Happy Christmas

We have been having a small problem with Bonitao, our horse. He has gotten into the habit of bolting to the field when being lead there. We had been hearinf reports of this for a while from the girls at the yard, but it was clearly getting out of hand so we have taken on the problem ourselves.
To understand the problem we had to see it so a week or so ago I went to the yard to turn him out myself. The result was that on the first attempt to take him to the field he bolted but I managed to let my hands slowly close the 22 foot rope and slow him to a halt, but at the expense of some serious rope burns on my hands. I immediately took him away from the field and lead him back again (with gloves on !) and again, at the same spot he bolted. With gloves I had no chance of stopping him.
The question now was, why? He is not doing this through fear as can be seen from his expression. He is clearly very left brain as he goes. Therefore he is not showing respect to humans as leaders in this context. My immediate response was to play the falling leave pattern with him, thus walking into his space as I asked for yields on the head collar. These went very well and the next attempt at passing the gate was good.
Ritchie then had a lesson with Becka, who spends a lot of time with James Roberts and so knows us and Bonitao well. She analysed it similarly to us but added in the idea that this was now a learned behaviour and we needed to break the pattern for an extended period of time to cure it. To ensure no repeats she suggested we send him to the field sideways with his head tipped towards us. In this position he cannot get into a power position to pull away from us. If necessary we should even send him backwards. I have been doing this for about 5 or 6 days now and it is working well. On just one occasion has he tried to bolt and as he was in the thick mud at the time by the gate he failed. In a way this was a good thing as he attempted and failed to get away reinforcing the idea that a new pattern is required.
It would be easy to get frustrated by this behaviour, but I prefer to say "How interesting" and then solve the puzzle. In a way I think this defines good horsemanship. Getting frustrated at a horse behaving like a horse is clearly not the way to go, the challenge is to use natural techniques to strengthen the desired behaviours, and diminish the undesired ones. For the horse it is just behaviour, neither good nor bad and we should "think like a horse" and understand this.
 This ideal can be tough to achieve at times but it is an attitude that separates a good horseman, of whatever experience, from a bad one.
On a happier note Billy can now have his leg bandages off in the stable. They have to be reapplied if he goes out to the field or in the school to protect them from sand and mud, but at least so air can now get to the area.
Happy Christmas everyone !!

Just an update

Although it is a while since the last blog I have been playing with both Filly and Billy. I have been somewhat short of time to write about as well though.
Filly and I continue to work on excellence at all the various games and this has been going pretty well. In particular we have continued to work on maintaining gait through the figure 8 and weave pattern. This has improved beyond measure but is still being done with a sour look on her face. In general I have been given the impression by her that she is rather bored with the whole thing which tells me that I have been a little too strong on the consistency with insufficient variety to keep her mind occupied. Remembering that "communication is two or more individuals sharing and understanding an idea" I realised that my responsibility of listening to her communication had been lacking and it was time for a total change of scene. She was telling me she needed a break and a change of scene.
It was not a very pleasant afternoon with gusty strong winds and the occasional light shower, but horses are fairly waterproof and I had a good jacket on so we went for a walk to the big field. Remembering that in the past Filly had been absolutely terrified of open spaces I was pleased when she excitedly but totally left brained entered the field. She was off to explore. The field had recently been muck spread to encourage hay growth next year and it was interesting to observe that she did not want to eat any of the grass where the muck was. This make evolutionary sense for her to be adverse to this as in the wild it would encourage the spread of worms. So we went further and further from the entrance looking for good grass. As it happens the edges of the field had been left un-tainted and despite this being near a noisy (due to the wind) hedge this is where she chose to graze. Slowly we worked our way further from the gate to the end of the field where she caught site of some very large cows in the next field. Head up and attentive. I was pleased to see that she was evaluating them with a sceptical left brain rather than just going right brained and running away. Back to grazing, but with the odd glance in the direction of the cows.
Spending time like this just quietly grazing allows close observation of the small details and I offer up one such detail below for thought and comment.
I have been continuing to read Equitation Science (Paul McGreevy and Andrew McLean 2010) and it raises an interesting suggestion. It acknowledges that horses have left and right brain behaviour and draws an analogy with left and right brained rodents and their dominant paws. It has been found in rodents that left pawed individuals have associated higher stress levels and speed of fear arousal. Left pawed suggests right hemisphere dominant brain which fits with the Parelli horsenality model. When horses graze they tend to have a handedness (hoofedness ?) as to which front leg they prefer to have forwards as the eat. The book suggests that there may be a parallel with horses and we can determine which leg is preferential from observing them grazing and then possibly use this to discover something about the inherent characteristics of the horsenality of the horse. They muddy the waters a little by then asking which leg is the dominant one, the forward one or the supporting one. However it seems to me that in Parelli with so many horse having had their horsenality determined it would be possible to test this hypothesis with enough subjects to get a statistical result. For what it is worth Filly favours her right front leg forward (by a factor of around 2 : 1) and I believe she is a Left Brained introvert, which suggests to me that the forward leg is dominant.
Any comments from others would be of great interest.

