Relationship Training

The biomass density of the SpotsNStripes Farm was a little overwhelming to me. It's like Dr. Doolittle turned loose in a panel fencing factory. Open-air pens of goats, dogs, cats, pheasants, tortoises, ponies, horses, donkeys, mules, and multiple species of zebras in a very zoo-like habitat. No open range here. But neither is it a place to casually oogle animals. This is one of the most intensive equine training facilities you will ever find.

Nancy pours her heart into teaching her clinics. She is a non-stop, high energy clinician who never stops reiterating her fundamental message. She is totally accessible to her students and she teaches with a patience and concern towards all. She teaches people pretty much like she teaches animals; and she is very good at it.

Nancy has four fundamental concepts:
1. Habituate or desensitize by moving from an accepted touch or activity to a less accepted touch or activity ("from an A spot, to a B spot")
2. Use the "whoops principle" as in "Whoops, I accidentally touched your B spot".
3. Do it with rhythm.
4. Show the animal you will do it yourself before you ask them to do it (Copycat)

She avoids negative reinforcement and punishment, because she says it just doesn't work on zebras. She finds food reinforcement too risky and ineffective to use as her reward, so she has this "zoo" arranged to limit "herd interactions" in order to use social interaction with herself as the main reward. She seeks to become each of her trainees "Best Friend", that is, more specifically, Dominant Best Friend. We watched the two kinship groups of zebras work out the problem of having a small flake of hay tossed in their pens. The kinship group (herd) always has a strict hierarchy and the female animals each have a best friend who she shares her food with. The stallion had his favorite striped mare. With friendship, privilege is conferred. It is this type of bond that Nancy is focused on.

Male zebras will collaborate to protect their herds and will tolerate their sons remaining in the herd. The father of a young zebra mare will fight the stallion that wants to court her, but only long enough to test him and make sure he is strong enough to defend his daughter adequately. Zebras respond with either total panic or total aggression if they have not been trained to do otherwise. Zebras will kill themselves trying to get away or kill their owners when leaving isn't a better option. She showed us how a bottle-fed baby turns into a disrespectful dangerous animal as it matures (usually about 5 years). She convinced me that I am not the kind of person that should own a zebra. She showed the National Geographic video on zebras to give us an idea of what kind of animal the zebra really is. It's a harsh reality that horse-lovers might not like.

I really enjoyed getting to work with Nancy for three days. She has interns helping her train and I think someone wanting to get a broad background in equine behavior should definitely try to spend some time with her at the ranch. Her techniques are very applicable to all equine training, and with relationship as the primary focus, it comes totally natural to women. She accepts qualified interns and she offers clinics twice a year at the SpotsNStripes Ranch. Do not show up uninvited though, it's not a zoo.

More photos of my experience can be seen here

When it was over, I was glad to get home to my own paddocks where my resplendent but tiny herd lives a relatively vast area. I don't think they missed me as much as I missed them. I tried her recommended head-rubbing protocol (me rubbing my head on them)for rebonding after my absence, but they just looked at me like I was out of my mind (or maybe they were just miffed that I had been gone?).

Reincarnation of a Perfect Mustang

Today is a moment to remember: Cisco got his back right foot cleaned for the first time since he arrived last fall. Clay was doing the cleaning. I was giving him intermediate bridge cues and scratching his withers. Somehow the mustang let us do it. FINALLY!

Cisco has been rather mad at me for the last few days though because I've been putting on the mustang rebirthing kit to hold on his starter saddle. The mustang rebirthing kit, my long time readers will recall, is three ace bandages, one wrapped around his girth, one as a breastcollar and the other as a britchen. They are all snuggly and stretchy so they can't possibly be uncomfortable. The term rebirthing refers to that thing people were doing at the end of the '90's where they wrapped them selves up really snugly and then simulated the birth process, being born into a better world. Flaky, perhaps, but the mustang has needed a little rebirthing. In the latest sessions I have been putting a fleece English saddle pad on, then cinching it down with the rebirthing kit. All snuggles... but he isn't too happy about it.

