Compliance

So I processed four horses today. Normally I say I worked four but that's not really how it went. I tacked up Lady. Alyssa was there and observed that she only dances and weaves when I step away from her, as she put it, she's respectfully girthy. That seems to be exactly it, so I give her a minute to do that and then up another hole. I'd like to get it to the point where I feel comfortable going up two holes at a time more often. I did it a little today but I really dont want to push this girl, she used to be girthed up really hard/fast by her trainer's assistant. Robert say's she's flipped over backwards in the cross ties from being girthed up too fast. I took her out to lunge, she wasn't as sluggish as before but still lame, her right fore looked like the one she was having trouble with, but it was her right fore that she wouldn't pick up, and when she did she leaned on me. That seems to indicate that the left fore is the trouble. More hoof dressing, untack, put her back. Robert wants to start her on iodine and formaldehyde for those hooves, see if she has a case of what I like to call "invisible thrush." Sometimes Reno starts limping and we declare (By 'we' I mean Robert) that its either thrush or a stone bruise, we keep him in his stall and we squirt some iodine and formaldehyde on his hooves until he stops limping a few days later.

Papillon, shockingly enough, was sound. So I went to go clean out her hooves, which were packed with mud like cement. I'm not sure if I just assumed there was a frog there and wound up carving out a frog shaped thing in the mud, or if indeed the top half of her frog came off (this would not be without precedent for her.) I know she has pretty bad thrush (anaerobic bacterial infection), or at least, very fragrant thrush if you know what I mean. I swear that saturday she was fine, no thrush, but time makes fools of us all, I suppose. So we put formaldehyde and iodine on that too. I just wanted to see if she would start limping after we cleared the mud out of her hooves. No, she was fine. I will say though, we tested this on the outdoor arena after some light rain, so the ground was just about perfect for horsey comfort. Better than the sand indoor arena, which is where we normally look. Anyway, Robert said to put her back, and I concur; I dont ride lame horses, and I've been given no reason to believe I should be ok with riding a horse with thrush.


I took Dylan out (before the mares actually, but no matter.) He really seems to be getting it now. I took him out to the far end of the arena, and he walked out on his circle, slowly and too close to me but he walked all the way around the circle, generally. He wanted to sniff the ground as he walked. I don't normally mind this, I think they stretch their neck muscles out nicely, which is good. The problem is that if they dont have the right distance from me, they tend to step on the lunge line. A few horses realize this is basically their own fault, and they look indignant but dont get too upset. He's not one of those. Today, the two times I took him out, we worked on associating verbal commands, and gestures, with actions. I said "out" and I pointed my finger, when he didn't do anything I took a nice aggressive step towards him, or flick the whip in the general direction of his barrel, or poke him with the handle of the whip. It depends on the situation. He figured that out, I think. Sometimes he wasn't paying any attention though. When I know a horse isn't paying attention to me, sometimes I'm torn as to what to do. Frequently I just behave as though I know they heard me and take the next step to correct the behavior, and if they want to be in the loop next time, they can listen. Sometimes I repeat myself until I think they've heard me. I dont do the latter more than twice, because its hard to be sure they didn't hear you, and they've got to learn that I still expect them to do things whether they want to pay attention or not. Anyway, I'm mostly pretty pleased with his progress.

He is going to need to learn more about voice command though. I was asking him to walk and to stop and he really doesn't get it. That was another moment when I was a little torn. Normally when a horse doesn't slow down or stop when I ask I have two responses, depending on a variety of factors. One is to ask them again more firmly, shaking the line, if necessary pulling on the line. The other is to give up on asking them to slow down, let them keep going until they try to slow down themselves, and then ask them to keep going. The idea is to give them the option to do what they want or what I want, and this sets them up to regret doing the thing they wanted to do, and to be grateful to me when I let them slow down when I want them to. He doesn't have any clue what I mean, so I knew that the second option wouldn't be good, but I don't know if he'd learn much from the escalation. He's sortof an experiment, since he came here supposedly having been lunged, but Robert said he couldn't get him out on a circle, and I'm betting he was put in a round pen, incited to run around, had plenty of fun running around, didn't have a clue what he was supposed to be learning. Annabelle, a horse from last summer, had very minimal lunging but she was a very different animal.

