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

Learning Disabled Mustang

This posting was stuck in limbo yesterday when the server went down.

This morning, I posted something to the BridgeAndTarget group on Yahoo.

I have a new mustang to work on. Rita is 2 years old and was captured when she was 1. The first owners, who have other horses, had no luck with her and she was given away to a trainer that usually does well with very broncish horses. He had no luck with her and so he said if I could get her to settle down, she was half mine. I didn't want her, but I saw the opportunity to learn something new.

She is about 12 hands high, has a stout little body and a bulging forehead. She panics over most anything and doesn't respond like a normal horse to natural horsemanship methods. You can't keep her with other horses because she attacks them.

I was browsing through Linda Tellington-Jones's book that has stuff about horse personalities and it showed a horse with a similar but less pronounced head profile. Linda wrote that horses like that were usually learning disabled and impossible to keep with other horses because of their aggressive tendencies. She said it was probably a good thing that the horse in her example had been put down. Yikes!!

This got me very curious so I looked into a couple of other books with horse phrenology stuff in them. Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling has a category called the "Peasant" where Rita would fall. Hempfling says they are extremely difficult but can be turned into general riding horses if you are willing to take the time. The old time head profile books all have very negative things to say about horses with her lumpy face.

Not knowing that I had a learning disabled mustang, I have been out there doing bridge and targeting with her. She is doing just fine. From panic scale of 10, she is now not going any higher than a 7. I think this mare really needs the control that operant conditioning gives her. It may also be that those kinds of horses have more brains (hence the bulging forehead) and can think for themselves, so they are
unmanageable. More like a donkey with a big panic button.

I don't know, but I will keep you updated as we go along. Right now we are learning "neck", "shoulder", and "face" and targeting a rope. She has a really big cut on a hind leg, but there is no chance of getting near it to doctor it, until she lets me touch that part. I have cut back the quality (but not quantity) of her feed since she is a tiny mustang and can survive on almost nothing, so she will be keen for
those rewards.

Yrs,
Patricia

This afternoon, I had a follow up:

The more I work with this mare, the smarter I think she is. She learned to stick her head in a loop of rope in about 10 minutes. She was willing to let me touch her neck, her shoulders and her face BUT ONLY WHEN I ASKED TO TOUCH THE SPECIFIC PLACE FIRST (Lucky for me, Kayce showed me this!) She never freaked out today and only snorted when I was reaching for a body part I hadn't asked for.

I took off the halter she has been wearing for a couple of months and gave her a good face rubbing. She really liked it.

When I return the mare to the cowboy, he might not appreciate her learning style. I think I will train her to stand on a pedestal so he can't pretend she doesn't know anything. He'll have to start out by getting soft enough to get on her pedestal. Or maybe I can find her a better home. You never know what will happen next.

Yrs,
Patricia