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.

An Epiphany

I had an epiphany today. You can get Cisco to perfectly execute his evasive turn and jump away if you just send him off on a longe line. It is the very same movement that happens when he gets nervous about anything and wants to get the heck out of Dodge. His earlier training probably solidified this behavior into something he thinks he is supposed to do. I normally have him come in and face up to me before I send him off the other way. He was anticipating the send off and it struck me that it's his basic escape problem only just on cue.

If I can elicit the behavior, I have it under control, we just reprogram a "Thinking about jumping away" state into a "Thinking about looking toward the human" state. So I tied a plastic bag onto my stick and started flipping it around. The rule was if he was looking at the human, the human had to behave and keep the stick near the ground. If he was looking anywhere else, the human could flap the plastic as she pleased. The human moved around, trying to sneak around the mustang so she could start flapping. The mustang knows how to watch.

Then we spent 10 minutes letting the bag dance in the winter sunlight, gently wafting down over the mustang and tickling his belly hairs. When the bag was no big deal, we started longeing, cutting off any attempt to anticipate the send off. I asked Cisco to stand along the rail before I sent him off. This confused him for a moment, but then he realized that I wanted him to be momentarily stationary. I was pleased that three times he started to jump away and then arrested himself. I am hopeful that we have finally found the key to solving this difficult problem.

We traded the stick and flag in for the tamborine and he longed around the little pen with me keeping the rhythm of his back outside leg. Cisco loves anything musical.