February 17, 2016

Cadence for young horses

With some curious and friendly young connemaras at Elliott Blackmon’s place

U.S. Eventing Team coach David O’Connor was teaching in Ocala early this week on the topic of training 4 year old horses. He shared a story about a cadence he drills into his working students while they are working with the four year olds:
“What are we riding?”

“Four year olds!”

“What are we doing with them?”

“Waiting for them to be 6 year olds!”

Sure ride them. Sure walk, trot and canter. But ever playful. Show them things and let them learn that you are generous and friendly and that work is fun.

September 4, 2012

Qi Gong

Qi Gong folks in New York City

So I do yoga about 20 minutes a day 5 days a week because it makes me feel good. I sleep better, my shoulders feel better yada yada. Really it isn’t as big a thing as people make it. I am always surprised when people say they are afraid to try yoga. What? Or that I must be really flexible because I do yoga. Um, I’m really not flexible, which is why I do yoga. They say a woman must really love a thing if she practices it with no hope of mastery. That is me and yoga.

Because I do yoga, I am on a few yoga email lists and I had a very interesting thing come across mid-week last week: Qi Gong classes. My acupuncturist (don’t get crazy about that either. No big deal) said it would be really good for me. I have no idea what that means, but I wasn’t there to argue the finer points of that comment.

‘Qi’ means ‘life force’ and ‘Gong’ translates to ‘work’ or ‘practice’. It is a 5 week class and I signed up for it. Starts tomorrow night.

So, of course I googled Qi Gong and found out lots of interesting stuff, but one thing really was super cool. It said that Qi Gong is about ‘going with’ rather than ‘doing to’. Interesting that they didn’t say ‘going with’ or ‘doing to’ your body. They just said, ‘going with’ rather than ‘doing to’. My guess is that it is a whole lifestyle thing.

Hmmmm…

So as I always do, I thought about that and horses. Some of my best rides have been when I have had the feeling of ‘going with’ the horse rather than ‘doing to’ the horse. Of course there are times when we have to ‘do to’, especially with green or unsure horses, who need to be shown the way. But when I get on and provide direction to a horse and then ‘go with’ it rather than ‘making sure it gets done’ in a micromanagement manner, the result is always not only better, but more enjoyable for both of us.

I am reminded of my yoga teacher who says that ‘how you do something is more important than what you do’. There’s a mind bender.

February 23, 2012

Inside leg

Charlie and I on a recent hunt. Yes, we're both very tall. He's 17 hands, I'm 6'3". My friend and her horse are normal-sized.

I haven’t had an unsound horse for a long time – until recently. Now I have two on the injured reserve stall rest list. Charlie and Sammy. The prognosis is good for both of them. We’ve now done the first 10 days of strict stall rest, the week of stall rest plus 10 minutes of hand-walking per day and now we are on to stall rest with 15 minutes of walking, this time mounted. I’ll admit, I had some trepidation about getting on Charlie, a thoroughbred who, a few years ago, had a habit of bucking and now had a few weeks of stall rest under his girth.

But he was an angel. Never set a foot wrong. Of course, the horse that I thought would be easy peasy, Sammy, started with a humped-up back and had a few moments of corkscrew ears and some mumbling about how he could buck and he was a wild, wild horse. Yeah. Wild Sammy. You can stop that now.

He didn’t buck, by the way. Contrary to his wonted bad boy image, he’s a good man. Sammy at an eventer derby

Anyway, now I am walking the two goofballs around the indoor for 15 minutes per horse every day. It just so happens that these days I am also reading Charles De Kunffy’s book Training Strategies for Dressage Riders (on my rockin’ Kindle Fire, that thing is just stupid cool). So I’ve got 30 minutes of walk to do and I start fooling around with CDK’s comments on use of the rider’s legs. He says the inside leg is the driving leg and the outside leg is the guarding leg when asking for a bend.

So I walk and walk around the arena on a loose rein thinking about this. Of course, the first time I put my leg on to play with it, each fresh horsie decides this is an invitation to trot. Hmmm. No, not the right button. So then I make sure not to drop my leg back even an inch, but use it more straight toward the girth, leading with my ankle bone. That got me leg yield. Hmmmm, right idea, but not quite. So I walked around a little more and thought about it. Maybe if I… What about if…

Sammy, in case you don't follow video links.

So I got to thinking about using my whole inside leg, from the hip down. This would have to be without pinching with the knee. With my long-legged conformation it is not possible to use my lower calf/ankle, while keeping my knee against the saddle, so I keep my calf on and allow the knee to come off the saddle if necessary, but usually it is just a softening of its contact with the saddle.

