Another fun day yesterday. As I collected her from the stable the food was just arriving. Not a great time to start playing with Filly, but she soon settled down and we had great fun. Due to the upset caused by walking past the food trolley to the school she did not want to roll immediately upon entering the school which is unusual.
We spent quite a while refining her backup as she had started to make the assumption that having backed a few paces she she set off on a circle. Principle number 2 applies. To counter this I just sent her back, made her wait then surprised her by walking to her to give her a carrot piece.
Having sorted that minor problem out we moved onto changing gait from trot to canter on a circle. To start this required an escalation to phase 3 pressure but fairly quickly she learned to transition to canter on only phase 1 or 2. Again I feel one of the differences with Natural Horsemanship is that we start with very light pressure, in this case merely upping body energy and extending the arm out to the side and then slowly increase the pressure until we get the response that is desired. In this case I held my arm out for at least a full circle and to start with released if Filly just increased the speed of the trot. If the arm did not work then I clucked twice followed by slapping the ground with the string behind her. To start with I expect no response at all from the extended arm but horses are very quick at learning "What happens before what happens happens". In other words if I stay at phase 1 long enough and then increase the phases Filly soon learns that if she does not respond to the phase 1 then more forceful phases will follow and therefore it is her interest to respond to phase 1. As training progresses the time interval for each phase is shortened gradually so she does not learn that she can ignore phase 1 for sometime before it is prudent to respond.
Once this was going well online we did some practise at Liberty. I think at one point I must have put a fraction too much pressure on her mentally as she suddenly didn't want to play anymore. Rather than get frustrated I just accepted the situation and set about restoring her trust. Simply done really I just wandered around the school ignoring her, making sure that all turns were made so that my belly button always pointed away from her. After just a few minutes of sniffing the ground, licking the walls (all displacement behaviour) she walked over and suddenly appeared on my shoulder with head lowered. I then reinforced the trust by walking to her favourite roll spot and decided to see if I could get her to roll at Liberty next to me. This is where that forbidding looking title comes in. Social animals will often mimic other animals in the herd and I decided to see if I could use this behaviour to induce the roll. I lowered my head and started pawing at the ground. Within one or two seconds Filly mimicked me whilst standing by my side. I then knelt down and again within 10 seconds Filly had taken a few paces away and knelt near me followed by a good satisfying roll. The speed at which she mimicked my behaviour was actually quite startling as I really did not expect it to work. I had not done any prior training for this other than always kneeling down close to her when she rolled. I had certainly never taught her to paw the ground on command, so this was a true mimicking of my behaviour, or was it just fluke on the timing ? I guess one trial does not make for scientific proof of the concept, but intuition told me she was mimicking me. A man with intuition, now there is a new idea !
We spent quite a while refining her backup as she had started to make the assumption that having backed a few paces she she set off on a circle. Principle number 2 applies. To counter this I just sent her back, made her wait then surprised her by walking to her to give her a carrot piece.
Having sorted that minor problem out we moved onto changing gait from trot to canter on a circle. To start this required an escalation to phase 3 pressure but fairly quickly she learned to transition to canter on only phase 1 or 2. Again I feel one of the differences with Natural Horsemanship is that we start with very light pressure, in this case merely upping body energy and extending the arm out to the side and then slowly increase the pressure until we get the response that is desired. In this case I held my arm out for at least a full circle and to start with released if Filly just increased the speed of the trot. If the arm did not work then I clucked twice followed by slapping the ground with the string behind her. To start with I expect no response at all from the extended arm but horses are very quick at learning "What happens before what happens happens". In other words if I stay at phase 1 long enough and then increase the phases Filly soon learns that if she does not respond to the phase 1 then more forceful phases will follow and therefore it is her interest to respond to phase 1. As training progresses the time interval for each phase is shortened gradually so she does not learn that she can ignore phase 1 for sometime before it is prudent to respond.
Once this was going well online we did some practise at Liberty. I think at one point I must have put a fraction too much pressure on her mentally as she suddenly didn't want to play anymore. Rather than get frustrated I just accepted the situation and set about restoring her trust. Simply done really I just wandered around the school ignoring her, making sure that all turns were made so that my belly button always pointed away from her. After just a few minutes of sniffing the ground, licking the walls (all displacement behaviour) she walked over and suddenly appeared on my shoulder with head lowered. I then reinforced the trust by walking to her favourite roll spot and decided to see if I could get her to roll at Liberty next to me. This is where that forbidding looking title comes in. Social animals will often mimic other animals in the herd and I decided to see if I could use this behaviour to induce the roll. I lowered my head and started pawing at the ground. Within one or two seconds Filly mimicked me whilst standing by my side. I then knelt down and again within 10 seconds Filly had taken a few paces away and knelt near me followed by a good satisfying roll. The speed at which she mimicked my behaviour was actually quite startling as I really did not expect it to work. I had not done any prior training for this other than always kneeling down close to her when she rolled. I had certainly never taught her to paw the ground on command, so this was a true mimicking of my behaviour, or was it just fluke on the timing ? I guess one trial does not make for scientific proof of the concept, but intuition told me she was mimicking me. A man with intuition, now there is a new idea !
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