Alex's idea with this exercise is to prepare the horse for lateral movements by encouraging it to yield or lift its shoulder a bit during a turn. The minuet hand is placed on the horse’s shoulder to help send that shoulder away onto an arc, or at least to keep it from falling inward. Her method is to slide one's front hand up the rope toward the halter clasp while sliding the back hand down the rope to the shoulder, to create a two-point cue for the horse. To start, she clicks and treats after just one or two steps, the instant its shoulder even begins to yield.
With an already flexible horse, it takes only the subtlest touch. With a thickly built young Lipizzaner, Alex postpones the exercise altogether and works instead on simply teaching him to lift one shoulder while stationary. She’s so minutely observant and her clicks are so well timed that she begins by pressing lightly with one finger on the front of the shoulder and rewarding as the muscle invisibly twitches or flexes. A minute’s worth of repeating the finger cue, and the horse is consistently lifting his hoof a tiny bit each time. A minute more, and he’s holding his foot in the air long enough for Alex to move her hand down and cup his knee for an instant before she clicks. A minute after that, he’s raising his leg reliably so that she can cup his knee in one hand and his hoof in the other. (This horse is fine with having his hooves picked, but here’s a clear demonstration of how easy it can be for a trainer or farrier to teach foot-lifting if a horse needs it.) For this Lipizzaner, after he learns that he can unweight his shoulders, he’ll benefit from the yielding and turning lesson.
In our lesson, we each practice the rope-handling, which is harder than Alex makes it look. She coaches us, and I think I pretty much get it: the timing of sliding my two hands apart, turning my own body a bit, helping the horse’s shoulder move outward as his head moves inward to form an arc, etc., etc. When I try it on Gus, though, I have to reduce the distance between my hands, since his neck and body are so short. I still make a wide slide-apart move so that he sees and feels it, but then I bring my back hand forward again, leaving a droop in the rope, to touch his shoulder.
A few days later, I'm still fumbling a lot, but Gus definitely digs this exercise. Part of his joy is the wooden mat used as a home base in the center of a circle of miniature traffic cones. We walk out around a cone or two to execute a shoulder-give, and then arc back in to return to the mat. He adores the mat. There we practice what Alex calls “the grownups are talking,” which simply asks the horse to stand patiently and keep his face out of the human’s way, with clicks and treats provided every one second, then every couple of seconds, to build duration. Sandy had already taught this to Gus, but reminders are always useful. The classic cue is to fold one’s hands at one’s waist, and when Gus sees me do that he immediately faces straight ahead and stands still. Soon I invite him (with my empty maitre d’ hand ahead of him) to walk off the mat, and then I ask him (with my rope-holding minuet hand at his shoulder and my formerly-maitre-d'-but-now-clasp-holding hand near his halter) to walk in an arc. Wait, do I pat my head and rub my belly, or rub my head and pat my belly?
No comments:
Post a Comment