Desensitising Billy

Arrived home from Calgary at around 2pm. Must add I had a great day yesterday in the Rockies indulging one of my other hobbies, ice climbing in Johnston Canyon. Thanks to the guys who saw a lonely climber and took pity to enable me to climb the falls. We climbed the pillar system up the center of the photo.
Due to a lack of sleep I settled for a gentle day with Billy today. I still need to work on his confidence in me as a leader and also to desensitise him to a variety of stimuli. As a result I got some of the toys out, the pilates ball and the tarpaulin.
Starting with the ball I reestablished his confidence in it by getting a little helper to roll the ball away from us as we followed the ball ( and helper ) around the school. This uses the principle that predators only approach the prey, never move away. Therefore the ball could not be a predator and became and object of curiosity and possibly entertainment. Once the curiosity was aroused I could then get more extreme with the ball and bounce it towards and away from Billy. Doing this I was also demonstrating my leadership by showing Billy that I could distinguish between a dangerous object and a harmless one by not running away from a harmless ball myself. Doing this procedure in many situations and with lots of objects I can portray myself in his mind as a worthy leader, similar to the matriarchal mare in the wild who must decide for the herd what is and is not threatening. If she gets it wrong they either get eaten or waste precious energy running unnecessarily.
Eventually I got to the point where I can put and bounce the ball on Billys' back, thus preparing him for another large object on him, me !! We have been at this point in the past, but I wanted to reinforce the lack of reaction to the stimulus.
I then moved onto the squeeze game. I wanted to make this a little more challenging in the past and reinforce the habituation to the ball. I put a jump wing around 3 feet from the wall of the school and then asked Billy to repeatedly pass through the gap, turn and face the gap (thus also adding in all sorts of driving and porcupine games). After a while I reduced the gap to around 2 feet. Horses do not like constricting spaces and so to get him to confidently pass through this gap at a confident walk bodes well for trailer and starting gate training. Just to add to the problem I then placed the ball in the gap. He now had to combine his confidence of going through the gap with the knowledge that kicking the ball moves it out of the way. With very very gentle encouragement he worked out the solution in just a minute or so. What a good exercise for his mind !!
Then we played for ages with the tarp. To really test and improve his trust in my leadership I tied a rope to the corner of the tarp so that I could drag it behind us as we walked. In this instance of course the tarp is displaying predatory behaviour by following and approaching his hind quarters. I allowed him to drift on the 22 foot rope as he initially pranced around, but used the natural power of focus to just walk in the direction of the gaze totally ignoring the tarp and Billy. After just a few minutes he was becoming more confident at which point I stopped the tarp and directed him to approach it. Curiosity followed. Several repetitions of this with the tarp visible in each eye in turn overcame his fear. In the end he was pushing the predatorial tarp around with his nose and playing with it.
Job done I returned him to his box and came home for a beer. No playing with Filly today, after a night out of bed my reactions would not be quick enough to cope with her sharp mischievous mind (learnt through bitter experience !!)