After performing this thought experiment, I gave it a try. What I noticed was that when I used my whole leg, my seat bones were more precisely placed and probably clearer to the horse. I got really cool results. The first night, after a few wobbles and comedies of errors, I could do a large figure 8 in my arena using only seat aids. It was terrific! The second night, not really believing this was possible – maybe the horses were so smart they were memorizing the pattern – I threw in a random circle. Sure enough it worked. Then I started playing with different-sized circles. Some learning curve there, and after what has now been an hour of walking around, I am getting a handle on that.

But back to CDK’s idea of the inside leg being the driving aid. Turns out that when I use that leg in a more energetic manner (still quiet and rhythmic, but a bit more emphatically) I get a tighter turn that remains in balance. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. Look at the reach from the inside hind on this horse learning canter pirouette.

February 26, 2011

Yeah, what she said

The stalling point

So the arena has been stalled at an unusable point for a month due to the construction crews moving to a cow/calf operation project that had to get done before calving. Um, arg. This has effectively eliminated any chance of riding to days when the footing happens to be perfect in the pasture or on the gravel roads, which doesn’t happen with frequency in February in Iowa. Of course, before the indoor arena project I had an outdoor arena which I could use with some regularity in winter, but the location of the indoor is where the outdoor was, so I am now effectively hamstrung for riding, until construction begins again in mid-March.

So I’ve been reading. The latest book is “Dressage Masters, Techniques and Philosophies of Four Legendary Trainers”. It is an interview book, simply written and it is really wonderful. I bought it because it has my dressage hero, Klaus Balkenhol, as one of the four, but I’ve found also that the other trainers – Ernst Hoyos, Dr. Uwe Schulten-Baumer and George Theodorescu are equally admirable. It makes me feel good every time I realize that all good trainers sound fundamentally the same. They all have first a love of the horse. That seems obvious, until you meet a trainer who doesn’t love horses. I bought this book for my Kindle for like $15 or something.

Ellen Schulten-Baumer

The quote from it that I want to share with you was spoken by Ellen Schulten-Baumer, whose father, Dr. Uwe Schulten-Baumer, trained her. She currently has 5 Grand Prix dressage horses in her barn that she and her dad trained from 3 year olds. I’m just going to share this quote and get out, because I can add nothing to it. Rock on, people.

“I learned something very important from my father. When a horse doesn’t perform a lesson as expected, I first have to ask myself whether the horse is capable. If the answer is yes, then I must think about how I apply my aids. I must use them better so the horse understands exactly what I want. This may involve riding more preparatory exercises. If I can’t get it right fairly quickly, then I go to something else. It is unfair and unproductive to drill a horse; this causes too much physical and mental stress. I tell my students this also. If they just can’t get it right, they can think about their aids overnight and try again tomorrow. Then the horse and rider get a fresh star together.”

October 19, 2010

Training, simplified

Piaffe

When Jay and I were watching dressage at the WEG, we were using the headsets in which a commentator was, well, commentating. I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes a particular turn of phrase will have such an undeniable “truthiness” (oh how I love that word) to it that I find myself putting everything else immediately aside to think about it. The commentator was acknowledging a particularly beautiful piaffe in an afternoon of piaffing excellence. She said,

“When you train a horse you have to do two things: You have to teach him the mechanics of what you wish him to do, and then you have to teach him that he is good at it.”

Upon hearing that, I didn’t really see the rest of the test, though I was looking. It was like a lightning bolt hit me, and I sat there, stunned. That one sentence encapsulated all that I do with horses. A trainer has to know the correct mechanics of any skill she is trying to teach (what are the footfalls of canter? How does half pass start? How does a horse arrange his legs in all stages of a jump?). The trainer also has to know when the work is correct, or even close while they are learning, and communicate that to the horse. Congratulate him, even. When the horse gets his paycheck in praise for doing a thing as we wish, pretty soon he likes to do that thing. When he likes to do that thing, he performs it with increasing confidence, which, if nurtured, becomes brilliance.

So the horse piaffing with joyful brilliance in front of us that day had mastered the mechanics of the movement, and he clearly knew he was good at it. It was a joy to see. Now that’s training.

August 25, 2010

The cooler side of horses

Bot fly eggs on a horse's front leg

Last week, temperatures were in the mid-90s most of the week, with high humidity, mosquitoes, biting flies and afternoon thunderstorms. The downside was that it wasn’t fun to be a horse or, for that matter, to ride a horse. The upside was that I didn’t have to water my potted plants. So I had that going for me.

This week, on the flip side of the cold front that broke the back of summer, a cool breeze blows from the north, the AC is off in the house and the horses’ tails flick lazily in the breeze or lie still as they nap in the benevolent late summer sun.

