Brain Fizzle

OK, so after I said I was going to take pictures of the fantastically dirty Stella mare, I had an even better idea...if I was going to go through all the trouble of trying to get decent photos, why not make them ones of her CLEAN and SHINY and do a conformation assessment? I've never done a post on her conformation specifically, and most of the photos that have been up of her aren't conformation critique-able.

So I set out on said mission. Then life happened, boyfriend had a bad day at work (and said boyfriend was supposed to be my horse holder) and Stella just wasn't in the mood to stand still (it was feeding time, probably my bad...) I got a few shots but they are so horrendous, so horrible, so unflattering that I could never in a million years post them here. I don't care to make my lovely, feminine mare (almost-mare, she'll be 6 this April!) look like a jug headed, imbalanced baby yak. Seriously, they were awful. I can deal with the winter fuzz and some residual mud, but nothing about the photos were flattering in the least.

We'll go for round two when we get a decent sunny, dry day, although based on weather.com that won't be happening in my neck of the woods until after the weekend.

But, in other news, we have a great couple of sessions this week. Monday was fabulous. We're working on the concept of "come": it occurred to me after listening to one of Dr. Deb's audio horsemanship lessons that my mare doesn't understand the concept of "come". She understands "go away" because that's all I've ever asked, but it makes much more sense to teach "come" before to send a horse out and then expect them to want to join up with you.

Here's what I learned: round penning in the sense that everyone knows it today (where you immediately send the horse away, make them run, and then ask them to step towards you and follow you) is completely backwards. In order to set the horse up to really succeed and understand A) what is being asked of them, and B) that the person in the pen isn't a monster giving them an ultimatum (i.e., "either run 'till you drop or give in and follow me around"), but a teacher they should want to be with, the horse needs to be taught how to "come" before they are asked to "go away". Before you even teach a horse to come, they need to understand the principle of untracking the hindquarters. Some call this disengaging the hind end, but they aren't the same thing. Disengaging the hind end is a term/method invented by self-advertised horse trainers who saw what greats like Tom and Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Harry Whitney had done and tried to replicate it without understanding it. Disengaging the hind end is these trainer's way of getting the horse to move away the most dangerous part of his body, therefore giving the trainer the horse's head. It's a psychological tool that doesn't serve a higher purpose after it's taught. Untracking, on the other hand, is teaching the horse that, under pressure (which starts out as just a tap from a rope or whip and ends up as nothing more than a position taken up by the handler on the ground), he should pick up the appropriate hind leg and bring it up and under his body, crossing it under his navel. By doing this, he is not only psychologically yielding to the trainer, but he is also learning the first lesson of how to use his body to carry a rider. Bringing the hind leg under the body effectively sets the horse up to lift the abdomen and raise his back by tucking his pelvis, which he has to do to protract the hind leg.

This lesson of untracking then goes on to be used in the round pen. Instead of asking the horse to go away or chasing him and pressuring him to force him to make the choice to follow the handler, the horse is asked, while moving freely, to untrack the hind end. By asking for the untracking and then "inviting" the horse to come to you by bending slightly at the waist and opening the angle of the arms, you set the horse up to A) round in the turn towards you, and B) continue moving in your direction. You reward the horse for his efforts (no matter how small), and immediately he understands that you control where his hind end goes, and he is MORE than happy to follow because the message is so clear. There's no running, no flying dirt, no sweaty horse at the end. I'm happy to report that as of Monday Stella understands "come" and will oblige at both the walk and trot. I haven't allowed her off the line yet but the lunge is absolutely slack when I ask and she comes without hesitation. The next step is to do it in true free movement, so I am not attached to her in any way. We're getting there; what we've accomplished so far is so wonderful I can't wait.

Be on the lookout for picture overload, Stella's got some interesting conformation to discuss...

Brick by Brick, My Citizens

Sometimes the small things are the most important.

I have been working on increasing Stella'as confidence by NOT pushing her too hard to commit to me all out. A lot of trainers will tell you that round pen sessions where the horse is at liberty are only useful if they end with the horse joining up and following you around. I have never had one of those sessions with Stella. Ever. She has never so fully committed to being with me that I could go anywhere in the working space and know she'd follow.

However, I don't declare that lack of success.

The "old" version of round penning I used to do was basically running Stella around, changing directions a few times, then "asking" for that join-up when I saw she was getting ready to ask. It always lead to her stopping, sort of facing me, but then standing there like a deer in the headlights. I always responded by sending her back out. This became a vicious circle with no real end. I'd leave the round pen feeling defeated.

This is no longer. It's not perfect, but I'm noticing a pretty significant shift in Stella's demeanor.

Today I worked her on the line first. We practiced yielding the forequarters, which we discovered is MUCH harder moving left compared to right. Then I sent her out on her own with no line to see what would happen. My goal has been to gain a little ground each time: I don't need her to follow me like a puppy (yet). In fact, it's better if I ditch that idea all together for now, because then I see progress no matter what.

