A chilled Filly

Saturday 21 November 2015

Bridleless with a purpose

Yesterday I had a very interesting and fun ride on Filly. I've been working on circles in corners and to be honest they haven't been going that well. Coming out of the corner Filly showed a marked reluctance to go back into the corner again. She wanted to head off across the school to the corner nearest her stable and stand there. She had become barn sweet.
I worked for some time in the bosal on the circle. The principle in my mind was to make my inside hand stay on the track I had in mind. So if she drifted out on the circle I took my hand further and further to the inside so that my hand stayed near the track I wanted to be on. Being a bosal if she pushed into the hand I bumped her lightly with the bosal to bring her around. Never apply steady pressure with a bosal is one of the prime directives to riding in one. I don't mean hard tugs, just light bumps.
This was working to a degree but she still drifted sideways out of the circle in the direction she wanted to go in. I needed her to stop pushing through my outside leg and stay between both my reins and my legs.
The best way to stop her pushing through my leg would be to back up the leg pressure with pressure from something else, like a coil of rope. If she then tries to push through my leg I can tap the coil of rope on my leg until she comes off the leg. If she persists then I move the coil forwards and tap her neck. All done in a progressive manner with time for each phase to take effect. You have to have a very relaxed attitude as to where she is actually going in the school for this to work ! Don't worry about the circle.
So I needed to isolate the yielding to the leg as this was now the primary problem. I felt the best way to achieve this was to remove the reins. Then I couldn't accidentally apply unwanted cues on the reins and the signal from me leg/seat would be purer. So off came the bosal and reins and out came the 45 foot rope split into separate coils for the left and right hands. Neutral is just having my hands relaxed by my sides. Active is lifting up a set of coils and moving them to a position where I can tap my leg (phase 1), tapping my leg (phase 2), moving the coils forwards to tap her neck (phase 3 and 4).

I started by forgetting about the circle in the corner and just wandering around the school occasionally asking for just a step over with the front legs then back to wandering around randomly again. Slowly we established (again :( ) what my outside leg meant and she would step over nicely. So back to the circle.

To start with she again pushed away from the circle and into my leg, but slowly she started to come around on the circle closer to where I wanted us to be. I had markers set out on the ground to define a perfect circle in the corner so I could easily tell that things were improving. Then we picked up a trot and a remarkable thing happened. She suddenly accepted the circle and with no asking from me, I had no reins, she also came into vertical flexion. This was after quite a long period of trotting and I think she figured this was an easier way to travel so adopted it.

With that I jumped off her, whilst still on the circle, and made a fuss of her. Saddle off and she went for a nice roll.

I see on videos many many folks riding bridleless as it is a cool fun thing to do. And it is. I love it myself.
I do wonder how many people also think of bridleless riding as an important tool in our arsenal. One that can take us right back to basics and ask the question "is the horse listening to my body or just being pulled around by the reins ?". It was of course James, and latterly Josh, who have impressed this on me. But maybe last night the lesson finally sank in.

Wednesday 4 November 2015

Moose Mountain

A few weeks ago I was again in Calgary. I try to never let an opportunity to enjoy the outdoors there pass me by so I had booked a ride at Moose Mountain.
Moose Mountain is just outside Bragg Creek and borders the Kananaskis range which can be seen a little way off.
When I arrived I was not sure what I was going to ride or how many would be going out that day. As it happened I was the only rider for the morning and I got given a lovely horse called Heart to ride. He was a wide black Percheron cross. And I mean wide !! But he was a lovely, well mannered boy and even after being ridden by a lot of riders of varying standards all summer he was still pretty light and fun to ride.
The ride we went on was around 16km long and 3 1/2 hours. We started on a gravel road past some pretty impressive houses and then passed through a barbed wire fence into national forest land. Here the going got a bit more fun. This is the foothills of the Rocky Mountains after all. We passed through forest and meadow accompanied by a dog from the stables. In the forest there were a lot of cattle that the local ranches allow to roam the land. I can see that here you would need horses to round up the cattle. I can't think of any vehicle that could do the job. Heart was a little nervous about the cattle at times, but soon got over it.
The route took us up onto a ridge line that gave great views of a small lake and the mountains in the middle distance.

The guide I was riding with was a young lady from Sweden. I'm sorry to say I forgot her name. But we had a lovely chat for those 3 1/2 hours. She had taken a degree in animal behaviour and was hoping to take a masters in Equine Behaviour. As a result we could chat about the benefits of positive reinforcement training vs to negative reinforcement and agreed that actually they were both equally valid and valuable depending on the circumstance. I think we both leaned towards PR for ground work and NR for ridden work, but only as a bias not as a rigid model.
We also chatted at length about the style I'm studying, vaquero, and she seemed pretty intrigued. She had ridden her horse in a bosal but had not really picked up on the finer points. This is something I'm beginning to realise about bosal riding. Many folks, especially in the USA, do it but very few have studied how to do it right. I find this a little worrying as the bosal does need a certain feel and technique to be effective and fair to the horse. But then again so does the bit I guess.
All in all it was a fun ride though having got off I found I had to do a fair bit of stretching to ease my legs back into their original shape !!