Autumn crickets chirp and the bot fly eggs are back. I’ve been blessed to have horses all my life and I think I may have actually tried every technique to remove the eggs from the horses’ legs so that I can, if even slightly, interrupt the parasite cycle in the little dearies in my charge.

My preferred method of removing bot fly eggs these days is picking them off one by one, between my thumb and index fingernails. I resisted this method in the first place because it seemed like it would take forever. It does take a while, but it can be a lovely while.

Eddie likes to be petted.

My horse Eddie likes to be touched and stroked. When petted in long appreciative strokes, he will take a deep breath and put his ears forward and his eyes become soft. When I spend 10 minutes fussing over his legs taking the bot fly eggs off, he practically purrs. My cross ties are slack enough that he was able to bend his neck around and put his muzzle on the top of my head, where he breathed several long slow breaths in my hair.

After I was done with my task, we tacked up and went out for a hack. As we warmed up in walk, he swung along, confidently checking out the scenery, and all was right in his world. Mine too.

August 11, 2010

Playful, playful

Fabulouso and Camie at the Radnetter clinic

This weekend’s horse adventure was to ride in the Herwig Radnetter clinic at Wildwood Hills put on by the Iowa Lipizzan Association. I’d heard that Mr. (Herr?) Radnetter, of the Spanish Riding School (SRS), was an excellent teacher. He’d been teaching annually in our area of Iowa for the last three years. My friend Susan, the immutable force behind Catalpa Corner Charity Horse Trial, proclaimed one day that I needed to ride Fabulouso in the clinic. She said it was time to see if I could make a foray into Real Dressage Land, continue to expand my education (an addiction of mine), and perhaps not have the entire local dressage community be astonished that any horse allows me to swing a leg over them. Bottom line is that I pretty much do what Susan says, so I signed up for it. I’d have her horse, Fabulouso (aka Elliot or Fatboy), under tack. He classes up any joint, so I felt that if worse came to worse I could simply fade into the background and count on the mesmerizing effect of 1,000 years of German breeding oozing forth from Elliot’s genetic code. That was my plan, and he is always good with being adored, so we were all systems go.

German breeding on display and the monkey-in-the-tack basking in the glow at the Otter Creek Horse Trial:

I should explain about the “Fatboy” name. I’ve always liked off track thoroughbreds, so I’ve gleefully decorated our pasture with them and taught them all sorts of fun games, like eventing, foxhunting and dressage. Physically, the thoroughbreds all run a little lean, of course.

Then one day Susan suggested that I teach Elliot to event. So he came to our house for the winter. Hanovarians, to say the least, are a bit easier keepers than the usually high-metabolism off track thoroughbred. Elliot arrived in the autumn, just when we were starting the transition from pasture to a lovely part grass/mostly alfalfa hay mix for the winter. All the thoroughbreds stayed in work and held weight beautifully through the fall and winter months. The warmbood, Elliot, stayed in work as well, and held weight spectacularly, shall we say exponentially. That winter in the frozen tundra of our pasture we had a group of fit, fuzzy, slightly angular tbs and one grinning bay marshmallow with whiskers.

Susan shows her love with food. Every time I visit her house, I have to go on a week-long workout program to mitigate the effect of the deliciousness she provides everyone within her sphere of influence. With this mindset, she fretted over Elliot’s weight all winter long, since it was one of the first winters he was going to be in significant work. The emails went back and forth. “Is he holding weight?” “Yep, just fine.” <two weeks> “How’s Elliot’s weight? I could bring over some hay.” “Lookin’ a little pudgy.” <three weeks> “With all this riding, is he doing ok with holding weight?” “Ok, Susan, I’ll fess up, around here we call him ‘Fatboy’.” “Super!”

Susan Brigham's Fabulouso, aka Fatboy aka Elliot.

Time passes, we do some prelim level events, the AECs, develop a partnership and represent ourselves pretty well. So now Fatboy and I were riding in the Herwig Radnetter of the SRS (still pretty cool to me) clinic in front of much of the local dressage community, who, I suppose, consider me a bit of a wild child eventer/foxhunter sort, which I would have trouble effectively arguing in any court. However, truth is, that I am able to do those things reasonably well because I base all my training in dressage principles. So the foxhunters think I’m a dressage queen, and the dressage people think I’m a foxhunter wildthing. All good, call me anything, just don’t call me late to go riding. As an aside, you can read a fairly hilarious “she must be from another country” critique by Geo. Morris about this picture.

