I’ve been playing with some "new to the horse world" ideas. I know, I know...so what else is new!
It has been a treat this summer to have a young lady interning with me who had a fabulous coach in the dog training world. So of course we started to play with how to do horse things in more of a dog way... why wouldn’t we? After all we are out-of-the-box thinkers to start with, so why not go way out?
You always see the horse agility videos where the horse is fairly close to the handler. In the dog agility world there seems to be two styles: the close and the far. We wanted to play with seeing if we could build distance in the work that most horse people do up close.
Eggo already knew his mat work and I could send him to a mat from a fair distance, so we started playing with going around an object to get to his mat. Of course, we still did all the thin slicing we always do when clicker training to set him up for success.
I didn’t want the look to be one where the person just stands and gives orders about what to do, I wanted it to be more of a dance, in keeping with my own aspirations and work. Again Nita and her past training came in handy. Her cues and movements, which she knew from her dog work, meshed beautifully with the body language I have already established through my Equispeak program.
While it is still in the early stages, our experiment is going very well and is great fun.
The pictures in this blog were taken by Nita during one of our sessions.
The following video shows how you can start sending your equine friend around an object, so you too can join in on the fun.
Also, keep checking back for my online courses starting hopefully by late fall! Information will be posted to the "Courses" page on the Equispeak website and will be announced in the respective Newsletter.
Till next time ‘keep it positive’