Muddy Filly

Filly hates to get muddy. I have never ever seen her roll in a field. In the nice clean sand indoor school she loves to roll, it is the highlight of her day. But in mud, never.
I was a little perturbed therfore on arriving at the yard yesterday to find her legs and belly covered in sticky, wet mud. She hadn't rolled apparently, but she had careered around the field so much that she had splashed her lower half with a thick coating. It was so sticky and wet that there was no question of cleaning her enough to be able to put a saddle on, and given the weather she would not have dried if I had washed her.
If she thought this was a clever way to get out of work, she had forgotten about ground work. So off to the outdoor school we went.
We started at liberty. As soon as I took off her halter she spotted a jump wing that was set up and wandered over to investigate. Never knock the curiosity out of a young horse, so I waited to see what she would do. After a good sniff she decided that practising sideways over it would be a great idea. With no prompting from me she carefully positioned herself and then stepped sideways until it was under her belly. The thing was so tall there was only one part of her belly it would fit under, as you can see from the photo. I was very surprised but happy to see her play and curiosity was this strong.
The rest of the session was just pretty normal stuff so I won't bore you with the details. Suffice to say by the end of the session she was dry enough for me to get very dusty scraping all the dried mud off :(

Cantering Filly

A lovely ride on Filly today. A perfect day for it as well, clear and still.
I started with the prepare to ride being done at liberty. Why ? It just felt right, and it was a change of routine which for a horse like Filly keeps her mind engaged.
Even though it was a liberty we still worked on the same things. It's just like preparing online, no difference, there just happens to be no rope attached. James Roberts always made the point that liberty done for the purpose of impressing friends looks horrible, done with a purpose and it is a thing of beauty.
The purpose today was to play the circling game with no interference on her head so that she could really think forwards and not be inhibited by the halter and lead rope flapping around. I was after 3 laps of maintain gait, maintain direction and look where you are going at walk, trot and canter.
To be honest it was very easy. Even though we were in the large outdoor school she never left me. The circles were, if anything, a little too small and I had to use the stick and string to gently drive her onto a larger circle. Once she had completed the required 3 laps, with quality, a slight dip of my head and she turned sharply towards me and happily trotted over. Of course each session took more than 3 laps as the count starts again if I have to correct her at all, but mostly it was fewer than 6 laps in total.
I then saddled her up and got her moving around a little more online to let her blow out so I could cinch the girth up to riding tightness. On that subject it amazes me the number of folks who get on a horse and ride it around before they have the girth at the correct tightness. As the horse moves initially they deflate a lot, the net result is that many people are spending at least a proportion of the ride with a loose girth. Do this a few hundred times and it is inevitable that one day they will spook with a loose girth, the saddle will roll and they will come off, leaving a frightened horse with a saddle dangling under its' belly.
Once riding she was fairly good, but seemed to lack forwards so I decided that canter was probably the solution. I have done very little cantering on her to date as we waited for her to get a little stronger, but she has toughened up nicely so I felt I could risk it. The first canter took a little bit to get her going but only maybe ten strides or so. I don't think she could believe that I was actually asking for canter ! Once going it took a while to get in tune with her gait. Due to the conformation issues all her gaits are a little odd. There seems to be an extra little bounce in canter. Once I finally "got it", much to Fillys' relieve, it was actually very comfortable. Given that she is supposed to be a race horse I have to say that her canter is really gentle and sweet. No rushing, just a really relaxed gait.
The stop is, however, amazing. The cue to stop is to let out a deep breath and relax in the body. The first attempt and I felt I was going to fall off forwards. Two strides from canter to a dead stop. Fantastic. They were not all that good but that first one showed what she could do.
Once we had cantered for around 5 minutes total I walked her off for a while by riding alongside another horse and chatting to the owner. All good for her confidence around other horses. Then I dismounted.
I needed to clear some cones I had set up to do the weave pattern at the start of the ride. Filly didn't look as though she was going anywhere so I just let her go. She followed me around the school as I tidied up, and all the time the other rider was riding around looking in amazement. "Just like a pet dog" she said and she was right. I have to say she is becoming a really confident calm horse now, one that I am proud to own.

Another hack out

A lovely if slightly cold day today. Ritchie and I decided we had to get Bonitao and Filly off the yard for a short hack along the local lanes.

All the usual prepare to ride was done, which showed Filly to be in a very mellow today. We prepared as we had played the last few days with more work on maintaining responsibilities on the circle and sideways over a pole and cones using porcupine pressure. Both showed considerable improvement.

Of course once on board the prepare to ride was put to good use. We played corner game at walk which she really understands now and I hardly had to direct her at all.

