Lateral Work

Backing in a square into head lowering is a lesson that I borrowed from John Lyons' work. He refers to it as the demand cue to calm down. And in many ways that’s a good way to think of it. If you find yourself in a situation where a horse is pushing through you, threatening to rear, spooking or doing other similarly dangerous behavior, a good option might be to simply unhook the lead and let the horse go. Put some distance between you and the horse so you can be safe while you figure out how to restart the conversation. 

 

But often this option isn’t available to you. You aren’t in the kind of environment where you can let the horse go. You have to cope. If you know the backing in a square into head lowering lesson, you have a very effective way of getting both you and your horse safely out of the situation.

 

This lesson lets you say very firmly - but not aggressively - this is not negotiable. I really need you to drop your head down. And I need you to drop it down in a very particular way. Head lowering is not a forward moving exercise. That means your very nervous horse is not being told to stand still. He can’t stand still. 

 

You are saying to him, if he needs to move, he can. He just needs to back up. But horses can back up fast, and they learn even faster to back up into anything dangerous that’s around them. Back up toward the highway with the fast moving cars or towards the harrow with it’s sharp points, or straight at the horse that kicks, and your human will let you go forward again.

 

Backing in a square lets you control where in your work space you are working. 

 

It has another side benefit. As your horse swings his hips to the inside, he is very likely to drop his head. When he does, you’ll release the lead, click and treat.

 

One of the things I talked about in the session is I don’t want to turn my training into "the tarantula dilemma". That’s a metaphor with the following explanation.

 

Suppose you are afraid of spiders. If I bring out a tarantula, the last thing you’re going to want to do is touch it. But suppose I tell you if you will put your hand on the rim of its bowl, I’ll give you fifty dollars. I’ll give you $100 if you touch it. You can buy a lot of hay with that kind of money. You want the $100, so you touch the tarantula. You’re still afraid. You aren’t breathing. Your eyes are squinting closed when you make contact. Everyone can see how much you don’t like touching the tarantula, but you’re doing it. However, you’re still afraid. So when I take the offer of the $100 away, you’re staying well away from the tarantula.

 

We can put our horses into a tarantula dilemma. They are cooperating, but they aren’t relaxed. Take away the treats, and they are out of there.

 

I can use the backing in a square into head down lesson to bring a bad situation under control, but then I want to apply all my clicker training skills to move the horse out of the tarantula dilemma. 

 

The horse who really showed us how this is done was Julie Varley’s Allie. Allie is featured in The Click That Teaches: A Step by Step Guide in Pictures and in the Riding book, as well as some of the DVD lessons. Allie was a brood mare until she was 14 years old. She had seven foals. When her owners decided they no longer wanted to breed her, they took her away from the herd where she had been the lead mare, stuck her in a stall and broke her in saddle seat. I use the old-fashioned term "broke her in" rather than "started her under saddle", because it is a more accurate description of the process she experienced. 

 

Allie couldn’t cope. She became an anxious, hard-to-handle horse. Julie was taking lessons at the barn. To get more horse time she started spending time with Allie. By the time she realized she didn’t want to stay in a saddle seat barn, she also realized she couldn’t leave Allie behind.

 

The first time I met Allie I was giving a clinic at a friend’s arena. Allie was doing okay until the snow started to slide off the roof. If you live in a warm climate and have never been in an arena during a snow slide, this may not sound all that bad. You would be wrong. When the snow starts to slide, it goes on and on. It lets go in sections, without warning, and it takes forever to slide down off the peak.

 

Allie couldn’t cope. I took her from Julie and spent the next forty-five minutes teaching Allie the head lowering lesson so that I could get her calmed down enough to take her out of the arena and back to the barn. I couldn’t take her directly out of the arena because the driveway immediately outside the arena was lined with barbed wire. She was not familiar with this farm, and I was afraid that she might tear the lead out of my hands and go through the fence. I’ve seen what barbed wire does to horses, and I wasn’t prepared to risk it, so we stayed in the arena and Allie had the crash course in head lowering.

 

Julie was a novice horse owner. She had a very limited tool box to draw on. When she took Allie back to the barn where she boarded she worked on head lowering because that’s what we did in the clinic. But she began where she felt safe. She started in Allie’s stall. Then she moved out into the barn aisle immediately outside Allie’s stall. Then she inched her way down the aisle.

 

She was boarding at a barn where they did team penning. The cowboys used to tease her because she wasn’t riding. Julie ignored them. Eventually she made it out of the barn aisle and into the arena. Allie and Julie could cope, even when the cows were penned right next to the arena.

 

Julie and Allie became a beautiful riding team. When people watched them, the word they always used to describe them was serene. Allie was the horse everybody wanted. She was so beautiful and so deeply, deeply settled.

 

I mentioned the saddle seat for a reason. One year at the Equine Affaire I invited several of my local clients to bring their clicker-trained horses to participate in the demos I was giving. They had a grand time prepping their horses for the event. None of their horses were show horses so the environment was definitely much more than they were used to. 

 

They brought their training props with them to the Equine Affaire. In the morning they took their horses for a walk around the back parking area. They had the lead in one hand and a mat in the other. Any time one of the horses got a little worried, they would stop, put their mats down and let their horses stand on them with their heads down. They certainly presented a very different picture, this group of four horses all on mats calmly, deeply settling even with all the chaos around them.

 

One morning Julie took Allie out by herself. They were away from the crowds by the back barns. Allie was doing great until five or six horses came clattering around the side of the barn. They were being ridden saddle seat. 

 

Re-create the conditions and the behavior will occur again. That’s what we learn from behavior analysis.

 

Allie panicked. Suddenly, she was the nervous, anxious train-wreck of a horse that Julie had first met. Julie threw her mat down. Allie didn’t need any promptly. She put both front feet on the mat and dropped her head. The world stopped spinning away into chaos. Allie could take a deep breath and settle. She regained her equilibrium and became her safe, serene self again.

 

I tell this story to emphasize that the lesson I gave Allie in the arena with the snow coming off the roof simply got the process started. I showed Allie what the answer was, and I kept her safe in a bad situation. But it was Julie’s patient, systematic work that showed Allie this wasn’t about touching tarantulas. She truly could settle and relax using the head lowering lesson. It may have started as a demand cue because we were in a tough situation, but Julie’s systematic, patient clicker training transformed it into something very different.

 

With Allie I had no time to prepare her for the lesson. If the snow hadn’t started to slide on that cold February day, I would have worked her into the head lowering lesson much more systematically. That’s how you avoid "the tarantula dilemma". It is very much prepare, prepare, and head lowering will pop out of backing in a square.

 

But let me share some stills from the clips that I showed from the Lesson 3 DVD.