I started by asking him to target the pad with his nose, then his shoulder, then his hip, and then, introducing a new body part, target with the withers. He would scoot himself under the pad just fine.... we also did the english saddle, which he moved to contact with his withers, but we didn't leave it on for long.... I wanted him to have special yard-wandering privileges for saddle pad wearing. So we just got it on and let him free.

I've been working almost totally at liberty with him. He rarely needs a rope and if he jumps away he almost always comes right back. So this saddling was done with out restraint. It was getting to be almost dusk and I needed to unsaddle him and feed. He was standing on the patio and it was a bit breezy. I untied the britchen bandage and it dangled in the wind.

THAT WAS IT.... HE WAS OUT OF THERE!!! He ran around, craning his neck to look at the bandage end, and snorting loudly. He ran across my arena space, around the laundry garden, up the hill, down the trail, around the building, and back again. He got near and I asked him to target my fingers... he did. I picked up the bandage end and asked him to target it. He did. He touched it several times with his nose, and then I tried to move into position to untie the other bandages. THAT WAS IT... He ran off again. This time moving away any time I got near.

It was getting dark, so I fed the other critters and put some hay in a stall Cisco could access. I found myself a bucket, turned it upside down near the stall door and sat down to wait. It is the dark of the moon, so it was getting hard to see until I turned on the barn lights. I just sat their waiting. Pretty soon Mr. Blaze-faced Mustang wandered in out of the dark. He let himself be unsaddled then turned to the feeder for dinner.

DAY TWO OF MUSTANG REBIRTHING UNDER SADDLE PAD
Yesterday I penned him up to feed him breakfast and went out early to put back on his gear. The pad has two loops on each side for the girth and girth straps, so it really works well when you just run your bandages through the loops. He got it on, still willing to put his withers to the pad, in exchange for a horse cookie, then I let him free in the yard again. There is about 2 acres in the yard, so they can graze, stand in a forest, climb a hill, run down a trail through the sage brush, etc. They love to be out, but yesterday you could see him standing with his head down, lethargic and depressed by the saddle pad. I kept things in my pockets, so I could go out and tell him how great he looks in a pad, rewarding him with carrots, cookies, grain, and raisins for his participation in the rebirthing activity.

Then it started to rain, so I brought him back into the pen for unsaddling and let him return to the herd. I didn't want to take a chance unsaddling at large again because I didn't want to be sitting on a bucket by a gate in the rain.

Today I expected him to be stand-offish. It was too wet to have him wear the pad. We only wanted to clean his hooves. He came up to be caught when I held the rope out and called his name. He let us clean his panic-prone hoof. He's such a good mustang!

Vacuuming the Mustangs in Largo Canyon

Well, Clay said he was mighty impressed by me getting ol' Cisco to stand still for a little shop-vac action. First I got Cisco to stand near the vac, which I had sitting in a chair near the paddock. Cisco was at liberty in our two acre yard and I told him he could run away any time he got scared of what we were doing. Then we started targeting the vacuum hose to different parts of his body. I held the hose and he pressed his body parts into it.... nose, shoulder, hips. He was controlling the contact, not me, so he never got scared. Then Clay came out and I asked him to operate the vacuum switch while we went and stood 50 feet away. Little by little we moved closer and closer to the humming vacuum. He never seemed to be too worried about it. Then we went back to targeting the now-sucking hose line. No problem. The mustang was vacuumed and even seemed to enjoy the sensation of the air flowing through his fur.

I don't think Mr. Cowboy Way is going to switch over to training with a bag of horse treats, though.

He did pretty good himself. He saddled and rode Jemez Dancing. They cut a fine western figure out there in the big paddock. Jemez Dancing is short backed and moves in a very elegant and collected manner. Clay wore his big black Texas cowboy hat. He had to work a little bit, but Clay goes easy on them so there was no traumatic moments. Later, though, when I was trying to vacuum JD, Clay walked up and JD jumped away and stood snorting at Clay until Clay hunkered down and I asked JD to target Clay. I held my fingers in a v-sign right behind Clays head while he was looking at JD. JD must have thought it was funny, as he relaxed and came in to eat the dried cranberries Clay was offering him.