The lesson with Herwig Radnetter was great, but not in the way I expected it to be. He talked about all the things that you’d expect-position, engagement, connection, a cajole about the fact that I didn’t clean my tack that week (guilty!), rhythm, balance, transitions and more. But the one concept that stuck in my head was ‘Playful’. He was saying this in reference to rein contact. In that lovely light Austrian (German?) accent with a faint smile on his face. When he said it I didn’t know precisely what he meant, as in what exactly a Playful thing to do with the reins is. But I did know the feeling of Playful, so I went with it.

“Rounder, rounder, rounder and playful with the reins”.

I was getting somewhere with it and we were all three moderately happy with the work, but Herwig said that he would ride the horse. Interestingly, he didn’t ask. I didn’t mind, so that worked out well for both of us. He got on and even though Fatboy is mesmerizing, I focused on what Herwig was doing with his rein contact. He was doing all the things we know already to do: still outside hand, active inside leg (but I note even the leg was Playful but without the prodding busyness we see sometimes). The inside hand was also still for the most part, but there was definitely a give and take in showing the horse what was appropriate. At some point during the lesson he said the ubiquitous “We do not pull” which we’ve all heard a hundred times. But now I finally understood that we can take momentarily, but the big brother of “take momentarily” which is pull, is not the answer. “Quicker and smoother and the release is The Thing.”

This can be an epiphany for riding. To know that you can take, but you can not pull. To be playful. Think of two kids playing with a toy together. It is fun when one interacts with the other by good-naturedly and momentarily taking the toy toward himself with a smile and a sparkle in his eye. The other kid laughs and takes the toy back toward himself and the first kid acquiesces because he knows it is a game and the interaction joyfully continues. If, however, one kid grabs the toy with a stern expression and pulls it toward himself in an effort to overpower the will of the other, resistance ensues. Whether the two interactions, which are essentially the same, are resistant and angry — or flowing and joyful –is a matter of intent.

Rounder, Rounder, Rounder, Playful, Playful. When it echoes in my head, it comes out as lovely gratitude in my horses.

Do you have scripts in your head that show in your horse when you ride with them in mind? What are they?

August 3, 2010

Best. 52.8 penalties. Ever

Sammy and I at a check on a hunt in TMH's beautiful Grand River fixture

Catalpa Corner Charity Horse Trial had a fairly tough training level xc course over the weekend. I had entered my developing horse, Sammy, in his first horse trial there, and walking the course I felt like we probably were prepared, but that it would take some riding to get it done. Sammy and I had done a lot of foxhunting together, which always makes me feel confident. I really get to know horses when I foxhunt them for a season or two. They say foxhunting is like war, but with only half the danger. The experience of going through the excitement and the tedium of live foxhunting bonds us like men who spent time in foxholes together-we’d never ask the other to do anything we wouldn’t do for them and we’ve got each other’s backs.

We’d also taken care of the technical side of things, with dressage, xc and showjumping schooling of course. We’d done a schooling horse trial at another park at training level and done very well. So, I thought we were prepared and didn’t lose any sleep on Friday night.

Saturday morning’s dressage went fine and after a few hours’ break we were warming up for xc. Sammy’s not much for show nerves, and galloping all over God’s creation on a hunt with 30 of his closest horse pals all winter makes the xc warmup chaos feel like old home week. So, having warmed up, we trotted down to the start box. Since this was only his second horse trial (the first being the schooling horse trial a few weeks before), he stood in the start box without much of a clue as to what was coming next. So I enjoyed the quiet time, which I know won’t last. When he has a few more horse trials under his belt, he will know exactly what a start box means and start revving up the engine there. I enjoyed the peace while I had it.

3, 2, 1 go! Have a good ride! And off we went. Sammy picked up a very nice hand gallop, taking in the scenery, and I got the feeling he was thinking there might be hounds to follow nearby. When I mentioned to him that there was a nice log jump ahead, he switched his focus to it and, though we were 10 strides out, he threw all his legs forward for exactly one stride, (it would have gotten a nice reining score I think) then immediately continued cantering. I heard a rapid conversation from his head, “What? There’s no fenceline, what’s with the jump? Oh, yep, I can do that.” He went down and popped over the log pile.