Have horse catch you

Another visit to James Roberts yesterday. He doesn't have any courses on a present so it was an opportunity to see him working with his own horses for a change.
The theme for the day was definitely Liberty work, and we watched a nice session of him playing with his own working horse "Princess". In particular he was working on zone 5 driving at Liberty, over emphasising his direction of focus of both the eyes and the belly button as he asked for serpentines up and down the school. As he said, this was to improve her response to his focus when he is riding her so that he has to use his hands less which are normally fully occupied with the lead rope to the young colts he starts. Princess is used a lot for ponying young colts as she can interact with them as a horse and move them around. So James directs Princess who in turn directs the colts getting them to yield to pressure. She is the perfect horse for this as she can look cranky and forceful enough to get the youngsters to respect her without getting aggressive.
In the afternoon he gave a lesson to a young man who has just arrived at the yard as a livery. (Lucky guy !! I'm not jealous at all !). After the usual brieifing on the Plan (see link on right side) they started working on "Have horse catch you". This was the first time I had seen the catching game as played by James. Basically the horse was put at Liberty and then made to move around the school while the student walked with purpose and "crankiness" around the inside of the arena, regularly putting pressure on the horse to keep moving. The result was this fit young pony cantered around the arena for about 1/2 hour with the occassional directed change of direction. From the ponies head tossing you could tell that she did not like this sudden assertion of leadership from a human. As James suggested the pony had been at the top of the pecking order for years and it was a bit of a shock to the system to find that she no longer was. As time progressed however the head tossing reduced and the horse lowered her head and started to show signs of relaxation and submission. The key was to pay close attention to her expression. To start the head and nose were tipped out and away form the owner, but slowly the head straightened. As soon as she glanced at the owner he had to turn and walk purposefully away for her. The mode of his walk was all important. He had to demonstrate his positive leadership qualities and so walk as though he knew where he was going and was thus worth following. The pony stopped and pondered him for a while before deciding that he was not worth following and turning away again, at which point she was immediately sent out on the circle again. Some minutes later and another glance. The owner turned and walked away again and she pondered him for much longer. So he just walked repeatedly past her as she decided whether or not to accept his leadership. On one pass he just asked her to move her front legs to get her "unstuck" and she then willingly followed him. However it was not all over, as he came and sat in a chair she again turned and left him, but was helped on her way to more circles. Only a short time passed and she again turned and asked for permission to come to him and then stayed with him for a long while as we all discussed what we had just seen.
James suggested that the owner do this for another 3 or 4 days to really get the bond and leadership established before moving onto "Halter with Savvy". This is what I mean on my Plan website where I say "don't pass onto the next item of the plan until the current one is solid".
Why is this so important. Well if you horse is travelling around you, looking to the outside and tossing it's head, as long as it is not doing so in fear or right brained, it is in effect swearing at you and giving you the finger. It does not see you as the leader but as an inconvenience that occasionally does things to it rather than with and for it. That is not a healthy relationship to have with an animal you are going to trust your life to.
All in all a very interesting day. On arriving back at the yard I checked out the "Have horse catch you" with Filly and found it was not really up to standard to start with. I therefore played the game and in only around 10 minutes it was pretty good again. I've made a mental note to be a little more conscientious in checking each box on the plan and make sure that each is done with excellence before moving on in the future.

Playing with Billy again

Just a quick note as it is late and we have to get up early to go to James Roberts yard again.
As the title says I have started playing with Billy again. His legs seem to finally be healing well after some 5 or 6 months. He is certainly full of himself and has spent the last two days testing our leadership relationship again. I hope I am winning !
The remarkable thing is that other than these displays of dominance he seems to have forgotten nothing that he has been taught in the past despite the long layoff. May this give hope to others in a similar situation. Circling game is very good as is sideways. In fact some of his yields have improved. However he is testing my strength of will when it comes to porcupine game on the halter, and given me another learn burn on my hand. Only slight though. The yard girls have mentioned that he is becoming more difficult to lead and as they are using a leather halter I can well believe it.
Sorry this is short but must go to bed now and prepare to have brain overload again tomorrow

Alelomimetic Behaviour

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 !

