107. VIDEO: Dressage development

Dressage clicker-trainer Alex Kurland returns to the barn for a lesson day, and with his feet cured and comfy, Gus gets to take part.  We continue our shoulder-giving and neck-softening work, which helps equines step in a more relaxed and powerful way.  It encourages them to lift a little weight off their front ends, rocking them back a tiny bit onto their stronger (but often under-used) hind ends.  Gus is getting to be a pro, especially when we travel in a curve to the left; like many equines, he’s less athletic — stiffer? weaker? — when circling to his right.  After each arc around a cone or two, we return to home base:  a wooden mat in the circle’s center.

Here I’m sliding my front hand up along the lead rope, grasping the snap where it clips onto the halter, and then rotating my wrist just a bit to suggest that he flex his neck.  At the same time, my back hand touches his shoulder to cue him to move it out and away so that he can step under himself.  All we’re after is a centimeter here or there, an almost invisible soupçon of lift and arch.  But watch intently enough, and you’ll witness his entire walk improving, as the lightness in his front-end makes it easier for him engage his hind end and produce a more relaxed, swingy, and athletic stride.  Dressage donkey!

 

93. Virtual lesson day

If it weren’t for Covid-19, we’d be celebrating the end of winter by resuming the barn’s regular lesson days with dressage and clicker guru Alexandra Kurland.  Instead, we resort to info tech, which sucks but is better than nothing: we gather on Zoom for a video chat.

In spite of my low-rent wi-fi service and its sporadic momentary freeze-ups of audio or video or both, I glean several good tidbits of advice and inspiration for donkey training.  (And I’m eager to share them also with my friend  who has an Irish Sport Horse gelding and a Morgan mare.)  Here are just three:

1.  In response to Gay, who owns a magnificent jet-black Frisian and a magnificent pearl-grey Lippizaner — big boys who can get jealous when one of them is clicked and treated in the presence of the other — Alex suggests some ways to train them together.  They both like to stand on a mat, so one turn-taking game involves scattering six or eight mats, starting each horse on a mat, and then asking one horse to stay while sending or leading the other horse to an empty mat.  Upon arrival, the traveler gets clicked for stepping on the new mat and the waiter gets clicked for staying put.  A simultaneous cooperation game begins with two parallel lines of three or four mats each.  The handler(s) should lead or send each horses, both at the same time, to the next mat in his line.  If one horse barges ahead to his mat first, it doesn’t matter, because the click isn’t delivered until both horses land on the mats — that is, neither performer wins unless both performers work together.  Because making a bitey face at your little brother delays the reward, sibling rivalry diminishes, and therefore fearfulness of your big brother's bitey face diminishes too. This is fun for horses, dogs, cats, giraffes . . .

2.  For Julie, who is teaching her new Holsteiner the basics, like head-down, mat-standing, target-touching, etc., Alex gives a refresher course in front-leg flexion exercises.  It’s good for strength and limberness and balance, of course, but if done right it’s also good for the core-muscle development.  And done right means getting the horse to really unweight his front end and take more weight on his hind.  To start, Alex recomends placing both hands around the very top of the leg — almost in the horse’s armpit, as it were — and waiting to feel a slight lift, perhaps when the horse inhales.  Whenever and however it happens, click and treat that tiny lift.  Once the horse is lifting that shoulder a bit each time, move one hand to touch his leg just above the knee; reward when the knee bends up and forward to meet the hand.  Unlike a human’s lifting of the horse's foot, as for hoof-picking, this method ensures that the horse does all the work, and in the right way to help develop lovely and powerful dressagey self-carriage.  I can’t wait to re-teach the leg lift to Gus like this, for his orthopedic health and for the first step in our take-a-bow trick.

3. For desensitizing Gus to the spritz and smell of fly spray, Alex suggests dabbing myself (well, my clothing) each day with a different smell — not just fly-spray but perhaps citrus, spice, medicine, perfume . . .  I’ll be the same old me, still with ear-scrubs and games and an apronful of treats, but with various odors that he can learn to ignore.  Also she suggests goofing around with (e.g., touching, wearing, straddling, fetching) many different items only one of which is the fly-spray bottle.  By noodling with, say, a dog toy and an umbrella and a jar lid and a scarf and a sponge and a squirt-bottle (maybe one or two each day), Gus can get familiar with all of them pretty equally.  That way, the spray bottle won’t be presented only when we’re about to assail him with its startling noise and freaky stink.  I fear he might be too savvy an analytic thinker to fall for this ploy, but it does sound promising.  Anyway, the more objects he can interact with, the happier he is.  So I aim to gift him with a vast and motley embarras de richesses.

