Blackberry and Willow are recent acquisitions of a former client of mine and have only been off the Forest for the last three weeks. The colt foal, Willow, was quite friendly at his head end and enjoyed a good scratch but was wary of anyone wandering along his body any further. His mother, Blackberry, would take food from the hand, probably being a veteran highwaywoman on the Forest as many donkeys are, but was scared of people and wary of their intentions. Once in the stable, she headed for the back wall to begin with and showed a lot of white around her eye.
The sounds of me apparently unwrapping something as I extended the feather duster with a long pole and some sticky tape brought both of them over to investigate. I'm not a picnic nicker but I'm a picnic nicker's mate.
As usual I carry out an early kick test to ascertain the likely reaction to being touched with the feather duster. Donkeys, like mules (as I know to my cost), have a multi-directional and unerringly accurate kick.
Blackberry showed no real propensity to kick and so it was over to students Ben, Sari, and Amanda to do the rest of the work. Ben and Sari have two mules - Marty, and Xato who came over from my friend Xanthe in Mallorca. Amanda is a veteran of the Magic course last summer. Nevertheless there is always something to learn and I broke the course down into stages both for them and for the donkeys who needed regular breaks to eat, drink and relax.
We were soon working from base camp one at the bottom to base camp two at the withers...
...and base camp three just behind the ears.
It was time then to get closer with our own bodies and to touch with the hand. The quality of touch is critical throughout...
After lunch we introduced clickered treats. The donkeys showed their real intelligence, rapidly making the association between a click and a treat and understanding the three click pattern. We started to touch them with the rolled up scarf and began to drape it over their necks.
The first scarf was too long and Blackberry was very worried about it...
...so we found a shorter one which was much more acceptable.
The scarf was used to teach her to lead using only the softest pressure and imagining the movement that we wanted...
...she seemed happy to follow even without the scarf.
Willow was fine with the scarf too.
Using a medium length scarf (thank goodness I have such a good collection) we created a figure of eight around Blackberry's face to imitate the head-collar.
Starting again today one of my students dropped out through illness which left me and Emma doing one to one tuition all day.
This entailed revising all of the work that I had done the day before both for Emma's benefit and the donkeys who needed some consolidation.
Blackberry, who is underweight because of feeding her foal, and sore from life in general, was exceedingly grateful for Emma's massaging skills. She leant into Emma's hand and manoeuvred herself around when she wanted to be rubbed somewhere else.
Back to the scarf work and there was no hesitation today...
...the figure of eight was easy...
and leading even easier.
Time to move on to the first head-collar. We suspect that Blackberry has had a head-forced on to her before so by taking our time and putting it on in stages we were able to avoid any fear.
This head collar was too big so we found another one.
Having led from the neck, leading from the head-collar was a doddle.
While Blackberry had another rest, we worked with Willow...
...a figure-of-eight head collar...
...followed by the real thing.
We ended the day leading Blackberry outside for the first time.
