I’ve been working with Fool’r since the very end of April. I’ve needed to have a rotation of behaviors to select from so I wasn’t drilling any one thing, in order to keep him calm and engaged. We have worked on SS/FF (stand still, face forward), but it was initially a challenge as he can sometimes be a somewhat anxious horse. Now that we’ve had some time to learn the game from different perspectives doing different things, we can begin to refine all the things we’ve started in our time together.
This brings up the question of whether you have to have a behavior solid and “finished” before moving on to another one, especially one that’s related - standing still is related to movement as they are essentially opposites. As with all things, I think it depends on several variables, including the temperament of the horse, the tasks you’re looking to do, how long you’ve been working together and how comfortable and confident the horse is with the training, and the gap between what that horse is initially comfortable with vs their comfort level with where you’re taking the training.
For example, Fool’r is pretty comfortable, I could even say he finds it necessary, to be really close to the human. He was not initially comfortable putting his feet on novel objects like the blue mat. If I had drilled SS/FF in the beginning, insisting on him stationing on the mat and looking for distance and duration away from the human, it would have been really challenging for him and may not have worked at all. But now we’ve been working together long enough that he’s much more comfortable with me moving away from him while he hangs out on the mat.
Of course there are benefits to having a horse that can stay in one place for a length of time and be content to do so, but this skill will have a knock-on effect for all the other skills. The overall effect is building the meta skill of being comfortable and confident - something every horse (and human!) can use.