And we humans agree to connect again via Zoom in future, until such time as we dare to gather in person for hands-on lessons.  I’m drumming my fingers ve-e-ery patiently . . .

68. VIDEO: Partnering

Thanks to an impromptu lesson from barn-manager Sandy (a natural expert at human-horse body communication) and some diligent concentration on my positioning, Gus and I are already doing better at lungeing.  Today, we get some really good walk and trot in both directions — and with less futzing and kerfuffle, as I’m able to send him, and mostly keep him, both far enough away from me and traveling forward around the circle.  The key is to aim the lunge whip toward his hip to encourage forward movement and toward his shoulder to encourage distance from me.  But the trick is to notice when he’s just even thinking about slowing or drifting inward, and to adjust the whip position that very instant.  By moving the whip early and often, I keep him circling fairly consistently.

And by clicking for just a half-circle or so of good work, I can reinforce the correct lungeing and — just as importantly — I can forestall our slipping into ugly, confused, lurching, insistent, discombobulated, half-assed lungeing.

After our modest success on the lunge line, I unclip the lead and let Gus work at liberty.  From last month’s dressage-clicker lesson with Alex Kurland, a square of PVC pipes and traffic cones is set up in the arena.  At each corner, just outside the structure, a wooden mat beckons.  Gus remembers the lesson, and anyway he loves the interesting impedimenta (which he only bops and topples a tiny bit), so we play with it.  I walk just inside the pipes, and he walks alongside me but just outside them.  I do the maitre d’ hand gesture — and lately Alex has us using more of the hand that’s near the equine’s hip than the hand near his head, so as to drive him from behind rather than only luring him from in front — and Gus eagerly walks to the mat and plants his front feet.  At the corners where a turn will follow, my arms continue to direct for a moment, until he pivots in place.  He gets a click and treat for stopping on the mat, for pivoting, and for staying patiently on the mat when I fold my hands to cue "the-grownups-are-talking(-so-just-wait-politely)."  Then, from my rear arm, a subtle traffic-cop hand wave suffices to send him forward, while my maitre d’ arm indicates the way ahead. 

The dance-partnering quality of the exercise kinda grows on both of us.  Soon Gus is striding energetically from mat to mat, and before I know it he’s trotting — and eating it up with a spoon.  He tosses his head high as he trots off, then lowers it to his knees and tosses it again as he approaches the next mat, where he slams on the brakes with a glinty eye.  If donkeys could grin from ear to ear, he’d be doing it.  I let him trot and stop, trot and stop, a few times around the square.  Then I try changing our direction of travel, but that seems to ruin the mood.  He won’t trot, even if I ask and urge.  He does walk purposefully from mat to mat, but the game has lost its goofiness and glee.  I move him over to the pedestal for some pirouettes, and I run out of treats.  

As I lead him from the arena, he balks and won’t come along toward his stall.  The barn doors are closed, and grazing is out of the question in the snow-covered outdoors; there’s no place to go.  Except back to the arena, which is clearly Gus’s vote.  But without more treats, that’s a nonstarter.  So I ask and cajole and prod and pull, all in vain.  Luckily, our shared bucket of autumn apples still has a few little seconds in it, and when I offer one to Gus, he follows me for it.  Sour and hard and rusty it may be, but he seems to savor each mouthful.  I know it’s a piss-poor substitute for more game-playing and apron treats, but he makes do.  Like the loyal partner that he is.

67. The line on lungeing

In the unprecedented cold of this early November, Gus gets mighty frisky when I take his blanket off.  I unclip his lead line and let him roll, but he wants to trot and trot and trot, so I jog alongside him.  About halfway around the arena is enough for my old lungs, so each time I reach the brink of syncope, I click and we stop for a treat (and a gasp).  For self-preservation, I pick up a lunge whip and hold it straight out behind him, like a long extension of my arm, and with the other arm I give a maitre d’ this-way-sir gesture to invite him forward.  Remembering the good lungeing training that Sandy had given him years ago, he trots around me in a circle.  Every half lap or so, I click, causing him to turn on a dime toward the circle’s center and trot right up to me for his treat.

I’m so unused to lungeing that it makes me dizzy to step around in a small circle and watch Gus moving around me.  Again for abject self-preservation, with each click I spin quickly in the opposite direction to unwind my balance.  And as soon as I’ve completed my tight, fast turn, there he is, in my face, eagerly waiting for his treat.  But the counterspin does do the trick, keeping me on my feet and able to resume the circling for another few moments.  If my long-ago experience is any guide, I know that the more I practice, the less the twirling will unseat my otoliths and set me reeling.

