More thoughts on walking backwards

Today I let Rita run with the herd. She got to leave her 30x100ft paddock and go into the 2 acre paddock system where the others were horsing around. She has been lonely in her small yard, so this was an exciting time for her. Right away Cracker and Chester came to greet her. Chester did not attack, which was my biggest worry, but Rita and Cracker Joe formed a cute little unit. He wanted to mount her and she wanted to follow him around. He is only slightly bigger than her and since they were/are both former residents of the Billy Hibbler Horse Training Ranch, I thought they might be a support group for each other.

When it was time to get them into their personal pens/stalls for dinner, I decided I had to get more organized than usual. I closed the gates and shut them into the common paddock, then I went to each stall and put the hay in. They were waiting just outside the stall gates when I was done, so I let them in, one by one, into their personal space to where Rita was the only one left in the paddock. I think I will adopt this method as it is more controlled than my normal procedure, which is to feed them in order of dominance so they will be in the right stalls at the end.

At the point where Rita was the last horse standing, I had a real challenge on my hand. We had about 100 meters to get to her paddock gate. I had taken the time during the afternoon to get her and Cracker to come up to me for treats, so she wasn't panicked when I called her to me. I started walking backwards and drawing her attention back to me if she looked like she was loosing focus. Twice she started to turn, but I called her name and she kept on coming. At the end she was trotting to come to the gate because she figured out what we were doing.

Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling walks backwards He walks backwards a lot according to his book, "Dancing with Horses". He says their first trips out of the paddock should be done with the trainer walking backwards. I have seen no one else advocate this useful practice in print. The Dancing with Horses book is truely inspirational and has a lot of good information. The down side of Hempfling is that he had only been working with horses for two years when he wrote that book and he dashed it off in a very short time. He must have been inspired by the Goddess of Horsetraining though as it is wonderful. I did not care for his second book nearly as much. I would love to attend one of his clinics or even host one here, but he says that a USA visa is problematic so he would only do clinics in Mexico or Canada. I bet he knows a lot more than just about walking backwards.

Yrs,
Patricia