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?

44. Slow comeback

Three days after the violent accident with Gus, I go to the barn to reassure him that I haven’t inexplicably disappeared from his life.  I’m still woozy and weird, so I stay outside his paddock fence and feed him chunks of apple through the bars of the gate.  He’s restless and fussy, pacing back and forth, all but shouting at me to get him the hell outta there.  But I’m too feeble to handle him safely.  I give him my regrets, scratch his neck, and leave him to his ennui and frustration.

Two days after that, I return.  It’s a hot, sunny day and I figure I can poddle around well enough to bring him into the coolth of the indoor arena for some lazy, hands-off trick-training.  When I arrive, though, he’s not stewing in his usual paddock.  Because it’s a weekend when Sandy can stay on the premises all day to round him up if he escapes, she has turned him out in the wide, multi-horse paddock with all the good grass.  Will he want to come play with me, or will he blow me off to continue grazing?

I take his halter and walk way, way out through the grass to fetch him.  I give him my signature whistle, but far from stirring him to bray and run to my arms, as he usually does —

 — today it barely elicits an ear-twitch.  At one point, he raises his head and gives me a look, but he ponders my approach, weighing its value, for only a second or two before he opts for more munching.  

Just to be sure that he's sure, I feed him a treat and slip the halter on, and I lead him toward the gate in a very clear attitude of questioning and offering, not commanding or expecting.  He kinda comes along and kinda resists, but soon he pulls enough to tell me that he wants to stay out here.  So I promptly unbuckle his halter, give him a farewell treat, and walk back.  It’s a rare privilege for him to graze in this pasture, and I’m in no condition to provide him with a training session that he’d enjoy more.

                                   ___________________________________


The next day, my noggin is feeling appreciably better.  I load my apron with the carrot and apple chunks I’d saved from yesterday, and this time the sound of my car arriving is enough to get Gus hee-hawing.  He’s back in his own boring paddock, it’s late afternoon, and he’s ready for some diversion.  I try not to be too gingerly around him (I mean, what are the chances of lightning striking twice?), but I’m relieved that he walks politely into the arena and behaves nicely in everything we do.

I take off his lead rope and we walk over a few ground rails together.  I send him to his pedestal and he pirouettes.  We walk to a wooden mat and practice standing still on it before I invite him with slow, grand arm gestures to walk around to the next mat.  He stays with me for awhile, but then the siren song of the arena dirt lures him away to inspect and sniff all over.  I reattach the lead line and he willingly rejoins our walking and mat-standing. 

I also practice asking for the backup the way clinician Alex Kurland had showed me.  I slide my hand up the lead rope to the clasp, and I turn my arm to take more control of the rope right under his halter, but I only lightly suggest a backward pressure.  And I wait.  Eventually he does start backing, and I immediately release the rope pressure.  If he stops, I ask again.  After two tries, I can keep him backing for a few paces just by “pushing” the loose belly of the rope a bit under his chin.  Much kinder and gentler than poking my finger on his shoulder and leaning my weight into his halter.

We end on this high note, and he barely tugs at all as I lead him to our usual grazing field.  I make a point of standing farther away and farther back, but nothing happens to startle him anyway.  Without meaning to (or maybe it’s a deliberate plan?), he eats his way toward the unmown grass against the doorway of the small barn, and in he walks.  He looks with interest at the first few stalls and tack trunks as we stroll down the barn aisle, but then he stops dead.  Is he just now realizing where he is?  Or does he suspect a trap?  I manage to keep him going out the far door, and only a blip of resistance darkens his brow as we head for his own barn.

He walks right into his stall and behaves like a gentleman, even when his grain arrives.  I groom the bejeepers out of him, rolling up wad after wad of loose hair.  I pick out his mud-impacted feet.  And I leave — him to his freshly bedded stall and hay tub, me to my dinner at home.

41. Hairy behavior

Gus is shedding.  By the handful, bucketful, and mattressful.  

While he’s grazing after our sessions, I have nothing better to do, so I brush him steadily.  Usually I just use my fingers, rubbing him in circles and against the grain and up and down, shaking clumps of hair into the wind every few seconds.  Or if I remember to bring his gear out with me beforehand, I use a soft rubbery thing with big knobs to scrub the hair loose, then I scrape him with a hoop-shaped and slightly saw-toothed shedding blade, and then I finish with a regular brush.  But really I never finish.  No matter how many times I go over him and no matter how much hair comes out, the same amount is yielded by every next pass of a hand or brush.

(My dog, a Heinz 57 mix heavy on the hound and German shepherd, is the same right now.  I scrub and rub, and I rake with a shedding blade, and I brush and brush, and the quantity of released hair never diminishes.  Ditto for the hair still coating him:  he should be bald by now, but he’s no less shaggy than before.)