Holiday over

Back from holiday with a reasonable tan and a head swimming with the ideas in the book "Equitation Science". Not a book for the faint hearted, but worth a read. Somewhat scathing about Natural Horsemanship but it really just says that the principles are not yet scientifically validated.
Having arrived home I was of course keen to seen Filly and continue preparing for a good audition. Two gentle days later and we are back on track. Playing with a Filly whilst suffering from jet lag is taxing, but keeps me awake and on my toes.
We now have a well established pattern of having Filly roll next to me as soon as we get into the school. She is now very confident with me in close proximity to the extent I have to be careful she does not actually roll onto me. This is a great exercise for building trust between us, and fun as all these interactions should be.
I am still working on getting lightness in the sideways game and have found that giving her a destination, preferably with a carrot on it, makes this much easier to achieve. We can now get to the end of the 22 foot line with only phase 1 or 2 pressure and more importantly with accuracy about the direction. I must start with the 45 foot line soon.
Yesterday we played a bit at Liberty and I found that my hind quarter yield no longer worked. Back to reinforcement online. Even then I had to go to phase 3 or 4 once to get her really responsive. Interestingly as I have noted before she became way more enthusiastic and attentive after a single phase 4 than when I was just trying to be gentle. This is becoming a repeated pattern. It seems that she responds to me better after I have really stepped up and asserted leadership at least once and even seems to enjoy my company more. I guess from her point of view she feels more safety and comfort around a strong leader than a weak one. Still it is hard to have to do this on occasion and I have to take care to use Principle 5 "The attitude of justice is effective" rather than just "Show her who's boss".
Having re established my leadership online I continued to work at Liberty which went much much better. To really reward her for a good hind quarter yield as soon as she started to turn and face I would remove all the pressure by turning and walking away. Within seconds a little Filly face would appear at my shoulder and contentedly walk with me.
All in all a good fun session which softened the blow of coming back to a cool windy England after the holiday.

Holiday !!!!

Just to let you all know that I am going away on holiday tonight and will be away for a week. Of course I am taking several relevant books such as Equitation Science with me.  This is one book that really needs quiet contemplation to understand. I have had to use Google to look up what some of the words even mean. Conspecific for example. But then I was never any good at crosswords having the limited vocabulary of an engineering student.
Filly will, I am sure be glad of the break. The good news is that she is confident enough now that she can be left in a field on her own. A very satisfying improvement from the early days where just being outside the stable block was a cause of considerable stress for her.
Normal service will resume the week after next !!

Quick update

Just a quick update today. I have been playing a fair bit with Filly but it has just been more of the same. We are still working on getting her draw to be more energetic and to be done with a more willing expression. It is slowly paying dividends. She now draws into me with a reasonable effort, but the expression is still a little sour. On the upside this is finally letting us maintain gait through a trotted figure of 8. Only one lap at the moment but the next session we will increase to 1 and 1/2 laps.
We have also been working on lightness in the sideways game. Larisa has set me a target of sideways to the end of a 45 foot line only using phase 1 or 2 pressure. This is actually going fairly well. I place a carrot on the top of a mounting block, carefully line her up on it and then send her sideways to it to get her reward. Once she got the idea that the destination has a reward on it she started putting real effort in getting there ! There are two advantages to putting the reward at the destination. To start with she can instantly receive the reward on achieving the task and thus link the reward more intimately to the task. Secondly it gives me a fixed destination to send her too which means I have to send her exactly sideways with no drift forwards or backwards.
We have also been working on her zone 5 liberty driving by using the follow the rail pattern. In this task I have to be able to walk behind her tail, guiding her with a couple of sticks whilst she has no halter on. To make this easier I started using the follow the rail pattern. This has the advantage that the wall of the school stops her turning one way whilst I use a stick and plastic bag to stop her turning away from the wall. Forwards in initiated by increasing my energy, focussing on where I want to go and then if necessary using the bag right above he tail to create impulsion. As soon as she is walking I go into neutral and walk, with focus, behind her. I placed carrots on cones in each corner to give her a destination and reward for reaching them. After this pattern was established I placed cones and carrots in the middle of the school and we left the safety of the wall and set off across the school. We didn't get to the cones on a dead straight line, but we did get to all of them which was a good start. As for stopping I just use the signal we use when riding. A breath in followed by a long relaxing exhale, drop my body energy and if this fails then a light pull on her tail and we gently stop. Hence the reason I was working on lead by the tail recently !!
We are also have great success with her friendly game whilst lying down. I know she will always roll in the sand when we enter the school so I have used that behaviour to slowly influence where she rolls. Leaving her online I kneel near her roll spot whilst she looks for the perfect spot. To start with I let that be anywhere she wanted and then moved to her. Slowly I have been using the rope to restrict her range. Now I have it to the point that I am using a 12 foot rope and getting her to roll within 6 feet of me. As soon as she is down she gets a carrot. She will even lay with her head flat out and still take a carrot from my hand. Slowly I am getting to the point where I can move around her and rub and scratch on her whilst she is lying down. And the point of all this. 1) It is a real acceptance of me as a partner, not a predator, to allow me to be near and touch her when she is in this most vulnerable position. 2) If she ever gets sick, such as colic, she is already used to having me around her whist she is on the ground. Thus I can attend to her without increasing her stress above that of being sick. 3) It just feels very special to have that sort of a bond and trust with a prey animal. This is supposed to be fun and rewarding after all !

