle waggling of the stick and string way out in front of him going until I get the desired response, or the slightest try in the direction of the required response. This could just be a slower trot or walk rather than the change of gait I desire but it is always a good idea to reward the slightest try and refine later.
Now to get to the subject of this blog. On a right circle Billy kept spooking at the same spot so there had to be something there to upset him. Now this part of the circle is where he is running towards a white wall with a big spotlight behind him. As he gets closer his shadow appears to run towards him and get rapidly larger. As horses vision is best in the black and white a shadow is a very large visual stimulus and so a shadow looming up the wall must have been quite scary for him. To start to overcome this I did the approach and retreat tactic, making him circle up to the point he started to be unconfident then backing away from it. Slowly we got to the stage he could touch the shadow and get curious about it. I then allowed him to just "play" with it. It was actually quite funny, from a human point of view, watching him try to sniff it, touch it etc. We are not over the problem yet but well on the way I hope. Using the philosophy that we always train for tomorrow I was pleased with the progress.

All in all a great day !!