In the afternoon, Clay snuck out while I was busy and saddled Ms. Paisley. He stepped up on her and she gave every indication of being ready and willing to just change status from bronc to saddle horse. He didn't move her much, just unsaddled her. Tomorrow we will start moving her around, but I want her on a leadrope and one person on the ground.... Clay could ride her out if she decided to buck (he is a former bronc-rider) but I think keeping her from ever considering the possibility is the best approach.

In the late afternoon, I took Cracker Joe back out to the big paddock. Clay and Paisley had thrown my white sewer-pipe jump out of the square-round pen, so instead of pulling it back in, Cracker and I worked in the big paddock. There was a corner where the square round pen was, so we targeted this corner from a new perspective... namely the outside of the pen. Then we turned and walked to another corner of the paddock..... somewhere we had never worked. I got about six feet from the corner post, pointed to it and told Cracker to "target corner". He walked right in and put his nose on the corner post. Why do I find this amazing?... Cracker had to understand the geometrical concept of a corner to do it. "Corner" means something to the little hinny.

Speaking of Hinnys, I launched a new website The Hinny Whisperer. It will have a blog, the bookstore, and a forum on it. It is all up and running although the forum is not in its final state of formatting. The blog will be a review of stuff I want to talk about (critique) from the web. The forum is all about training equids. If Experiments in Equine Training is of interest to you, I think you will enjoy the forum. Be sure to check out todays blog posting about the Zebra Whisperer, Nancy Nunke. She is holding a zebra training clinic in May that promises to be an incredible learning experience. I am hoping to find the money to go.

Cracker Joe Heads to the Corner

Having discovered that my animals flunked cantering, we started doing a little pen work on transitions. Cracker has always been like a little hotrod, so we spent a lot more time on slowing down to a walk than speeding up to a canter. My little hotrod was cutting around the corners of the pen and generally not staying on the rail, so we shifted gears into a different mode of training after the walking gait was stable.

I took Cracker into the corner and asked him to target the corner post. After thinking his trainer had lost her mind, he decided to try it just to humor me. I served up the bridge and reward, and it wasn't long before Cracker had developed a certain fondness for the corner posts. The first day of this training, we just circled around the square-round pen, making friends with each of the corners several times.

Today was the second day. I spent the morning teaching the animals to stand to let me run the shop-vac over their shaggy shedding coats. Cracker had the hardest time accepting the vacuum. It was the hose that scared him, so this afternoon I tucked one end of the hose inside the other end, so it turned into something like a big ring, and I talked Cracker into putting his head into the center of it. It gave the white hinny a very Hawaiian look, like he had just gotten off the plane and they put a thick lei of black flowers around his neck. We strolled out to the square-round pen and reacquainted ourselves with the corners. One quick zip around the square and Cracker was ready to go. I started running from corner to corner, Hawaiian Hinny following me and tucking his nose up to the post. Then I quit running in as far, but that didn't stop Mr. Cracker. He is both eager to please and loves to earn his horse treats. He gets excited. I started worrying that he would kick at me as he went rushing on into the corner, as he did that once when he got overly excited and it sent me tumbling into a snow bank. It wouldn't be from meanness, just exuberance. Luckily it didn't happen this time.

After a while, it was time to vary the program, so I drug a large white sewer pipe into the pen and laid it diagonally across the middle. The game was to jump it and run to the diagonal corner. He did fantastically and seemed to love the activity. Tomorrow I will take out some "marker-cones"(really spray painted plastic jugs weighted with sand) to provide a visual boundary. I suspect that he will have no problem staying on the rail when I send him out to circle as his focus is now on the corners.

Tomorrow, if the weather stays nice, I will be reporting on vacuum-cleaner training. Clay says if I can vacuum a mustang, he might have to switch over to my crazy style of training.