In the past when trying to lunge Gus, I failed at keeping him far enough away from me or keeping him moving.  But I’ve studied the “horse speak” book’s excellent chapter on lungeing, and the dressagey walking-alongside exercises of recent months have helped hone my body language.  Now, by carefully keeping myself even with his hip, and by opening my maitre d’ leading arm nice and wide, I’m able to keep sending him around.  When I drift too far ahead — across from his shoulder or neck, say — he feels my body position blocking his forward motion and he immediately slows.   Between the two of us, we manage corporeally to signal and adjust and resignal to each other, and we achieve some good lungeing.

After a particularly steady lap, I click and treat with a peppermint.  Oh, baby, oh, baby!  Then when I step to his other side and send him around in the other direction, we achieve even more good lungeing.  Yay!  This means that this winter he can get warmed up without my running myself ragged.

Next we play some less active games, like basketball and pedestal and standing on the mat.  After half an hour, my feet and fingers are starting to freeze, so I end the session and lead Gus to the arena gate.  But Caesar does not wish to leave.  We debate the options with equal conviction.  I try luring him with an apple, but he backs up.  Since the barn doors are closed, I drape his lead-rope over his back and walk away.  I busy myself in his stall — including a very audible toss of treats into his feed bucket.  When I peek at him from his stall door, he hasn’t budged from standing in the middle of the barn aisle, but he's gazing hard at me.  I repeat the apple lure, to no avail, and again I retreat into his stall.  Finally I hear his little hooves slowly clop-clopping, and he walks into the stall with me.

He gets a nice rub-down, cooperates beautifully with hoof picking and re-blanketing, and just as I head for my car, Sandy arrives to serve dinner.  Da life of Riley.

65. VIDEO: Noodling

Using the outdoor arena again, Gus is less driven to sniff every single manure pile, and he’s less distracted after I let him sniff those he finds of interest.  He gives me even more, and more sustained, periods of walking in excellent form.  He paces right alongside me, needing just a few brief and subtle takes on the leadrope to keep him light and nimble as we make arcs and turns.  When I hold the lead lightly and openly, and when I match paces with him, his walk gets more limber, relaxed, energetic, and rhythmic.  Dressage donkey!

Along with walking over the wooden bridge, and dunking the basketball there (click here for video), we walk through the arch of breeze-blowing pool noodles, which have replaced the strips of tarp.  Gus was fine with the tarp, but he seems to actively enjoy the noodles, pausing and nosing at them:

56. VIDEO: Dressage donkey

Another clinic day with clicker-dressage expert Alex Kurland, and while lots of lessons are learned and progress made by six humans and seven equines, for me the banner headline of the day is that Gus is declared a bona fide dressage donkey.

After auditing last month’s clinic, I’ve been working with Gus on the main lesson of that day, shoulder yielding — at least in a rudimentary, ballpark sort of way.  And he’s catching on quickly and enjoying it.  But I know my cueing needs a lot of refining, so that’s what Alex offers us.  She confirms my fear of shoving him into a stiff or unbalanced shoulder-yield, and she steps us back to a preparatory exercise focused on the tiniest, subtlest little gives of the neck.

The cue is the same — sliding down the inside rein and taking it up just a little, while using my “minuet hand” to touch or brace his shoulder if it starts to fall into the circle — but the goal is only a teensy softening of jaw and neck, a hint of releasing, a soupçon of acknowledgment.  All without any loss of energy or ground-speed as he continues walking along.  I peer intently at the faint vertical wrinkle behind his jaw, and the instant I see a little increase of crease, I drop the rein and click, following up with a treat.

And doesn’t Gus turn out to be a champ?  Alex praises the quality of his walk, his responsiveness, and the lightness with which he carries himself.  She notes how much those are improved since she saw him a couple of months ago.  And she reassures me that I'm clicking at the correct moments.

I mention my distant hope that I could joshingly call him a dressage donkey one day, and she replies that he already is one.  She figures he’s executing elementary dressage movement as adroitly as any equine classmate.  I am one proud auntie, trainer, and partner.

We practice this detailed exercise around and around in circles, and Gus only loses focus once or twice, upon which I walk him off the circle briefly and then return.  After close to an hour I end the lesson (with internal fanfares and confetti), but Gus refuses to exit the arena.  No wonder, given the quantity of clicks and treats he was earning, plus the limelight shed by his human spectators, plus his knowledge that some other equine will soon take his place and get all the fun.  I haul and cajole, but he plants his feet and leans back.  Finally, Sandy shoos him from the rear, and I wrestle him out the door.  He cooperates nicely once we leave the arena behind, and I strew imaginary palm leaves in his path on the way back to his stall.