On to fence two, a shiny maximum height pheasant feeder. He cantered hesitantly down to it, felt extra wobbly at the second to last instant and exercised his right to wobble decisively left. I could have stuffed him over it, I think, but I didn’t want him to have an awkward jump and scare himself. I exercised my right to tap him on the butt once with the crop, gave him a second to reset his mind, re-presented to the fence and hopped right over the pheasant feeder on try 2. Next, through the small creek (an easy deal for a foxhunter) and on to the barn jump. He cantered on down to that and sailed it. He’d seen this fence’s identical twin on the course 2 weeks ago, so he was good with that. Canter up the hill and up the bank. This was more like it for him. Terrain issues are a foxhunter’s forte’. He took that bank like a professional and now he was getting in a bit of a rhythm.

skinny chevron

Canter down the hill and up the next and on to the skinny chevron. I had wondered how this one was going to go when I walked the course because some horses don’t think they will fit between trees like this. I had one horse who actually jumped a 5′ showjumping standard in a clinic when the clinician set a skinny showjump. The horse was sure he would not fit between them, but didn’t like to stop or runout, so, very logically, he jumped the standard. His rider managed to stay in the tack by sheer benevolence of the Universe and the horse staying straight upon landing. Had he done any minor squiggle in the first two strides after the fence, I’d have been a lawn dart. Good man. So I cantered down to the skinny chevron with a leg on, but wondering how this might go. Sammy jumped it straight and true, no muss no fuss. Yay Sammy, because the next fence was a bending line two stride log combination in the woods. There was a lot of talk about the combination on course walks. There was walking and rewalking the center distance, the inside distance, the outside distance. As for me, I loved the combination, nice round logs, good footing, nice distance right down the middle, nice size. And voi la! Sammy agreed. Smoked on over that combination. Good man.

Trakehner. "Did you know there's a ditch under that?"

Next a let-up coop that rode easily and then down to the trakehner. He’s done trakehners before, but still he was a little rattled early in the course and, though he was doing really well, trakehners are still funny things to horses. He cantered down to it and at the last minute turned left exclaiming, “Camie, did you know there is a ditch under there? I’ve got a solution for us. Let’s go this way instead! Look, no ditch!” I think I actually giggled a little. I know he can jump the height and I know he learns quickly, so I took a breath, gave him a pet, walked a few steps away, picked up a canter and asked him to have a try again. He jumped it perfectly.

That was a turning point. I think I heard an audible “click”. He figured out that the easiest and most fun thing is to go over whatever is in front of him. “Ohhhhhh. I get the game.” It was really cool. In that instant, I knew the rest of the course was going to be pure fun. He dropped into the water like a star. Did the barrels in perfect stride, the combination felt like a gymnastic and we went down the down steps, both grinning like crazies.

The steeplechase fence rode just like a real steeplechase fence, forward and confident. The corner was easy and then on to the coffin complex.

Ok, this picture is from last year's prelim. Replace the coop with a table and put the c element to the left a bit and you have the training coffin 2010. There's a creek between the two jumps.

On the course walk, I was a little concerned about the coffin. I jump judged it last year and I’d seen some inexperienced horses come up to the first element, start to jump, see the water on the other side, stop jumping and slither on their front legs back down the jump. Faced with that, a few riders stayed on and a few ejected. No lasting harm to anyone.

So now I was cantering down to the same complex. But I was not on the same horse I’d started the course with. I was on One Who Got the Game. Even cantering down to it, I knew it would go well. He sailed over that table, took the creek in stride and actually locked on to the prelim C element. I had to pull him off and send him to the training C, which he sailed easily.

Next a coop. I giggled to myself coming down to it since a foxhunting friend of ours had remarked to herself about a coop on her course at a different horse trial. “It’s just a coop. We jump them all the time. No problem.” And promptly got eliminated at it on xc day. So I rode the coop properly and with respect and it went well.

Birdhouse rolltop. Built by husband Jay and sponsored by Julie Kuhle as a memorial to her bird-watcher mother. Lovely.

The new bench was a lark and it was great fun to jump the birdhouse, which had spent a few weeks being born in our garage a few winters ago and was delivered to the park in our horse trailer. And GREAT fun to jump. Then a nice big table, and pet and praise the horse through the finish flags.

The 10th place ribbon is a very pretty cornflower blue. And it was the Best. 52.8 penalty-ride. Ever.

July 26, 2010

How to make your horselife more relaxing and safer

Being a horse is confusing sometimes. You get on a trailer, spend a couple of hours with your balance constantly changing, back off the trailer when it stops and you’re somewhere new. Maybe you are going to a new owner. The trailer drives off and you are in a place where every variable in your life has changed. New surroundings, new person to interact with, new horses to meet, new pecking order to establish, maybe new food and maybe water that smells funny to you. Quite possibly, new rules from the new handler. It can be a scary time for a horse. Here are some tips I find useful in helping horses to relax and perform when they arrive at a new or temporary home.

Quality of Energy In = Quality of Energy Out

A relaxed horse, trusting his rider, and the rider allowing a slack rein, in trust to her horse. Sarah Hannapel photo

Horses, you may have noticed, don’t talk much generally. There is the occasional outburst and some friendly nickering or “meet the new guy” posturing sounds, but generally, they’re quieter than humans. They are into physical cues. They read energy for the most part. When you approach a horse with the attitude of Benevolent Dictator (BD), that person who will assume the position of making decisions for both parties, but who will put the horse’s needs to the forefront, you will be given right of way as leader by the horse and the experience of being the follower will relax the horse.

