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In addition to learning an important physical skill, he’s going to be learning emotional control and relaxation. He’s going to discover that turning into a freight train and barging over the top of you isn’t the only solution available to him. When he finds himself in a tight, trappy situation, instead of panicing or freezing, he can look to you for guidance to help him out.
Working in a stall or small paddock helps a horse learn how to maneuver his body, and it also helps the handler learn how to set his horse up for success. The video uses slow motion and freeze frame footage to teach the mechanical skills needed for this lesson. It highlights a fundamental handling skill which is one of the key building blocks for many critical ground exercises, including head lowering and lateral work.
From backing in a stall the video lesson progresses to basic leading. Here I let Max, a three month old Friesian colt, and his owner teach the lesson. Backing, moving the hips and shoulders, yielding softly to pressure on a lead, and the beginnings of ground tying are illustrated clearly by this youngster.
The second half of the tape extends the concept of moving away from pressure to teach the beginnings of lateral work. I use my young horse, Robin, a Cleveland Bay cross, to illustrate how you can focus on individual parts of the horse and get them yielding to you. This “duct tape” lesson, as I refer to it, is the cornerstone in the development of both basic control and
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the development of a beautiful, elegant carriage that has become the hallmark of our clicker- trained horses.
It’s all well and good to watch a trained horse perform, but it’s often much more useful to see how you work with a horse who doesn’t know anything about lateral work. In the final section of the tape, you get to watch our Icelandic stallion, Sindri, in his second in-hand clicker training session. Sindri began this lesson by crowding in on me and wrapping his body around mine. Never mind lateral work, just walking a straight line with him was our first goal. Sindri’s eagerness to be right there next to you made this almost impossible. The solution was systematically to teach him to move his hips and shoulders away from pressure. The result was the beginning of lateral work and lunging.
When we taped this session, I was not wearing a microphone, so the sound quality is not as sharp as I would like it to be. However, it was such a good visual, I felt it was important to include this footage with the rest of the lesson. This part of the lesson is especially for all of you who have felt totally left out when you have listened to an experienced horse person describing a horse’s movement. If you have trouble seeing what they are talking about, you will really appreciate the slow motion segments in this tape.
From lunging to lateral work you’ll learn how to ask a horse to carry himself in balance instead of crowding into you. Through slow motion and freeze frame footage, I highlight the important mechanical skills you’ll need for this lesson, and the responses you can expect from your horse. In addition to a basic clicker lesson, you’ll be training your eye to see and understand the balance shifts that help a horse perform at his best.
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