At trot I am still being very uncritical other than she must maintain gait. The order of the responsibilities of the horse is important so getting her to maintain gait first is the correct thing to do. As for direction I play "tit for tat" letting her choose where to go for a while, and then taking her idea and modifying it with my idea as to where to go next. Doing this, and with lots of stroking and reassurance, we trotted for a fair time with no head tossing at all. A great leap forward. No I have to gently increase my ideas as to direction compared to hers. Slowly, with her hardly noticing, I will be directing her more and more. No fight, just persuasion.

After about 15 minutes in the school we left and went for a walk. She happily helped me open the gate to the school, thus giving the earlier practised sideways a purpose.
The hack was fun, but she was again pretty tense. With lots for reassurance and stroking she held it together very well. The few spooks she had were all of one step, or less.
She was very forward in the walk leaving poor Bonitao far behind. He regularly had to trot to keep up, and he is a horse who prefers to be in front. We figured he thinks it is too much effort to stay in front of Filly so plods along behind.

Sideways Porcupine

Only groundwork with Filly recently as I haven't felt well enough to ride. Hopefully today will be different though.

In lieu of riding I have been going back to basics a bit with the groundwork. For example Filly had forgotten her responsibilities on the circle of maintain gait, maintain direction and looking where she is going. She was also still very defensive about steady (porcupine) pressure on her sides to get her to move away.
First the circling game. Of course we only use circles when doing groundwork as we can't move fast enough to keep up if we do not. In addition the leader of a herd of horses tends to be the one who moves their feet least and by circling we can stand still and make the horse move a lot. However the lessons learned on the circle will translate into more linear patterns when ridden, especially the responsibilities.
My aim was to get two laps at forward walk, forward trot and forward canter with no interference from me once the direction and gait had been set. This is an advancement of the basic circling game where only the gait matters. Here I wanted quality of gait as well. Should I have to remind her of the need to maintain the desired gait the circle count reset and she still had to do two circles to get the reward of a rest. Thus each session consisted of many more circles than just two, but as soon as two good quality circles where achieved she got to rest.
The game for her was to figure out what she had to do to make sure I did not give her a cue and for how long she had to do it. This is different from normal lunging a horse where they are constantly reminded what to do. This develops them physically but not mentally.
It did not take too long to get the desired circles and so I can build now from 2 to a goal of 6 circles with no interference.

As for porcupine sideways we had, over several sessions, got to the point where she was beginning to accept the pressure and move lightly off it. But it was still with some attitude. Now she was at least partly thinking about things during the porcupine game I could add obstacles to negotiate as I directed her with finger tip pressure. The obstacle yesterday was a pole on the ground with a cone at each end, and the task was to go along the pole sideways with the pole under her belly. This put a purpose to being manoeuvred about with porcupine pressure. After four or five goes she suddenly "got it" and the resistance largely melted away and we got some really nice sideways. Lots of licking, chewing and even yawning from her showed she was finally relaxing to the idea.

The result

I went down to the yard this morning to turn Bonitao out. I decided to do nothing special, just turn him out as anyone else would. I wanted to see what he would do after spending a night in his box (one theory is that he gets hungry and wants to get to grass quickly), and was just handled in a normal way.
So all I did was quickly change his rug, put his halter on and head off to the field. I guess the only thing I did differently to the yard girls was walk with authority.
I have noticed that because they are expecting him to run off they are a little tentative and rightly nervous of what he might do next. This uncertainty in their body language leads Bonitao to believe that he does not have a good leader in them. He is the type of horse that needs a good leader to feel safe, lacking one he gets nervous and takes the leadership into his own hoofs. He then does what he feels is needed to keep himself safe and gets from one safe place, the stable, to the next, the field, as quickly as possible.
But by walking purposefully I can give him that feeling of leadership and he happily plodded alongside me to the field with no suggestion that he was about to take off. In fact I walked so purposefully that he had to trot occasionally to keep up.
Adding energy to the situation is not something most folks would consider doing, but this is directed leadership energy which actually has a calming effect on a horse such as Bonitao. For other horses this would be the wrong thing to do, so one has to read the situation as it comes up and adapt accordingly.

Recovery

Recovery from what ? According to Ritchie I may have had actual flu, not man-flu. Not pleasant and therefore no horse play for a while. Recovering now so a gentle day with the horses was called for I thought.

