25th May, 2009 Mutual Appreciation

I shall start with Saturday when I was phoned by a client telling me that she had been trying to load her horse for two hours and hadn't got anywhere. Fortunately she had managed to keep her cool and to keep anyone away that was likely to get out a big whip. Taking control like that is not easy. We arranged that I would go over to load him the following Monday, but, I said, you could just try clicking and treating him on since he is familiar with that technique (we'd used it to desensitise him to syringes). Not much later: "Thanks so much for your advice. You're a star!! I'm so glad he remembered the clicker training. It was great that we succeeded and only wish we had less people around. He is travelling happily and munching haybag I can see he is standing well in centre of trailer looking out. He isn't hot and is eating. I think we did fairly well at keeping him calm. Nearly at farm now, been a good journey with not too much traffic."

This morning I went over to Exton to load a horse that is going on a course for a month. This is the one I inadvertently didn't turn up for last Wednesday. The owner had gone ahead and practised anyway and done a really good job. This morning it was great to work with a calm owner and a relatively calm horse. The horsebox is owned by Steve Mills (Horse in Motion) who is also calm and patient and without an ego. Having put us under no pressure, he gave the horse a lovely journey. His horsebox, which allows the horse to travel rear facing or loose, is light and airy and yet robust. Hampshire Animal Rescue Team are really worried about rear facing lorries where the partition into the "living" areas are so low and so weak that horses end up having nasty accidents and getting stuck over them. In this case the horse cannot get through to the living area at all. Steve's website is http://www.horses-in-motion.com/

Later on I rode Petra Perkins and worked with Jack. He is now accepting a very short lead rein threaded through his headcollar and very mild pressure and release to ask him to come forward. He's not totally convinced but he is getting there. I have had another read all the way through Ben Hart's book "Clicker Training for Horses" to make sure that I am going about everything the right way. Apart from needing to write down my "shaping plan", I think we're doing really well. It's tempting to think of a shaping plan as a sort of step ladder but it is more like a cobweb - as the horse learns to learn his training can expand in all directions at quite a rate. My job is to guage what he is ready for and those stages where I need to break down the steps into miniscule stages.

Both Petra and Jack need to lose weight so they are confined to the two small paddocks. Where did all this grass come from?