Remember the reponsibilities of the horse ?
1) Don't act like prey animal, act like a partner
2) Maintain gait
3) Maintain direction
4) Look where you are going.
We have now started to combine all the responsibilities in a single circling game. I have been working on the maintain gait for years, maintain direction for the last couple of weeks (at a new level of precision) and look where you are going more or less independently of the others by asking her to cross obstacles.
The maintain gait part is fairly easy. Remain in neutral unless she breaks gait from walk to trot or walk to halt for example. Should she break gait then I just ask for the gait to resume as asked. I have modified this slightly. If she goes from walk to halt to graze I then ask for one lap of trot before resuming walk. She quickly learns that just maintaining walk and snatching a mouthful on the move is much more pleasant.
As I have reported recently I have been working hard on taking maintain direction to a new level. Again if she keeps the same amount of slack in the rope she is left alone and I maintain neutral in the center of the circle, but should she edge in on the circle I drive her out a little further than she came in by walking into her space. Again the concept is to slightly over correct then resume the circle. This has worked pretty well and we usually get good circles these days.
For the look where you are going part I have put a small jump in the way and just to add to the difficulty placed some barrels such that there is a smallish gap for her to pass through at the same time. The squeeze game was used to get her confident and get her to maintain gait over the pole. To start she tended to enter the squeeze at walk and exit at trot as though the squeeze had accelerated her. Slowly we got to the point where she confidently picked each leg up carefully and walked over the pole. Then we added trot as the gait which she managed to maintain immediately so back to walk and she was still happy at walk.
So the latest challenge was to combine all the above so that she could circle accurately at the same gait and pass through the squeeze. I just acted as though the squeeze did not exist and asked for circles having positioned myself so that she would pass the squeeze on each lap if she maintained direction. I am ultimately after at least four laps with no intervention at all from me. To date only two laps have been achieved, but then I am asking a young Filly to concentrate on her responsibilities for quite a long time. It is interesting that we can already manage more laps at trot than at walk which seems to indicate that it is attention span that is the challenge as the total time to a breakdown is about the same.
1) Don't act like prey animal, act like a partner
2) Maintain gait
3) Maintain direction
4) Look where you are going.
We have now started to combine all the responsibilities in a single circling game. I have been working on the maintain gait for years, maintain direction for the last couple of weeks (at a new level of precision) and look where you are going more or less independently of the others by asking her to cross obstacles.
The maintain gait part is fairly easy. Remain in neutral unless she breaks gait from walk to trot or walk to halt for example. Should she break gait then I just ask for the gait to resume as asked. I have modified this slightly. If she goes from walk to halt to graze I then ask for one lap of trot before resuming walk. She quickly learns that just maintaining walk and snatching a mouthful on the move is much more pleasant.
As I have reported recently I have been working hard on taking maintain direction to a new level. Again if she keeps the same amount of slack in the rope she is left alone and I maintain neutral in the center of the circle, but should she edge in on the circle I drive her out a little further than she came in by walking into her space. Again the concept is to slightly over correct then resume the circle. This has worked pretty well and we usually get good circles these days.
For the look where you are going part I have put a small jump in the way and just to add to the difficulty placed some barrels such that there is a smallish gap for her to pass through at the same time. The squeeze game was used to get her confident and get her to maintain gait over the pole. To start she tended to enter the squeeze at walk and exit at trot as though the squeeze had accelerated her. Slowly we got to the point where she confidently picked each leg up carefully and walked over the pole. Then we added trot as the gait which she managed to maintain immediately so back to walk and she was still happy at walk.
So the latest challenge was to combine all the above so that she could circle accurately at the same gait and pass through the squeeze. I just acted as though the squeeze did not exist and asked for circles having positioned myself so that she would pass the squeeze on each lap if she maintained direction. I am ultimately after at least four laps with no intervention at all from me. To date only two laps have been achieved, but then I am asking a young Filly to concentrate on her responsibilities for quite a long time. It is interesting that we can already manage more laps at trot than at walk which seems to indicate that it is attention span that is the challenge as the total time to a breakdown is about the same.
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