Then came the text message. Bonitao had barged past Amy, out of the stable and into a field, where they could not catch him. He has run off before, but never from within the stable so this was a new development.
Once I had finished my coffee I set off to the yard to sort things out a bit. A quick chat with Amy to make sure she was OK and it was off to catch Bonitao.
If a horse could ever look guilty, it was Bonitao. As soon as I entered the field he started walking tentatively towards me, but stopped 10 feet away. I kept lowish energy but circled around towards his hind quarters forcing him to turn and watch me. When he did I let all my energy out and waited.
I did NOT want to catch Bonitao, I wanted him to catch me. We played this cat and mouse game for a while and then suddenly he was on my shoulder mirroring my every move. I did many turns away from him, asking him to keep up, to improve his flexion towards me and his draw towards me. I did a few turns towards him to generate respect for my space but moving my space into his.
Once this was acceptable I attached the rope halter and lead him back to his box. He followed very calmly and quietly with slack in the rope.
I now wanted to address the issue of the stable door, so started by playing "YoYo" game through the entrance. This consisted of backing him into the stable and then drawing him back out one hoof at a time. We then did the same the other way around, so backing out of the stable and drawing him back in, again one hoof at a time. I wanted to expose him to calmness whilst in the doorway as much as possible.
Once this was good we then moved onto standing in the doorway and asking him to lower his head. This puts him in a very relaxed, but submissive, posture. I asked for the head to remain low for significant periods of time to really reinforce the relaxation in the doorway.
Once I was sure he was happy with the doorway on his own I deliberately stood in the doorway and asked him to come past me into the stable, then turn and face the gap he had passed through. A classic squeeze game. This was repeated many times in and out of the stable with me standing on either side of the gap. Finally I was convinced that he was totally happy and relaxed in the stable, the passageway and the doorway.
I then started on checking out his leading to and from the field. I think a mistake folks make is that they lead a horse like this tentatively which makes them feel like they have no leader. For a right brain horse like Bonitao this makes him worried and he takes the leadership upon himself. Therefore I lead him with authority. We are going Somewhere and if he has to trot to keep up that is his problem. We did this several times to and from the field, with the odd stop and back up to check responsiveness and the odd grazing break.
All went well so I put him out in the field and came home to lunch.

Ridden Sideways

Another fun ride yesterday. All the usual prepare to ride was carried out. A little trouble with standstill for saddling. She moved at least two steps, but it starts like that and then you get three, then four, then "where did my standstill go?".
So I was particular and insisted on a good standstill for the saddling.

Once on board it was obvious that my recent work on forwards at walk on the ground was paying off. She was much more forward and hence much better at inside leg isolations.

Up into trot and the old tossing the head problem came up. Worse than before if anything, but by being persistent in getting her to move her feet around alot (small circles, weave, figure of 8 etc) she soon settled enough that I could reward her with a long rest.

Now I had good leg isolations I wanted to put them to a purpose. As the cones were out for doing figure 8 pattern I decided that sideways over them was a good purpose. It came pretty easy for right to left over the cone, but we had trouble left to right. This seemed to be unconfidence rather than uncooperative and there is no need to fix things like that in the saddle. So todays prepare to rise will include sideways over a cone in both directions using driving game first to get the confidence up, then porcupine game to get the obedience.

Another good example of using the Plan constructively and going back a step when needed to fix a problem rather than just always ploughing on forwards.

Back to ground work

The last two days I have concentrated on playing on line rather than riding. The riding had highlighted the fact that Filly was not upholding her responsibilities of

Acting like a partner was actually not bad so needed little tweaking. 
Maintain gait
Maintain direction
Look where you are going.

Maintain gait was ok ish. But I found that I did have to regularly remind her to keep trotting at all when trotting, and remind her to maintain a forward walk when walking. This means that I am having to use my leg more than I would like and risk getting her dead to the leg if I carried on. This was thus better fixed on the ground.
Maintain direction was sort of all right, especially once I had got her thinking forwards, but with all the head tossing at trot thinking forwards was not what she was doing.
Look where you are going was frankly awful. She even tried to trot straight into a fence and I had to turn her at the last second. Going over poles was sort of ok, but we did knock the jump wing over once. Again it was an issue caused by the head tossing. With her head moving that fast there was no chance that she could focus properly and see objects in the way.

This was all getting better when riding, but I felt I could make faster progress on the ground with the circling game. After all this is a game designed to teach the horse its' responsibilities so why not use it ?

We played in the indoor school, the weather being pretty bad outside. I set up poles around a circle so that when she was around 12 feet from me she would cross the middle of the pole. Then we started to circle. To start with she hit the poles almost everytime with her feet and was getting mighty upset about it. At one point she got so annoyed she bolted into canter, but I kept her on the circle. At canter she did not hit a single pole, interesting.

