June | 2009 | Horsegirl on a Journey

Monthly Archives: June 2009

Practicing draw felt like reinforcing drive…with Rock at the wheel

Posted on June 12, 2009 by horsegirlonajourney

I did my homework this morning: S-turns (S-pattern) with Rock to encourage draw. But instead of a friendly draw, I think he was putting his ears back and driving me!

I know about “wipe that look off your face” and “don’t let him come to you with his ears back, send him out/back him up again until he’s polite and respectful,” but I’m not sure how to incorporate those into S-turns.

When Erin first taught him the S-turn, he interpreted it as a send, and got RBE when the pressure didn’t release and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He figured out the puzzle and became, in the words of Ron Weasley, “bloody brilliant!” at the S-turns. I don’t want to put sends back into it and confuse us further.

But then on one turn he almost snaked his head. It wasn’t a strong movement so much as the thought of head movement, with a little bit around the ears and eyes and mouth. I felt it clearly and I knew I couldn’t just keep going without addressing it.

If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something else; you have a 50/50 chance of being right. ~ Parellis

I drove him back in a yo-yo and went with him, trying to keep projecting my energy, and I used the stick to keep his hindquarters exactly straight. I tried to be particular and passively persistent until he had a good brisk back and the steering worked and we did almost a full circuit around the arena in various zig-zags. When he had two ears and two eyes on me and wasn’t bracing against going back, I gave him a rest. I am still learning to sense a more subtle brace than planting all four feet and sticking out his tongue, but he licked and chewed immediately at getting the breather, so I think I did okay.

As I write, I realize I am focusing on the positive and discovering that I did try and learn things. At the time, I felt ineffective, clumsy, unsure, and useless. Like I was just making things worse instead of better and stirring up resentment and “wrecking” the relationship. I kept remembering Erin saying on Tuesday that there was no relationship/connection happening at all when I first put Rocky on-line and sent him to a circle; I had thought she meant just at that moment, but today was wondering if she meant all the time. That he’s always subtly driving and I just didn’t know. I don’t think that’s the case, but during the homework, I would have believed it.

After the massive yo-yo, I tried more S-turns and still got ears back. However, I’m also not very far in front of him because I can’t run that fast (forward or backward, and I tried both), so part of that could be that he’s so close he can’t give me two eyes and see me. I don’t want to keep acting as if it’s dominance when it’s not, especially when it is dominance often enough that I get to practice that strategy too. Yet if I judge by the rest of his facial expression and not just ears, it’s dominance. (Sigh.)

He never allowed tension to develop in the rope — he kept it slack the entire time, even when I tripped over a cone and landed on my butt right in front of him. Nice to know that he won’t run me over.

At the end, I did a couple of driving game fore- and hindquarter yields, 360 degrees, which he did but not particularly enthusiastically. This was to see if the driving game worked and to let us end with something we’re confident with, keeping the belly of the rope on the ground.

I ended with a traveling yo-yo about 12 feet back to the cone and then a wait. And wait. And waaaaaaait. For him to drop his head, give me two eyes, swivel both ears forward, and lean toward me like “can I please come in now?” When that happened I invited him forward and he came with a fast walk and happy face, so we ended there and I put him back into this pasture where he could finish his beet pulp and probiotics and supplements in peace.

I’m not in good enough shape to jog backwards steadily for 20 minutes in arena sand, much less do wind sprints, so I ended up going in little bursts with only two or three turns each. Even when I was running 16-20 miles a week, Back In The Day, I was never fast. I tried to churn my legs fast enough for Rocky to get up some speed at the trot but if I did that, I couldn’t sustain very long AND turn AND manage my rope and stick. This is a problem that will resolve over time simply by continuing to practice running backwards towing a horse.

Meanwhile I have been feeling sad and deflated becauase I am not spending as much time with him as I want to, and here it is June and I have barely ridden him. It feels like years ago that I started the Freestyle patterns and he learned to follow the rail; it has been months. It’s partly the barefoot transition and not doing it the way I now, in retrospect, wish I had done (but that’s about moot as the guy is coming Monday to measure and roll-trim). But it’s partly just me. Not being provocative enough. Not giving him enough physical exercise in our play sessions. Not introducing new stuff or higher gaits. Not being able to apply the appropriate strategy at the right time. Diving too deep into the classroom instead of going out and making mistakes in the lab….

