Hi,
In the last email we explored how to teach self-haltering. Now we want to take our horse out of the stall. Leading is a skill than needs to be taught. This needs to be emphasised, so let me repeat it:
Leading is a skill than needs to be taught.
Many people take it for granted that a horse knows how to walk next to you and stop with you when asked. When you have a young horse, you’ll soon find out that your horse does not automatically know this. She will run past you, because you’re too slow, and then run into the end of the lead rope without knowing how to respond to that. She may be swinging her hind end around or she may push through or rear.
We’ll be going through the various exercises that I did with Malou in later emails. In this email I want to share, what I chose to do with Blondie who reacted strongly to the slightest pressure. I couldn’t simply attach a lead rope to the halter and go.
My strategy with Blondie was to:
- teach fetch in liberty
- standing on a mat in liberty
- fade in the lead rope with minimal active role
- Feldenkrais-inspired flexions
Teaching Blondie to fetch an object was a great start. I could stay safe behind a barrier and Blondie engaged in an activity that was not poisoned by previous experiences. (Let me know if you want more details about how I taught the fetch behaviour)
Side note: People often ask me where I got the fetch toy because it’s really quite good. I purchased it from a German online shop for children’s educational toys. Here is the link, maybe you can find something similar in your area https://www.wl-versand.de/shop/sport-spiel/freizeit-fun/flugstern-fnfarmig
Alexandra Kurland’s preferred way to teach Standing on a mat is through the “Runway lesson”. This is a fabulous strategy to teach joy-stick like control over each individual leg through the lead rope and ends in a “magnetised” mat, i.e. horses are eager to go to and stand on a mat. (I may get back to this lesson later in the series.)
Here is a clip to show you why in Blondie’s case I could not start working with the lead rope directly.
I still wanted to use the mat as a way to get directional movement without using pressure from behind, so I worked at liberty and clicked and reinforced for landing a foot on the mat.
This approach also gave me an opportunity to walk towards her delivering the treat because she initially viewed that approach as a threat. This improved as she began to understand that all I did was delivering treats.
When Blondie understood these lessons, fetch and going from mat to mat, I faded in the lead rope. With fading in I mean that I attached a lead rope to the halter, but I maintained the same behaviour that we developed at liberty. The lead was only a minor environmental change. Nevertheless, you will see that adding the lead rope creates some tension at first.
The set up is four mats laid out in a circle. Later, I remove one mat to create more distance.
You might have noticed that I gently stroke her neck when I give a treat. That’s something I did with Asfaloth, and it worked wonders. At first, he wasn’t a fan of me touching his head or neck at all. But I started giving him a nonchalant soft touch every time I fed him treats, and before long, he was totally fine with it! (In addition, I used body targeting for those times when I needed a more intentional touch, e.g., during grooming. He’d lean his neck or head toward the brush before I brush down his neck.)
In the next video you see how I use the fetch toy in combination with leading. When the horse in the neighbouring paddock starts running, she follows. Throwing her the fetch toy (instead of stopping her with the rope) takes her immediately back to the lesson. You’ll also see how I introduce the flexions, we’ll get to that later.
This strategy worked for Blondie, thank goodness. But it’s not the end of it, of course. I want to be able to communicate through the lead rope.
The next step was to teach Blondie how to respond to pressure cues from the lead rope. I want her to be able to give to pressure by softening and responding to the cues. If I ask for a forward through the lead rope, she responds by stepping forward and similarly for halt or backing.
All these transitions, from halt to walk, from walk to halt to backing etc, should always start with a softening in the poll and jawline.
This is so so very important! I can’t stress this enough.
If the transition does not go through a softening first, there will be tension. The softening does not come naturally. Quite the opposite, your horse will naturally react with tension. The key is to teach your horse to soften and you also need to learn to release.
If you watch great riders, and my example will always be Anja Beran, you’ll notice that they ride on a release. They request something, their horse softens and responds, and the rider immediately releases and stops the request.
Anja likes to tell this story: “If you ask your dog to sit on the verbal cue “Sit”, and your dog sits, you don’t continue saying “sit, sit, sit, sit, sit” while your dog sits. Yet riders often forget to stop requesting when the horse already did what they asked. That doesn’t make sense. You need to leave your horse in peace when you got the response.”
In the next email, I’ll go into more detail about this key lesson of teaching the give. To me this is THE most important lesson. It was crucial for Blondie. And because it is so valuable, I taught it to my other horses as well even though they already had excellent lead rope communication skills.
Have fun with your horses,
Michaela