Some notes on using what you have to develop skills you’d like to have, such as lateral work on the ground:
- I don’t have a reverse round pen or anywhere convenient to put one, and barrels are always in the arena, so I may as well use them.
- First get the pattern of the barrel between horse and handler. You can add a target for bend, and then extend the bend after the barrel.
- What the bend looks like in the beginning doesn’t matter. It’s more about letting the horse organize themselves to move both forward and somehow sideways. If the hind end moves sideways too, then that’s the horse’s solution!
- If you need to be more specific about exactly how much bend and on what line, you can always microshape. However, I’d caution against it as it doesn’t allow the horse to move in a way that makes sense to their own body.
- The barrel helps infer the idea of the bend. For some horses that have a hard time moving with a handler, the barrels can be a sort of protective contact. This pattern can be carried over into ridden work, too.
- Siri has more experience than Fi, and you can see the difference between them. Fi has been more heavily reinforced for trotting, so that’s what she tries harder at. I’m not going to turn down the opportunity for her to get some exercise! And you can see some of the intermediate training steps I did with her to not squash the forward, and just add a little sideways here and there. She gets stuck at one point, so I just work on the hand target piece for a few seconds, and then try again.
And yeah, Siri’s muddy. ;)