The two parts of Benevolent Dictator nest into each other. For instance, sometimes when a horse is in a new situation, he will exhibit resistance to being led, either figuratively or literally. Maybe he literally will not move, or maybe he is whinnying himself silly and skittering about. At this point, the BD is wise to employ the Miz Scarlet Effect a brief, but moderately strong suggestion, repeatable as needed, that the horse’s best interest is served by having his attention on the handler and following directions. This correction is both a Benevolent and Dictatorship act because horses and handlers are safest when their attention is focused in the same direction. Benevolence is also manifested when the horse is praised when he keeps his attention on you. The Benevolent Dictator makes being with her more fun and relaxing than “being”, physically or mentally, somewhere else.

More on Benevolence: No Fingers, No Face Scratch

My horses' favorite scrubbie

Horses, you may have noticed, do not have fingers. Hooves are handy for crossing rough terrain, but they’re inconvenient in many ways. Imagine going through life not being able to scratch your face or ears, and often having flies on your face, to boot. This might be why most horses lurve face rubs. Rubbing a horse’s face in long, easy-to-predict strokes with a rubber scrubbie both with and against the hair while the handler puts her hand under the horse’s chin or jaw for support is perceived by many horses to be a very benevolent act. Their respiration slows, they close their eyes and they think good thoughts about you. (Ok, my fantasy, but a nice one to visit every day.)

No fingers also means no Q-tips. Horses’ ears get waxy or itchy just like ours do, but again, the no finger thing. That’s where you step in and help and make an instant friend or at the very least find out more about your horse. Put a kleenex on your finger and gently put it in his ear and see if you can gently rub some of the dirt/wax out. Some horses love this, some horses wonder what in the heck you are doing and please maybe not so much of that. If not, let it be. Just offer and see what happens. The ones that love it do this funny thing with both their upper and lower eyelids that I have only seen them do when their ears are cleaned, and all horses who like it make the same face. Must be the universal ear delight face. It is hysterical and you’ll know it when you see it.

Many horses also have a swirl of hair in the middle of the bottom of their bellies where the flies love to bite. Scratch this. Then put swat on it. More good thoughts to you from horsie.

While you are distributing all this Benevolence (and feeling the love back), the Dictator is also there, making sure basic rules are followed. If horsie looses focus and starts whinnying or skittering about, invoke your right to a swift Miz Scarlet Effect, growl for a maximum of two seconds and then let it go and proceed back to Benevolence mode. If you made that quick energy change in an interaction with a person they’d call you Sybil. When you do that to a horse, they are happy to have gotten clear direction. And they usually step happily right back in line.

Moving backwards down the horse’s body, if you have a mare, run your hand along her belly until you reach her teats. If she will allow it, check between her teats for icky crusty stuff. It builds up there and I bet it itches like heck, because most mares are delighted to have you gently remove it once they figure out what you are doing. Meanwhile, they are also figuring out that your intentions are good. This goes a long way to improving their confidence in their environment and you. A confident horse is a safer horse.

If you have a gelding, it gets a little more complicated as they can telescope their thingies into the netherworld and most people aren’t going to go spelunking after it. Some geldings, though will welcome you removing some of the dead skin off of their winkies if you are gentle, and don’t tell me that doesn’t feel good to the fingerless-types. This is all entirely trust building through hygiene.

When it is time to do the soft-brush-on-the body routine, get a seriously soft brush. If you can run it down your cheek and be happy, you are there. Start with the top of the horse’s head. Move the forelock to the right and groom the area between it and the ears. Then do the same on the left. Then groom the outside or even upper inside of the ears if the horse will allow it. Then, use long strokes that go from the middle of the face, following the hair, smoothly over the eyes, which the horse will close as the brush goes over, and then down the cheek. Spend a full minute or two on the face alone. Some horses like to have it run down the channel of their cheekbones, underneath their head. As you do this, look at the horse’s reaction of relaxation, slow your breathing and just allow the connection. Many horses will draw a long sigh of relaxation while you do this. The Dictator program is always running in the background, correcting the horse if he starts to rub on you or fidget around or otherwise be distracted. He is supposed to passively allow you to kindly groom his face.

When you groom the rest of the horse, if you are not removing mud or having to otherwise scrub, use long strokes and breathe long breaths. Let your free hand rest on the horse, having placed it there palm first. I haven’t quite figured out why, but if you watch really good horsepeople, they rest their whole palm on the horse and feel, rather than let their free arm hang or spider their fingers over the horse, with their palm held away. Regardless of the reason, horses relax when touched with the whole palm in long strokes in the direction of the hair.