Gus’s bison brow is thinning, and his chest is smoothing out.  But his lush crop of belly fur still billows in the breeze, and the hair on his back piles up in swirls and rivulets.  I notice all these details, because our de-shedding sessions run to 30 and 40 minutes these days.  That’s how long it takes him to maybe slow down in his munching, and that’s when my attempt to terminate the session is less likely to result in knock-down, drag-out resistance.  

I’m gratified to report that the over-and-under lead-rope technique is still 100% effective at preventing any knock-down drag-out escapes.  Sandy has told me that it’s worked for her too.  Thing is, in operant conditioning like clicker-training, there’s a phenomenon called an extinction burst.  When an animal comes to expect that a behavior yields a desirable result and then finds that it no longer does, a common response is to intensify that behavior — to demand, goddammit, that it work as expected.  (If a toddler’s fussing has cued its parents to deliver a snack, but then they start ignoring it, the fussing may burst into a tantrum.)  If the trainer remains firm and consistent, this behavior burst precedes the extinction — the giving up and abandonment — of the behavior.  

While I’m braced for this with Gus's escaping the lead line, lately I’m beginning to hope we’ll get the extinction without the burst.  He does still yank and shove, and now he’s trying the signature donkey move of refusing to move.  But the new rope attachment has so far risen to every challenge and enabled us to get him from Point A to Point B no matter what.  And the what hasn't yet escalated into anything I'd call a burst.

He’s a smart guy.  He’ll learn that resistance is futile, and it’s easier to accede to his alien overlords.  Well . . . he would if he were a horse, or a dog, or a cow . . . but he’s not.  What we may have here is an 800-pound honeybadger with hooves.

39. VIDEO: Identity crisis?

A hot, humid day and the still-furry Gus has been braising in his pasture, where the trees aren’t yet leafed out enough to cast much shade.  He’s happy to accompany me into the dim, cool arena.

We practice our walking in unison, and he gets into the groove nicely.  I use my maitre d' gestures (I still feel a tad ridiculous making them, but I can’t argue with the results) to cue our turns, and soon we're a pair.  The more our footfalls sync up, the more his neck relaxes and his head sways (and his lower lip dangles) as he plods along rhythmically.  

Next he gamely fetches the traffic cone and brings it the whole width of the arena to place it in my hand; he also carries it onto the pedestal with brio.  We walk from wooden mat to wooden mat, where he practices standing, square and firm and patient, until I invite him to move on.  When the treats are gone, he comes compliantly into his stall for grooming and hoof-picking.  He’s as sweet as sugar.

Now I rig up his over-and-under lead rope and take him out for some grazing around the paths and paddock edges.  He bulls his way forward more than I appreciate, but I manage to insist that he graze only where I want him to.  For 20 minutes, he tears up and sucks in grass like a high-powered Electrolux.  

When I ask him to come away, of course he refuses, and we engage in the customary tugs of war and sumo matches.  But as it did last time, the cinching action of the lead rope around his halter now gives me a fighting chance.  When I let out too much rope and he pulls to run away, that seems to give me more leverage, rather than less: his muzzle gets squeezed harder as the distance between us widens.  When I keep the rope short — for frog-marching him forward — and he counters by plowing into me bodily, a yank or two pinches his nose enough to make him stop.  He can drag and barge and twist and shove, but as long as I struggle back, he can’t wrest the rope out of my hand

Today, for the first time ever, he tries repeatedly but doesn’t escape even once.  His whole world-view may be shaken and reeling.  He might lose his marbles.  He might spiral into donkey depression.  He might need relationship counseling.

Or probably not.  He’s almost theatrically indignant as we make our ugly way back to his paddock.  But he seems unbowed as I remove his halter and scratch his face where the straps were.  He even deigns to play a little I-step-you-step with me, and I give him a final treat and pat-pat as I leave.

37. Push-me-pull-you

Four blog-following friends come to the barn for a donkey-trick demo.  Grateful for the company, Gus eats up their pat-pats and greetings with a spoon, and in return he gives them spoonfuls of cuteness and charm.  We walk around the arena, retrieve a traffic cone, tilt a chair upright, bop the beachball . . .  At one point, during his pirouettes on the pedestal, he pointedly looks over at the guests to make sure his adoring fans are sufficiently adoring him.

After this love fest, I can tell that Gus is distracted, gazing out the arena doors at horses in the pastures.  Eating grass.  Must.  Eat.  Grass.  So I cut our session short and we adjourn to the driveway edges for some grazing.  Before we leave the arena, though, I rig his lead rope for extra control, threading it through both sides of his halter, so that a pull on the rope will tighten it around his whole muzzle, exerting pressure over his nose and under his chin.  Heh, heh, I chortle to myself: look at me, outsmarting this ornery ass. 