Putting the lesson to use

I have been continuing the exercises that were started during the lesson with Larisa. The main emphasis is still to get Filly to draw towards me with real energy and a lack of aggression on her face.
To balance these two requirements is very tricky. For example is she comes to me with real impulsion but a sour look on her face do I reward her? If I do then I am reinforcing that the attitude is ok. If I don't she will think "I put effort in and still did not get rewarded, so extra effort cannot be the right answer".
In practise I run backwards away from her, encouraging impulsion with a pull pressure on the lead rope and tags with the stick and string on her sides whilst studying her expression. As soon as I see her ears soften I stop and reward her. The snag is that she can twitch her ears faster than I can react so timing the reward of rest and a carrot can be hit and miss. The problem is missing an opportunity to reward her. If I miss such an opportunity I am inadvertently reinforcing the idea that softness is not the answer.
To mix things up a bit I am also continuing to work on her sideways game. Under Larisa's tutelage she suggested that I needed to get to the point where I could get her to drift out to the end of a 45 foot rope whilst I stand still and only use phase one (body energy only) and phase two (very very light use of stick and string wafted in her direction). The key is too walk to her and reward her with a treat as she moves further and further away. So on the first attempts I rewarded her for a quality step or two away from me. Slowly she has to go further and as of last night we were pretty much getting to the end of the 22 foot rope. Quality is the watch word here. I want lightness and straightness. By straightness I mean that if I pick a spot on the wall over her whithers then she should remain on that line. She tends to drift forwards, and if so I just wriggle the rope gently to get her back on line. In contrast to the draw exercises she is learning this game remarkably quickly.

Can horses laugh ?

We had another lesson with Larisa today. As usual she quickly isolated where my problems lay and then set up specific exercises to improve things.
As I have mentioned before I have had trouble getting Filly to maintain trot around a figure eight. I have tried all sorts of things to improve the issue, boomerang pattern, maintain gait on a circle, weave pattern to name but a few.
I had noted that Filly gave a really sour look as I asked her to change direction at trot but was unsure as to whether this was due to dominance or unconfidence. I had been working to start with on the assumption it was unconfidence. After all I had a 50 50 chance of being right and if I guessed dominance and was wrong the exercises to make her less dominant could really have damaged the rapport with an unconfident horse.
But this was not working. Larisa had me start with the falling leaf pattern. This involves walking in a straight line forwards and asking the horse to perform half circles in front of me as I move. I am therefore continually moving into her space and she has to move to get away from me. Sure enough she showed the sour face at each change of direction, but Larisa noted that she was not very quick at yielding her shoulder away from me and was pushing on my personal bubble. Horses in a herd will often push on each other with their shoulders to demonstrate dominance, especially if their ears are back at the same time. The solution was to continue doing many falling leaf patterns and "tag" her with the string on my carrot stick if she made to push on my space with her shoulder. I was therefore looking for snappy forequarter yields away from me as she came through the turn and a non-agressive look on her face. Lots to take in whilst you are handling stick and rope, walking forwards, asking for changes of direction etc. After many passes up and down the school we started to get the quick yield and she was rewarded with a rest for that. As we progressed I got more particular that not only did the yield have to be good, but the expression as well. Not something to be fixed in a day but we made good progress.
We then moved onto improving the energy she puts into drawing towards me when asked. This is again to improve the maintain gait during figures of 8. Larisa had me circle her around and then run backwards down the school, applying pressure on the lead rope and using the stick and string to tag her on the side until she mode effort to follow me. If she failed to apply effort, or came to me with a sour look I then had to send her back on the circle. If she did put effort into coming to me with a good look then she got a nice long rest by my side.
At the start of this exercise she was really resisting on the rope and I was having to apply quite a lot of pressure, whilst running backwards and tagging her with the string. We worked at this for a while with only small improvements. Suddenly she got the idea and with me pulling on the rope she suddenly broke into canter towards me. Caught of guard and with all the rope tension released the result was inevitable. I landed flat on my back and, according to Larisa, bounced once before coming to a stop whilst Filly overshot me and came back around with her ears pricked, eyes glinting and head tilted to one side as she examined me from an unfamiliar angle. I am sure the answer to the blog title is "yes they can" !!