Meditation on the Riddles of Equine Training

At my last posting, I was quite optimistic about progress with the critters. All my equine buddies were going out and about into the vast wilderness with out a bit of worry and the bridge was just an interesting landmark.

Then on Friday, the situation deteriorated with a visit from the farrier, a man you have met before on my blog, Billy Hibbler. Billy is a really good guy, but he drinks a lot of Mountain Dew so he's wired up about 20 notches higher than me. He was the former owner of Cracker Joe and the recent trainer for Jemez Dancing. The animals hate him. All of the animals!!!! So suddenly Billy arrives and no one can be caught. They fidget, kick, balk, shy and generally act cranky. My pride in them gets scratched and dented. Then Cisco bolts out of hand and runs around the corral in such a frenzy that we think he is going through a pipe fence. Now, understand, Billy never speaks mean to them or threatens them, he just is a fast moving cowboy. He thinks that I never train my animals.

Animals can sense peoples energy, I am quite sure of it, then they all sense each others energy. Jemez Dancing was probably the one who first really responded to the smell of wired-up-cowboy and as herd leader it infected all the others. Danger was in the air; run for your lives!!!

Okay, I consoled myself, it's just a Billy thing, when he is gone and forgotten they will be back to being good. On Sunday John, my hubby, came home and we took the mules out for a ride. The perception of the bridge as mere landmark was gone and the trolls living under it must have been back. John and Chester, his mule, are totally bonded. Chester loves John. There is no fear there. Chester and Cracker were real dips about the bridge, but failure wasn't an option, so eventually we had a nice ride beyond it and up Ice Canyon until we reached the semi-permafrost zone and decided to turn around. I was really sad to see that the memory of all of our walks across the bridge last week had made no impression.

Today I started a new project with my animals that involved recording their physical dimensions. It meant tape measures on their bodies. Hmmm....

Over the weekend, Clay West, also known as America's Most Lonesome Cowboy, returned to work on his cowboy novels, so I now have some expert horse-wrangler help at hand. Clay grew up on a ranch where the horsetraining was progressive enough to include Ray Hunt clinics. He has been speaking Natural Horsemanship since the day he was born, but his heart is into being a novelist, so we provide him a place to work and he gives me a couple hours of help everyday. We stepped out this morning, clipboards, pens, tape measure and paste wormer in hand for my new project. Eight equines to work through; one by one they were brought to the work area and convinced that tape measures are harmless tools used by humans to pet equines.

The donkeys were passive, the mules were interested, and the horses were most likely to be shy. Anticipating real trouble from Cisco, the new mustang, we saved him until last and took a coffee break before we caught him up. It was with some feelings of trepidation that I set down my cup and headed back to the corral. Tape measures are yellow and make funny noises. They move in a springy erratic manner. They may or may not eat horseflesh for breakfast, no one knows.

I started out with a training session. We targeted the tape measure. Touch with your nose, touch with your jaw, touch with your ears, touch with you shoulder. Then I started just randomly holding it across his body parts and rewarding him for standing still. After five minutes of training, we started the process. Eighteen measurements... we worked from the head back. Around his nose, across his brow, along his face, around his neck, down his mane, around his barrel, across his shoulder, along the length of his body, from hip to hip, along his back. I didn't think we could do the final measurement.... flank to flank around the rump for britchen length. I fully expected him to take flight at the first touch of the tape to his rump, but I rubbed the brown rump with my hand then the tape, then Clay read the measurement as I pulled it into place at the other flank... no fireworks at all, he just looked at me to see if he had earned a cookie.

We were also recording the equine behavior as we went. Cisco was more in the passive behavioral profile exhibited by donkeys than in the wiggly horse category. He always hides his dynamite when I am expecting a big explosion.

So what did I learn from all this? Hmmm, it's really kind of a zen question that will require some kind of long meditation. The most obvious lesson though, is if you think you are doing well, you are probably about to have everyone blow up, and if you are waiting for them to explode, they are going to fall asleep unless you give them a horse cookie.

