Finding Your Nose, Unwinding, and Two Despooking Tips

I've been working with Lily on various things, mostly just getting her back into regular work. I was stuck with her on side passing.

Lily is highly trained. I know little about her background, but I do know she is trained to have about 7 speeds, neck rein, travel collected, back up straight, and do long division with her tail and a piece of chalk.

So when I couldn't get her to side pass I was shocked. I can get Smokey to side pass. I can get Woody to side pass. I know the signal. So why would Lily go in the opposite direction?

Loren, the horse dentist, was in town, doing follow ups on horses. She was happy to see how well Lily is doing, healthy and in good spirits. I asked her to watch her move to see if she felt she needed any other chiro work.

After a bit of riding I showed her the problem I was having side passing. Loren walked me through some dressage tips. (See anything here familiar, folks?)

To move right:

• Don't lean. At all.
• Drop your right heel and open that leg all the way to your hip
• Drop the right rein, keep the left rein lifted slightly
• Apply pressure - or just tighten - the left upper and inner thigh

Boom. Lily crossed over like a tap dancer.

My jaw dropped. I had, in what seems now like how a clown would execute a side pass, been doing this:

To move to the right:

• Leaning on my left side, quite exaggeratedly
• Applying pressure with my left calf
• Incidentally applying pressure with my right upper leg to keep from falling over, therefore "closing" her right shoulder.
• Trying to neck rein her over.

After I marveled at my new side passing horse Loren said it. "She's a horse that'll teach you a lot."

It was like suddenly discovering my nose on my face. Maybe I have at least one instructor who I'm already paying. In hay.

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Smokey


As for Smokey, here's where I am:

I can't forget what cowboy Dave told me. "I can train a horse, but I can't keep you from unwinding a horse." There's a line that'll stick in your head. This IS what I worry about. I don't know how to get from here to a place where I'm not unwinding. Am I unwinding Smokey? I see other riders and I know my skills are better than they were a year, a month, a week ago. It all builds. With Lily could I do more building? Perhaps this is more about not getting that one element - trail work - in and less about my saddle abilities.

I thought about how Smokey "deserves" a better rider. Then I heard about a horse in a terrible situation, even though they'd been with a great rider. So I wondered about the value of that guilt trip.

I thought that this may be a lesson about an element of me that can "cut and run" too readily and it's a lesson I'm going to keep repeating until I learn it.

I thought that if all this horse and I do is tool around the arena and local trails would that be enough.

Still thinking...


From Ray Hunt (found on this cool blog)

Clinic spectator: "Ray, how did you get such good judgment with a horse?"

RH: "Experience."

Spectator: "How did you get so much experience?"

RH: "Poor judgment."

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Your Despooking Tips

There are two horses in the barn right now with HUGE plastic bag phobias. They are learning to live with plastic bags in their paddock, tied to fences. But here are the two things I do that the trainer has started to do as well.

1. Plastic bags in the round pen. While having bags in a pen or paddock and just having the horse deal with them is one thing, it's not the same as them having to listen to you while the plastic bag is doing its morphing thing in the wind while you're directing the horse.

I like having a plastic bag tied on the round pen in different places at different heights to teach a horse that they can listen even if there's a scary thing close by. It's made a nice difference with Smokey in the last two weeks.





2. Treats or grain from a plastic bag. You know how dogs will fly into the kitchen if you open their treat jar? Well, even if you don't train with treats, you can use a plastic bag to carry grain and empty it into the bin. Pretty soon the positive association will be there. Remember Pavlov's dog? You can make this work for you, even if you aren't trying for a Nobel Prize.

The Office - Pavlov's dog from Rauno Villberg on Vimeo.

Again, these are ideas. Your mileage may vary.

Also there were some round penning questions in the comments last go round. I'll post some answers (at least in so far as what I do) on my next post.