Feed Cookies

At will. And the people who say not are silly meanies.

Pick Up Hooves

Yes, you should do it for all the reasons you know you should, but you should also do it because a horse who will calmly shift his weight to his other legs and allow you to futz with the remaining one is a horse who is confident in you. Spend time getting this right. Not just holding it in the air for the 8 seconds it takes you to pick it, but spend time helping them learn that yielding their body to you is not scary. This isn’t just a “yes” or “no” will-he-pick-up-his-feet-for-cleaning thing. This is a connection thing. When a horse does this efficiently and confidently, the ride goes well. If I have a horse who isn’t calm and relaxed in yielding his body to me in this manner for whatever reason and we don’t resolve it, it tells me I have more work to do on the ground, and I’m not getting in the tack today. No biggie, glad to know it before I am in the tack. Time spent getting this right and getting better connected is always well spent.

Extra Credit

Lots of horses like to have their heads held. What? Seriously. Lots of horses, when they are relaxed and in a calm environment, like to have their heads held by their people. Several, ok all, of my horses will walk up to me and place their whole head right in front of me so that I can put one elbow over their nose and one elbow over their upper neck, which puts my face in the perfect position to kiss them right behind their ears. They love this. They make big happy sighs and will stay there as long as I do. They relax their necks and curl around me. You don’t want to rush into this or even have it as a goal because some horses are more into it than others and horses’ heads are heavy and solid and can move very quickly and hurt you. You wouldn’t rush in and kiss a person you don’t thoroughly know wants you to kiss them. Same or even moreso with horses.

Connection = Relaxation = Greater Chance of Safetly

When we put ourselves in the position of Benevolent Dictators, taking both aspects of that title to heart, we open a channel to greater connection to our horses. This relationship is one of caring and empathy with a lack of fear in both parties. When we have greater connection we have more trust and relaxation from both handler and horse. When we have trust and relaxation, horses are more likely to react predictably and calmly. Even when things don’t go perfectly, a horse who has been handled with consistent Benevolence and Leadership is likely to look to its leader for relief rather than improvising his own.

July 6, 2010

Corn and Conscious Competence

Eddie the 17h tb says, "Knee high by the Fourth of July?"

I was out on a hack today with my eventer, Eddie. We do a lot of hacking around for conditioning on the land our kind neighbors allow us to ride. Most of it is CRP ground, but there are a few short stretches of crop ground we sometimes pass through. This spring it was easy to hack on down between the corn rows, avoiding the small plants, but in the last week, aided by a lot of rain and then a week of sun, the corn has shot up to the extent that 17h Eddie found himself having to stretch his neck up in order to see anything in the sea of cloying corn leaves.

Temple Grandin wrote a great book called Animals in Translation. One of the many theories she puts forth in the book basically says that the lighter-built animals within a type of animal are generally more sensitive and quick-to-react to outside stimuli than their heavier-built counterparts. I tend to think of the more reactive animals as “brighter” though I note that I don’t mean this to mean more intelligent. I think of those animals that are slower to react as “duller”, and this does not imply less intelligent, just less reactive. So, for instance in dogs, a greyhound might be considered brighter than a newfoundland and a draft horse might be considered duller than an arab, just on Temple’s theory alone. Temple goes on to say that the lighter animals within a breed are usually brighter too. So a spindly-legged tb could be predicted to be brighter than a more solid-type tb. This holds true in my experience in general and in my barn at the moment. Charlie, our foxhunter, is a bigger, heavy tb, still purebred, just heavier-boned, and he’s just as steady and sweet as the day is long, and he’s not given to over-reaction. Eddie is a skinny, long-legged, long-necked wisp of a narrow tb and he is as bright as they come. He is given to Anxiety Groans when he is uncomfortable or doesn’t understand things and I guarantee that if there ever really IS a mountain lion near us, he won’t be the one it gets.

So, now I’m on a hack with Eddie the Bright in a cornfield up to his ears, with the leaves pressing against his body from muzzle to croup, withers to hooves. He gets light on his feet. He lets out his Anxiety Groan. He breathes faster. He champs at the bit and his pace quickens. I simply put him in a shoulder fore (really, it’s no problem, the corn row limits the angle, like bumpers in a bowling alley) and let the distraction of its effort, combined with a consciously relaxed elbow, quiet hugging leg and steady breathing, settle him. He gets to the other side with little problem.