50. Quadruped cotillion

Alex teaches us a dressage exercise that relies on what she calls our “minuet hand” — that’s the hand nearest the horse as you walk alongside it.  When you pivot a bit toward the horse to use both hands on the rope or rein, your formerly outside hand reaches forward to become the front, guiding hand nearest the halter or bridle, while your erstwhile inside hand swings behind a bit, to operate at the horse’s withers or shoulder or belly.  That rear hand is like the inviting hand offered by a periwigged courtier to his brocaded consort as they promenade in a Viennese minuet.  It's also like the hand placed behind a dance partner:  assisting the other hand and the feet, it helps to fine-tune the dance movement.

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?

29. VIDEO: Training clinic, part 2

After Alex practices with me being the horse and being the handler — she’s an excellent teacher, patient and kind, eloquent verbally as well as physically, and adept at pacing her comments and demos so the student can best digest them — she snaps the lead-line onto Gus's halter.  (She’s worked with donkeys before, and lately she’s adopted several goats whom she’s training to lead as well.)  For me, stepping back and observing her and him from a third-person perspective is really useful.  I get to see his frequent little hesitations and distractions as he walks.  And I’m glad to find that Alex’s answer is what I’ve been doing:  accepting, waiting until he’s ready again, and walking on.  But I notice an extra technique that I need to adopt:  she gestures with her hand like a maitre d’ to invite and guide his movement forward.  It works like a charm to help him step off promptly and without rubbernecking at every stray leaf or pigeon.  

She does a little "dancer's arms" with Gus and encounters the same issue I've had: a hand at his girth or shoulder sends him backward rather than forward.  I've been touching his hip instead, as that seems to send him forward more reliably, but Alex often advocates waiting and letting the animal figure it out.  With Gus, when he steps backward, she moves with him and doesn't change her cues, because he's clearly not upset by that but he needs time to figure out what she's asking for.  Eventually he offers a step forward, and he immediately gets a click.  The success lets him learn how to respond to that cue, without my having to dream up a different cue.  Smart lady, smart donkey.

Alex also notices my sloppy and unbalanced footwork, so when she hands me the lead rope, she suggests I make an effort to roll each foot, walking more deliberately heel-to-toe. Because Gus responds so well to matching paces, I know her point is important for us:  it could improve the focus and rhythm in his hooves if I could demonstrate more care and clarity in my feet.  I resolve to practice this whenever I’m moving with him.

Alex walks Gus around and between several mats, asking him to stay by her side rather than tacking over to one of them.  He knows that standing on mats will guarantee clicks and treats, so they’re hot items for him.  When he walks nicely around them, she leads him onto a mat as a reward.  

With some of today’s horse pupils, she introduces a mat-to-mat exercise that I also want to try with Gus.  One of its goals is to help the horse practice making turns in good balance.  She clicks the horse for staying on the mat, but she reaches under and past its chin to deliver the treat, so it turns its head away from her just a bit to take the food.  At the same time, she steps closer to its neck, filling the space left by its turning head.  A couple more of these small head-away moves serve to prime the horse’s posture for taking a step and turning its body — and the human comes along, leading it off the mat and toward another mat that’s over to the side.  This way, the horse decides when and how to adjust its balance front to back, as well as side to side, in order make the turn in comfortable self-carriage.  It’d be nice if Gus could teach this to me, but at least I can try teaching it to him.

19. Footwork

A dressage training technique involves walking alongside and guiding the horse’s every step by way of what some call “dancer’s arms,” using one hand at the girth or haunch and another at the halter or bridle.  With Augustus Little Caesar, my arms don’t have far to reach —  barely shoulder-width apart, rather than dramatically outspread.  

Since his response to my touching his girth is to walk backward, not forward, I need to tap his hip instead.  As long as I also twist my body to face forward, he’s catching on to walking along in the frame I’m setting with my arms.  In this he’s a precise and patient teacher, helping me rate how fast I should go, how to block him from rushing too quickly ahead, how to keep him moving but not nag at his girth, etc., etc.  The idea is also for the two of us to match paces (something horses apparently do with one another, as a togetherness gesture), and I’m fumbling a bit with that too:  Gus not only takes short, fast steps but he often changes speeds slightly.  Luckily I remember how to skip.

After we practice this a little and then return to his paddock, I silently take one exaggerated step toward him and he backs up one step. When I then take one exaggerated step back, he comes forward one.  We're so attuned that we do this three times in a row, and his only reward is my turning half-away and exhaling.  I'm so rapt that I inadvertently snub Barbara as she's turning her Henry into the paddock and trying to converse with me.  Vital affairs to discuss?   Sorry, gotta play patty-cake with my donkey.