And the plan works when he tries to trundle on down the driveway and I’m able to haul him back in the other direction.  Now I can convince him to graze where I want him to graze.  I let him loiter around the geldings’ paddock; they oblige by congregating at the fence to touch noses with him, and then everybody grazes, sharing a mood of sunshiny togetherness.  For awhile, Gus leaves off grazing and just stands and watches the geldings — more togetherness.  After 20 minutes of his alternately chowing down and casually communing with his posse, I propose that we move along.
 
Now the muzzle-snare rope system gets a thorough field-testing.  Gus cranks his neck and tries to march away, but I resist, and he grudgingly relents.  By way of thanks, I exhale and whisper sweet nothings and scratch his withers.  He ducks his head and tries to squeeze under (or simply break) a fence board in order to enter the geldings’ paddock.  I’m able to pull him off, delivering a sharp yank with the rope to indicate my displeasure.  When I try to walk on again, he drags me right back and half under the fence, but again I manage to haul him away.  Clearly the wraparound lead line is leveling the playing field for us. 

Right about here is where a headstrong horse would surrender.  But Gus ain’t no horse.  Gus escalates.  I can almost see his brain make the decision to grit his teeth and suffer the discomfort, and a half-second later he barges into me, pulls past, and overpowers my grip on the rope.  Once again, sheer will and weight simply trump all modes of human opposition.

He canters away, but just as he tries again to scoot under the fence, I wave my spare lead line and yell, chasing him away.  I begin plotting ways of herding him into a barn, any barn, in hopes of shutting him into a stall, any stall.  (Fifty years ago, we might let Gus have the run of the farm, which is really all he desires.  But these days the road is full of cars and trucks, and the humans have day jobs off site.  It’s not a safe world for independent donkeys.)  Recognizing the yells and curses that Gus so universally inspires, Sandy comes to my aid.  I lead him, with grim determination and the rope held short, while she shoos him from behind.  Outnumbered and outflanked, he walks up the path and into his paddock.

There I thank him with a handful of apple cubes, and I talk to him nicely as I remove his halter.  But he’s holding a grudge: in no uncertain terms, he turns his back on me and stalks away.

36. Head ’em up!

For grass, Gus even misbehaves with Sandy.  The other day, he pulled away from her a few times, but she didn’t just curse and walk after him.  She cursed and chased him.  She yelled and waved her arms and ran at him, so that he couldn’t stop to graze — he got no yummy reward for his escapes.  Eventually, he galloped right into his paddock and up to the back fence, watching and panting as the gate was slammed shut.  I like the sound of that.

Today we work in the outdoor arena — walking over the bridge and through the tarp strips, standing on the wooden mat, walking in zigzags as I indicate each direction change with my arms in maitre d’ pose — but even during this work, Gus tries to pull away a couple of times, drawn by the grass beckoning just outside the arena fence.  I get him to comply nicely, if lazily, with a few exercises, and then I take him grazing. But first I snap on his heavy, long lead rope and tuck his smaller, lighter one into my pocket.

After 30 minutes of blissful grazing (his busy mouth doesn't miss a beat as I lift his feet to pick his hooves), I decide it’s time to quit.  He’s pretty sated, so he accedes until we near his paddock gate.  He tries to pull away, but I yank back in time to dissuade him.  He curls his neck and barges into me, trying to knock me over backward, but I dance and dodge.  And now he resorts to sheer force, trotting away too hard and too fast for me to resist.  I whap his shoulder with a handful of looped rope, I curse him loudly, and he departs.  (By the way, now, for the first time ever, Gus poops in my presence.  Is he so revved up that his sphincters loosen?  Has all that fresh grass stimulated peristalsis?  Is it a more deliberate strategy to jettison extra ballast while making a run for it?)

But before he can stop and lower his head to graze, I unfurl the smaller lead line, wave it around my head, and run toward him, bellowing imprecations like a sailor.

He startles and scoots down a lane between two paddocks, behind which he runs into deep, soft mud.  Mired to his knees, he makes a U-turn.  I step aside to let him by (and to see if he’ll surrender as he draws near me), but he gallops faster past me and zooms down the driveway.  I stop chasing, and Gus stops running in order to greet the geldings through their fence.  I tuck the whippy lead line behind my back and jog in a big arc to approach him from the side so that I can chase him back up the driveway and away from the street.