To rush could be fatal.

We haven't let the snow and slush stop us, we are just moving slower, working hard to avoid slipping around. Not only the critters, but me as well. You just don't want to have to make any quick moves when you are on snow, slush or mud. Like picking up the mustangs back legs.... one false move and he will slip, bolting away, and I will have my spectacles splat in the icy mud at best. No... we have to just make sure that we don't get into trouble. If a person did crash and burn on a winter's afternoon and lay unconscious in the snow until someone decided to rescue them.... well, at least I have an epitaph picked out for my headstone.

Cisco and I are doing well though. I've spent the time flicking and flapping things over his body, tossing the rope, rubbing him with a stick, and singing holiday mustang songs until he sighs and lets his lower lip hang loose. I put him in the tiny roundpen and gave him a choice: would you like to give me your right hind foot and get this cookie, or would you like to circle the round pen ten times each way? He chose circling about three times and then figured out he might as well just eat cookies. Today we worked on lateral movements of the hindquarters. I had his lead looped around a fence post, hoping he would pull and yeild just a tiny bit. I started tapping his back girth area. At first he was worried and he tried pulling back just a bit, then he stepped forward. That was our starting point and I rewarded him. From just stepping at all, our criteria level rose to stepping sidewards with either hind foot, them to stepping sidewards with the hind foot nearest me. He crossed over a couple of times (the ultimate goal in hindquarter lateral movements) but I didn't have that as the bar on this first day. You have to slow down in this kind of weather. To rush could be fatal.

I was using some horsetreats that smell like apples and are about the size of a slice of apple. They are entirely too big. One day I took a bunch into the woodshop and bandsawed them into quarters, which made perfect treats. A good training treat should be about 1 cubic centimeter. Smaller than a grape, bigger than most raisins. I have thought about writing to Purina and asking them to manufacture such things, but that letter remains unwritten. The dog likes the apple flavored treats too. She was sitting on the horse feeder, which I had turned upside down in the center of the roundpen and supervising. She says bigger treats would be better, especially elk flavored ones.

If you read my blog often, you will notice that I seem to sea-saw around in the development of the mustang as a tame horse. Somedays I proceed as if I was going to be riding him next week and somedays I just dwell on the basics of the basic. In my opinion, you can never overdo the basics. If they don't have perfect stable manners, there is room to seek perfecion. If you can't get them to relax when you ask, you still have work to do. If they don't yeild in the direction indicated, it would be suicide to think you should ride them. If you can't tie them they aren't trained to any degree. Cisco and I have work to do. We are focusing on the desensitization side of horsetraining and every session, no matter what it seems like we are doing, we are really forming a bond of trust.

After this week, I will have some old office projects finally off my desk and I can start to really focus on equine training. My goal is to have Tobiah, Paisley, and Cracker ready to sell, should I need to let them go. Tobiah just has to have some work on yeilding to rein and leg cues, Cracker is going to get some trick training, and Paisley needs to work on driving and overcoming herd-attachment. It's going to be a fun winter.

The Horse Spanker

My Clinton Anderson DVDs arrived last week and I have watched three of the Ground Control Series 1 DVDs. In the first DVD, he desensitized the horse by flipping a rope and a string on a stick. In the second and third DVD he got the horse to turn on the haunches, backup and turn on the forehand by wacking it with the stick that he desensitized it to in part 1.

You are never going to find Mr. Anderson cozy in a sleeping bag under a watchful mare. He perceives his horses as dangerous beasts of little intelligence. I think he cows them into an obedient state. There is some degree of learned helplessness at work. Negative reinforcement is a useful tool with horses, but it is not the only tool. It has its own consequences.

Bronc Ridin' for Dummies

This is the project in process that made me consider starting this webpage. While a little light on science, you can find useful details on the method.

My thanks to my colleague, Judy, for her help with this.

Link: Horse Training for Dummies