It was okay. She still keeps more eye to the outside than on me, but I see her inside ear stay consistently with me, and when it leaves, I remind her by sending her a little more forward. We do some transitions: walk to trot, trot to walk, walk to trot again, trot to canter, canter to walk, walk to halt, halt to trot. We change directions every time she gets squirrely: this sends her a couple different message simultaneously: "let me direct your feet," and "hey, focus here".

Eventually, when she's fairly focused, I ask for her to untrack her hind feet and turn to me. She doesn't the first time. She stops with her body perpendicular to mine, and she looks and licks and chews, but doesn't face. I give her a minute to decide if she's "ready" to approach me, and during that minute she decides to see what's good for eating on the ground. Wrong answer, so I send her back out. This time it only takes a couple laps before I can see her lower her head and "ask" me if she can stop. I ask for the untracking. She comes a little bit closer this time, turning her body at a 45 degree angle to mine and meeting me with her eyes. She didn't truly untrack the hind, but it's better, so I take it.

Now comes the waiting. I think the biggest mistake I made when I first started round penning her two years ago was not knowing when to wait. She needed time to process, and I was cutting that processing short before. It taught her absolutely nothing.

I stood with my hands in my pockets for probably a full two minutes, waiting. She didn't make any attempts to eat or "leave", which told me she was still thinking. Every once in a while she'd turn her head to gaze towards the barn, so I'd whistle at her or lift my hand to catch her attention again. Finally, without hesitation, she turned square to me and ambled over, coming to rest a few inches from me. I couldn't help but smile. We stood together for a solid five minutes while I patted her. She didn't follow me to the gate, but that's just fine for now. We'll just keep building on this until she gets confident enough to do so.

Little Red Riding Mare

...can trot calmly on the end of a slack line!

Rome wasn't built in a day, and our relationship wasn't dissolved to bits in one day either. It's going to take some time to get this perfect, but as long as the end of each session is better than the beginning, I'm a happy lady.

This is about the midpoint of a 20 minute session. The head shaking is one of her tells, but that stopped pretty quickly. The jumping here was mild: a few minutes before she was doing airs above the ground. She's settling faster and faster, though, as we went from that to this:

What a good Mama! I asked for a whoa, she stopped, chewed thoughtfully and walked right up to me.

Thank you Alex, camera-man extraordinaire, for his wonderful videography.

Progress

It's a pretty awesome thing when you find a trainer who truly gets you and what you are trying to accomplish with your horse AND has the knowledge to help get you there. I have found such a trainer, and no, you can't have her.

We are starting on the ground with Stella. Our first session about two weeks ago was roundpenning, but no type of roundpenning I'd ever done. Instead of pressuring the horse to move out and away, I invited Stella to be with me immediately. K and I discussed her reaction to pressure and decided it was not disobedience or defiance as so many would probably assume (and as I assumed), it was frustration. "Big" pressure isn't needed with this horse: it stresses her and pushes her further away from being interested in joining me. It would explain why I never got her to join up in the traditional round penning methods: she'd just run around bucking like a bronc until she was sweaty and exhausted and I was at the end of my patience.

There is still the traditional idea of pressure and release to ask the horse to move its feet, but the pressure came from my body language, not from a rope or whip. I asked with my body first for her to walk out, trot up, etc., and then asked a little "bigger" if she didn't respond. The idea was to ask as little as possible, and for eventually her to raise or lower the energy in her body (which would then manifest as picking up the trot, canter, etc, or coming down to the trot, walk) by just the position of my body and my breathing.

The first couple days were successful, and ended with a very calm and fairly focused mare. The next few, however, were not so much. K and I decided in our session yesterday, in order to help Stella succeed, that we would keep her on a lunge. It enabled me to have direct control over where her head was, and it would "help" her in understanding where her focus needed to be as well as minimize the amount of bronc bucking she did.

What a great session! K is so encouraging. I'm learning the importance of rewarding what I perceive to be even the smallest try from Stella. She needs that more than anything, because often she does not get the big picture all at once. I have to reward those few steps of quiet, relaxed trot, the nice down transition to the walk, that attempt to pick up the canter when asked (even though we could both tell she was saying "Mom, I'm so unbalanced!!") every single time. This is what builds her confidence. This seems like such an easy, obvious concept, and it is, the problem is noticing the small tries and interpreting the signals she gives me. Is that flinging of the head and fast trot her honest try at raising the energy in her body and picking up the canter? Is it defiance? Is it nothing? The answer is that everything the horse does is a communication to us. If the trot gets bigger and faster it is supposed to tell us something, or is a response to something we did. The problem often occurs when we try and interpret the message, and we transcribe into English what the horse said in Equine. Doesn't always work. It's like trying to interpret in Greek what a Russian said to you. Things get lost in translation.

Stella is doing better each session, and all the facets of her personality are coming out. Is she high energy? Absolutely. Is she disobedient? Absolutely not. What I'm seeing is that she is so utterly willing to do what I ask, but what I ask isn't always clear, and in her attempt to guess what I want often explodes a little. She doesn't know how to manage her energy in a productive yet expressive way, and that's what I need to teach her.

Also, as a total aside, Stella got a new toy :) Pictures and video to come.