Back to trot. She then started to avoid the pole at trot by ducking to the inside of the circle or pulling out to go around the poles. I guess many people would have been annoyed by this, but for me it was progress. She was now seeing the pole and making a decision to avoid it. I let her do this for a while, but of course it was sort of breaking the maintain direction responsibility. Once I was sure she was seeing the poles I then asked her more firmly to maintain direction and actually cross them. The hitting of the poles became less frequent. To start I would reward her with a rest if she managed to cross a single pole without touching it, then a reward for crossing 2 poles and so on. Eventually we were getting all three poles crossed with maybe a light brush.

The second day was a repeat of day one except that I raised the poles with jump wings on their outer ends only by around 4 inches. Not much but it gave her a more painful consequence if she did not concentrate on her feet and hit them.

Of course I worked on other stuff each session as well, such as the ever popular hind quarter porcupine, but the essence of the session was her responsibilities on the circle. I think we made progress and I will do something similar on my next prepare to ride.

What I like about the Parelli system is that it always gives you clues as to what needs fixing if you hit an obstruction in your progress, and there is no disgrace in going back to previous sections to fix the problem. This I think differs from other systems. I am sure that many would have just plugged on with the riding to fix the problem, but that would have risked making the riding aids dull as I would have had to nag her to get through the issue.

In the long run going backwards is sometimes the fastest way to make progress

Quick update

Since my last post we have been making good progress. Sean came over to give us a lesson fresh from working in Pat Parellis' barn in Colorado. Filly has been out hacking again, and we inadvertently did our first jump !

First Seans lesson

This was on a cool morning, and Filly was a little upset that she had not been turned out. She got really upset when she saw her field mate passing the menage on the way to the field. Left brain extrovert Sean said, and at this time he was right. She was extroverted in the extreme, bouncing around on the end of my 12 foot line. I did not even have a chance to pick up a carrot stick so just used the end of the rope instead. "Good technique" Sean said, "but get her mind more engaged with obstacles".
Once she was settled the normal prepare to ride ensued which went very well, so with my nerves back under firm control I mounted up.
The major issue was still the head tossing when trotting, which today was extreme. To the point she could not even look where she was going and kept running into things, like cones, the fence !!
Sean suggested that I help her throw her head around, not fight it. Make a game of it and then play it more than she wanted to. So there I was trotting around with my arms flailing all over the place as I encouraged her in the head tossing. God knows what the other folks on the yard thought. Probably nothing as they have long ago dismissed us as a bit strange.
After a time this started to work and the head tossing lessened. The trick now was to time exactly when she stopped head tossing and relaxed and then reward her with a long rest. Getting the timing right was exacting work, but kept me really focussed on my riding.
By the end we had settled on a combination of tactics to overcome this issue. The join in tactic, the ignore it tactic and the extreme random turns tactic to get her to think to her feet. This was my homework for the next few rides.
Sean also rode her for a while, working on the head problem and also getting her softer in the halter. At the end he reckoned that Filly is among the top 3 most challenging horses he has ever had to deal with, which given his experience is saying something. He also said he though Filly and I were well suited. Not sure how to take that !

Yesterday we had a lovely ride in the ménage. Much quieter than when Sean was there. I set up more obstacles and a small trotting pole to keep Filly thinking about her feet and not her head. This worked well, except the first time over this low pole, about 6 inches high, she jumped which was a surprise as she had trotted happily over it online in prepare to ride. I also added in a little clicker training. So when she was trotting calmly I just cluck with my tongue to reward the good behaviour and she immediately stops and gets a treat. This is going to surprise any normal rider who would probably expect clucking to mean go on. Oh well !

Today was one of the best rides to date. Long periods of trotting with no head tossing at all. Lots of really responsive inside leg isolations once I had got her forwards at trot. And then a short hack out along the local roads. It was very very foggy and about -1c. But with Bonitao for company she kept her worries under control and we had a fairly uneventful hack. She was worried when a man with a walking stick loomed out of the mist, but that was soon cured by getting him to feed her some treats. Then she seemed upset when he left ! One thing about Filly is she learns very fast. Once something is proved not to be dangerous she either ignores it or tries to eat it. Just what you want in a hacking horse really.

Comfort, discomfort and the training of horses.