Eddie’s little moment of anxiety, though, reminded me of the progression of learning how to ride. When I was a kid, I had the Greatest Shetland Pony in the World, apparently, judging from all the horror stories I hear of other peoples’ experiences with shetlands. Cricket and I spent many afternoons playing cowboys and indians with my sister and her horse, who was born at our house and who we imaginatively named Grasshopper, since, if you have a Cricket, you obviously need also a Grasshopper. We were 8 and 14, and thought we were clever. Oy. Anyway, a favorite tactic of Cricket and I was to enter a cornrow at the end and pretty much gallop down it to get away from my marauding sister on her much faster horse who was too wide to follow. Cricket was entirely unfazed by the lack of visibility, swinging corn ears and pressing leaves as we bucketed down the row, partly because he knew I would pick something delicious for him to eat once we escaped the marauder.

Then I had my friend Ruth out and we went for a ride, me on Cricket and her on Mariah, a big, kind morgan we had. Mariah was a beautiful, well-mannered bay, and quite tolerant. So I was surprised when I led Ruth, trotting down the corn row, only to be rapidly passed by a white-eyed Mariah and clutching, shrieking Ruth. I had no idea that the claustrophobia of the leaves and the lack of ability to see over them could cause a horse to do that. At that moment I became aware of my incompetence. The first step in learning is Unconscious Incompetence where I had merrily lived before that moment. I had been enjoying, unaware, the benevolence of the Sprites Who Protect the Ignorant. Now I was in the land of Conscious Incompetence, with all the heaviness-of-being it brought. Conscious Incompetence, to me, was extremely uncomfortable and I had to move on ASAP.

Ruth was a farmkid with good balance and a heckova good sporting sense of humour. Mariah’s eyes popped back into her head as soon as she got out of the corn, and we had a nice day of it, other than the niggling thought in the back of my head concerning the fact that I had no idea in my 8 year old brain how to teach Mariah to not be scared of the corn. And I really wanted her to not be scared of the corn. So I read books and asked anyone who might know how I might desensitize the mare to the corn. I learned some tricks and slowly desensitized her and she was ok to walk in the corn, but not trot or canter like Cricket. I had to get more tools. But where? The people I knew were fresh out of ideas and probably wondered why I was so obsessed with cantering a horse down a corn row anyway. My little brain said that if Cricket could, somebody had to have taught him. I’d never seen a horse just canter down a corn row by himself, so somebody had to have taught him, I reasoned. (Ok not entirely logically sound, I know, since most horses don’t have the opportunity or reason to canter down a corn row, but I never got that far in my little kid reasoning.)

About the same time, I started taking dressage lessons, after a fashion. Since I was more wild child pony jockey than classical equestrian, my instructor spent a fair amount of time frowning and teaching me circles and how to carry my hands. One day though, I must have finally gotten somewhere close to getting it, or simply bored her silly. She started talking about bending the horse on a straight line. Shoulder in, haunches in, shoulder fore, haunches out. We just brushed the surface in that night’s lesson, but I was on fire. Now again I hit the books and quizzed whoever I could to learn more. By my next lesson I was doing a fair shoulder in, that actually made my instructor smile. The little wild child monkey might not be a complete waste of space in the lesson. It took every ounce of my brain energy to get my body and the horse’s body to do what I had read about and was picturing and practicing at home, but by jiminy, her smile said I was doing it or something in the same zip code as it. Welcome to the world of Conscious Competence. In this place we master, on fledgling wings, what we later will do without thinking, with ease, as muscle memory does its magic. This place of Conscious Competence is a land of private work that happens only between the rider’s ears. No instructor can do this for her rider. The work of Conscious Competence is the basis for the axiom, “Princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer.”

I soon learned the power and usefulness of being able to influence the individual parts a horse’s body. When a horse’s body is yielding to the rider’s leg, and when his poll is relaxed, it is easier for him to stay mentally with the rider and to relax. If the horse and rider are trained properly, they can communicate in times of crisis, such as when a horse can’t see over the corn leaves and they are being touched all over by the leaves. I could put Mariah in shoulder in in the little grass paddock we had, could I do it in a corn row when she got worried? The short answer was no, not for quite a while. I needed to have the connection without effort, to have it in my muscle memory. Unconscious Competence comes to those who are motivated to put in the work, and time is undeniably an element of work. It took a lot of practice in the arena before our communication was good enough to be helpful to the horse in an anxious situation. But it did come for us, and it was really fun to canter a big horse down the corn row!

Whatever you want to do, be fearless. Be hungry, try, make mistakes, endure setbacks. Celebrate every victory. Learn from every setback. Put your eye on the prize and do not take it off. The beauty of Conscious Competence is that it dances with the one that paid the cab fare. Do you have the change?

Horsitivity

Communication