I decided to escalate the rope shaking very very slowly and I kept repeating the cue "Dylan aaaaaand waaaaaalllk." I try to sound really sleepy when I do that, I can say "aaaand" and yawn at the same time pretty convincingly. I dont know that horses actually know that a human yawning means they're sleepy, but I think it cues other postures in me that signal that I'm calm and slowing down. He eventually walked and I stopped making noise and shaking the lead line. He'll either learn from that or I'll go back to my usual tactics.

Robert is very fond of his behavioral scale for horses. A 1 on this scale is an extremely compliant horse and a 9 is an extremly non-compliant horse. This, as he explains, is not a good or bad thing, just different. A 9 is just as hard to train as a 1. Compliant horses want to do what they're told, sortof, basically they're not thinking for themselves very hard so they're pretty susceptible to your influence. The problem is that they're not thinking for themselves so they're susceptible to other influences too, they get distracted, they have a hard time suppressing their fight or flight instincts. At the same time they have a hard time reasoning about how to keep themselves safe because they are reacting much more quickly than they are thinking. They are frequently very fearful at the lowest ends of the scale. Further up the scale, around 3 and 4, you get pretty nice kiddie horses. If you are calm they are calm, if you are agitated then they are agitated too. They're willing animals and what some people I know refer to as "good packers", they'll carry you around wherever you point them.

The 9 horses know exactly what they want to be doing and it aint what you want them to be doing. They dont like you, they dont respect you, they want to do their own thing and they'll fight you for the right to do it. These are horses that can actively try to hurt you, they can be conniving, and kinda scary. A little further down the scale around 7 and 6, you get good competition horses (or at least I think so). These guys learn to respect you, they want to win, they know what they're job is, they want to do it and they're not always really happy if you get in their way. If you're confident then they're confident in you and they do fine, if you're nervous they may want to run the show for you which can be problematic. I love the non-compliant horses. There's something sortof thrilling about staring down an angry mare, watching her size you up and then decide you're not worth messing with. You win their respect and they'll do anything for you. Lose it and you'd better get out of their way. Dylan seems like a more compliant type maybe a 3.5 or 4. He really wants to come into the circle and be my buddy. I think Alyssa is better with the compliant types.

Keno I think is a pretty compliant type. His problem is that he was taught to misbehave. The little girl, who was sure she knew everything there ever was to know about horses from what I hear, got pretty scared anytime he did anything bad, ie rear, buck, roll, jig, etc. She didn't tell anyone she just put him back in his stall whenever he did anything. Thats a really really fast way to train a problem horse. Compliant horses can be very reward seeking, so Keno learned to look for a way to take advantage of the situation. It wasn't malicious really, he was just looking for the fastest way to be rewarded. Now he's pretty sure the best thing to do is cooperate. And he's very happy to cooperate, he just looks like the happiest little guy cantering around with Alyssa.

Compliant types misbehaving makes me a little crazy. I can't really wrap my mind around it. I know what defiant horses are thinking and I know I'm going to win them over. I have no such faith when it comes to these lower end of the scale guys. Confused I'm ok with. Its not my favorite but I can work with confused. I'm definitely handing Dylan off to Alyssa as soon as I get him lunging and long lining (those are the big L's in Robert's training program, a horse needs to lead well, lunge well, and understand long lines well, before they are trained to drive or ride.)

In case anyone is curious, and Alyssa should post her scores for comparison, I would rank the stoneybrook horses as follows:

Lady: 7.5
Papillon: 6.5
Star: 6
Keno: 3.5
Reno: 4
Colonel: 3
Luca: ?

I also too Star out today. She was much better. She was given many fewer reasons to be upset, but I think she was also just plain better. I took her out on a hack. That went OK. The only reason we managed to get out into the field is because Alyssa went out to mark a hole in the ground so we followed her out there. Star was basically rushing around everywhere. She would stop, sortof, but not for very long. Then some dogs came into the field. She was pretty difficult to control after that but she was trying to be good, I think. She likes me a lot but sometimes she disagrees with my decisions. She really wanted to run home, but she really didn't want to throw her head up to protest being told to slow down, lest she bang into that running martingale again. It was an interesting ride that way. Anyway, we did that one little lap, with a brief interlude of running and ineffectually bucking because of the dogs. On a side note, Star seems to be convinced that when long grass is knocked over or pressed down a little bit, it becomes an impassable barrier. Papillon just bull's through it like its not even there. Then again, Papillon would have wanted to run over and kill those dogs. Very different mares, love 'em both, of course.