This is a topic that I have recently been thinking long and hard about, and have come up with a theory I would like others to comment on. It's probably not new but I have developed it using a combination of the teachings of Mark Rashid and Karen Rohlf.
Mark talks about horse's main task in life is to feel more comfortable. They don't care how they get to feel more comfortable, just that they do. For example if they are thirsty they go to water and get comfort. If they are scared they do whatever it takes, runaway, buck (right brain extrovert) or go inside themselves and pretend the threat does not exist (right brain introvert) to make themselves feel better. In this context it does not matter if they feel as well as it is possible for them to feel just that they feel a bit better than right now. When you think about this it is easy behaviour to recognise, and we probably have a similar response ourselves. The difference with humans is that we have the ability to project a long way forward in time, which horses don't. They live in the moment. Thus we can experience discomfort for a long period to get to real comfort in the future whereas horses just want to feel better now. As I write this I am sat in a cosy cottage in the mountains of Snowdownia. Ritchie and I have just come off the mountains in pouring rain. We did pass some shelter stones that would have got us out of the rain, but we could project forwards to the cottage and so ignored the small increase in comfort of the stones in favour of a warm dry cottage and glass of wine. I suspect that a horse's mentality would have lead them to just take shelter under the stones and feel a little more comfortable.
Karen Rohlf has this idea that we need to coach our horses through discomfort to find greater comfort elsewhere. In this example it would mean saying to the horse "let's ignore the shelter stone and continue to the barn an hour away where you can spend the whole night in comfort with some hay". As we pass the shelter stone the horse will experience increased emotional discomfort as they wonder why we are not taking such obvious and immediate shelter. Karen actually does not use this example, I doubt she mountain climbs in the rain ! She uses the example of trying to get your horse to go in a straight line. Many horses have learnt to walk crooked, and for them that is comfortable. They would be more comfortable in the long term, however, if they learnt to walk straight. In the short term this is not going to be comfortable as it is not familiar and the muscles have probably developed to walk crooked. Thus as trainers we need to coach them through this discomfort because we can project forward and know that in the long term we are taking them to a place of greater comfort. The same can be said about training the horse to be collected. We have the knowledge that,once learnt, the horse will find it more comfortable to carry the weight of a rider when collected with more of their weight on the hind quarters. The horse doesn't know this, and will only experience the fact that in the training phase what we are asking them to do is less comfortable then the way they are familiar with going. Thus given Marks idea that all a horse seeks is to be relatively more comfortable than now it is easy to see why they will resist such training.
To make use of this idea we need two things. First we need a very clear picture of what the finished, more comfortable, product should look like and second we need strength of purpose and resolve to follow through with the training with the clear idea that we are "doing this for and with the horse, not too the horse". In James Roberts eyes one of the great crimes was to ever do anything to the horse, it must be done with and for the horse. Thus if we do not have a pretty clear idea as to what the finished product is going to be we should not put the horse through the discomfort of taking them there.
I have an example from my own current training with Filly. She is my 4 year old thoroughbred mare and is called "Filly". The problem is the application of porcupine (which is Parelli speak for steady pressure) to any part of her body to ask her to move it away from the pressure. Thus if I want to move the hindquarters away I apply steady pressure, increasing in force, to her flank area. I know that this is not physically a problem for her as she likes much firmer scratches there than I ever use in porcupine. She will escape this pressure and move those hindquarters away but it is done with a really negative emotion, tail swishing, cow kicking the lot. It is the emotional pressure of being asked to move which is the issue, not the physical. So emotionally having the porcupine applied creates a lot of discomfort in her mind, and she reduces this discomfort by a) escaping the pressure with a big move and b) acting so as to discourage any attempts to porcupine her again. She thus falls back into the little comfort zone where there is no porcupine pressure being applied. However she still has the fear of porcupine and discomfort being applied again in the future. I have knowledge of the finished product from other horses however. In the finished product the horses yield gently from this pressure with no mental discomfort at all and are thus not continuously stressed by the fact that this discomfort may happen in the future. The cumulative stress on this "finished product" horse is much less than on Filly as they can accept the necessary requests to yield that humans make of them on a day to day basis without the emotional discomfort she endures . But the only way I can show Filly that a better place exists is to apply porcupine pressure to her until she accepts it as just another part of her life, nothing to be defensive or upset about, just something that happens from time to time. But during the application of the pressure she is going to react with discomfort for a while until it has happened for long enough that she starts to understand that it's ok to move without emotion. Of course should the pressure be removed at an inopportune moment then she is going to get back to her old comfortable place and the idea that acting against the pressure works is going to be reinforced. This is going to make the training task harder as the hill of discomfort is going to become bigger and bigger each time it is reinforced with a release.
Having studied engineering at university I find it pretty easy to think in terms of graphs and diagrams. Believe it or not a graph from differential calculus sprung to mind as a good, if not perfect, representation of this idea, and I add it at the bottom of this page for nerds like me.
I'd be interested to hear folks views on this idea, whether it is totally nuts or just needs modifying or expanding.