Categories: Learning Experience, On-Line | Tags: deflated, Horsenality, provocative | Leave a comment

Rocky goes quadpolar for our lesson

Posted on June 11, 2009 by horsegirlonajourney

I understand that exuberance can be a little scary at first. — Erin Murphy, Equine Partners, Inc.

Rocky started out at liberty by racing around the arena, bucking and snaking his neck, totally disrespectful of anything mere humans might want. Obviously he’s no longer too footsore to play, and it was great to see him buck and leap and twist and kick out and really arch his neck and show off his huge trot.

Then when he rolled he got all the way up on his spine, although he didn’t roll all the way over. Given how much better his health has been since we moved here, I’m hopefully he’ll be able to make it all the way over someday. He didn’t used to be able to get up onto his spine.

I tried some “extreme” catching game to get him to tune in, and when he came to me, I waited for him to put his nose into his halter rather than just put it on him. See? I can be taught. Of course, I had to tell him aloud “please consent to your bondage,” because that’s the kind of partner I am, but I did wait politely for him to do so. Then Erin and I watched as my LBE transmogrified into an LBI. Later, when she worked with him to teach him S-turns to improve his draw, he went RBE until Erin’s consistency brought him back to himself and he started solving the puzzle. And briefly, he had a moment of planting all four feet, head way up, eyes wide, but now I can’t remember why.

The S-turns were scary to watch at first. What you do is put your carrot stick in the hand you’re most facile with (my right) and hold the line in the other hand. You set the horse up to face you and then you run backward, keeping tension on the line. Any time the horse is not facing you straight on, you change direction so you are going in the opposite direction as the horse — heading back past their hind end. At the same time, you block their turn with the stick and string. It’s an energetic swing that whistles through the air and slaps the ground in zone 2/3/4, and it’s possible that a horse will run into it, although Rocky did his best to reverse direction fast. Erin described it as flicking the string out like it’s your hand and you are scooping the horse into you by reaching out to zone 3/4 and drawing toward you. If they go to the right, you flick on the right. “Don’t go that way!” If they go to the left, you flick on the left. “Don’t go that way!” All the while keeping tension on the line … until the horse puts slack in it.

The lesson is twofold. The horse has to figure out that if he trots right at you, nicely straight and centered and with slack in the line, you stop changing direction and flicking the stick and indeed you slow to a stop and give him time to rest. If he’s LBI, you give him a cookie. The horse also has to figure out that it is his responsibility — not yours — to keep slack in the line. When he keeps the slack, the pressure goes away. No stick, no string, no sudden changes of direction.

The 180-degree turns are the same thing you do when teaching a Labrador not to pull on the leash– when the dog hits the end of the leash you turn and walk briskly the other way, until he learns to keep slack — but doing that while also getting a good string swing while also running backwards while also seeing the full 1100 pounds of horse wheeling side to side to try to figure out this new game … it’s a workout for sure.

Erin did it with Rocky for a while to teach him the game, after I struggled with figuring it out. He kept thinking the swing of stick and string meant circle, so he’d try to scoot off but would get blocked. That’s when he started rearing up a little and that was scary to watch. But then I realized he wasn’t rearing or striking, he was just changing direction so fast that he was sitting back on his hindquarters to pivot his front end around. My nervousness changed to pride: what an athletic boy I have! I also saw how careful he was not to run over or step on Erin when he figured out to trot in to her. She played with him long enough that he had several successes in a row and then handed him back to me — having given both Rocky and I time to work through the “whu? huh?” stage and get some confidence.

I had a hard time coordinating my turns with bringing my stick under the line and flicking it out to the left, and my backward run was more of a jog, but since Rocky had figured out the puzzle by then, we were able to get some practice in.

Our homework is to play all seven games online with the belly of the rope on the ground to prepare us for liberty, and to practice these S-turns for at least two more sessions to improve our draw and earn his respect.