But he lets me take up his lead rope, and he walks with me toward the barns. (He's stuffed with so many carrot and apple cubes from our training, topped by so much rich grass, that he's practically waddling.)  He offers a couple of desultory tugs to veer away from me, but I keep inviting him forward with one arm and, with the other arm, swinging the extra rope behind me to tickle his hindquarters.  Knowing his paddock gate is latched, since his pasturemate Henry is inside, and knowing I can't trust Gus to stay put while I unlatch the gate, I suggest we walk to his stall instead.  He knows a few things too, and one of them is that dinnertime is nigh, so he marches into his stall without demur.  (Gus is such an easy keeper that his dinner is a very scant fistful of grain; Sandy throws it into his bucket hard so it’ll sound like a larger amount.  As all his bigger neighbors get grain at the same time, Gus seems to anticipate and relish his token crumbs as much as they do their bucketsful.)

Lesson learned by Gus:  running away will no longer yield extra grazing, just extra running. Lesson learned by me:  when Gus gives me hell, I can give him some hell of my own.  

34. “You can’t make me”

A cold spell descends, so I take Gus into the indoor arena.  He hasn’t been there for three weeks or so, and he’s enthralled by the new data:  leaves that have blown in, various horses’ spoor (both prints and scat), new bits of pigeon down, etc., etc., etc.  But we manage to focus on some walking in hand, and Gus is delighted to return to tricks such as pirouetting around the pedestal and tilt-a-chair.  We end with some standing on mats, which seems to interest him a lot, and as we exit I tell him what a stupendous donkey he is.

He instantly proves me wrong by digging in his heels when I try to lead him toward his paddock.  He sees Barbara grazing Henry nearby, and he wants some grazing too.  The swaths of emerald-green spring grass look succulent even to me, so to him they must be irresistible.  To get at them, he hauls me forcibly to the edge of the big pasture and thrusts his head to the ground.  Well, I rationalize, he needs some grazing, and afterward I’ll get him into his paddock.

I give him 15 minutes of nonstop noshing and then suggest that we move on.  He begs to differ, pulling away and trotting onto the lawn of the barn owner’s house, a forbidden area.  I notice that, in heading there, he shows me a swish of his tail. As the “horse-speak" author Sharon Wilsie points out, a tail-swish is a common goodbye signal among horses.  Per Wilsie’s recommendation, I routinely give Gus this signal, by swishing my arm behind my back, to let him know I’m leaving for the day.  But it can also signify a blow-off, a dismissive back of the hand.  Which is pretty clearly what Gus is sassing me with right now.
 

I scrape up my dignity and quietly retrieve him, but my request to come along is again rejected: he pulls, I pull back, and he pulls harder until I’m running (read: being dragged) alongside him, impotently shouting “No!”  I angrily punch his neck, but that leaves my lead-line grip one-handed.  He freakin’ wins.  I toss the line over his back and call him bad names.  As he canters off — flipping me the bird with a tiny back-kick? — he draws three big geldings into his powerful magnetic field of naughtiness.  Gus runs the outside of their fence and they follow along the inside, fairly chortling in their glee.  He really is a pain in the ass, of the ass, and by the ass . . .

I blame myself for not switching from his light lead-line snapped on the underside of the halter to his heavy rope snapped on the over-the-nose side ring, and for using up all my carrots and apples in the arena.  I should know better than to go up against Gus with no physical leverage and no gustatory enticement.  So I turn my back on him and return to the barn to fetch his other rope and some horse cookies.

On this third approach, once he feels the weight of the bigger line and gets a whiff of the oat-and-peppermint treats, he’s all mine.  He forsakes the grass, abandons his ego trip, and follows me like a puppy.  I match his paces as we walk, which helps get him into the zone; I ask him to stop and walk on and back up once or twice; and I bung him into his paddock without further ado.  There we play some I-step-you-step, which earns him the rest of the horse cookies, and we part on the friendliest of terms.

30. Change of venue

The day after the clinic, the weather is suddenly warm again, and the general vibe around the farm is lazy and noodling.  One or two people are hand-grazing their horses, and other horses are dozing in their paddocks.  

Now that the snow is gone, I can lead Gus around behind a big derelict barn where two horse-trailers are parked.  His experiences with trailering are limited to the two or three times that Sandy has switched barns, and, like his trip from his previous owners’ place, they were ugly ordeals requiring tranquilizers.  My hope is that we can walk by these trailers a jillion times, then look inside them a half-jillion times, then get his front feet into one of them another quadrillion times, and maybe even stand inside it a few elephantillion times, so that perhaps eventually he’d find it less horrible to ride in one.  Anyway, it’s a pleasant perusal of the premises and good lead-line practice for us both.

At one point we find a fallen pine branch and he veers over to chew on its long, dark-green needles.  ??!?  Donkeys don’t eat turpentine, I tell him, and we move along.


Later, after I give him a few minutes of nibbling teensy green sprigs under the dead turf, I ask him to walk again and he accedes.  Until.  Suddenly he cranks his head and pulls to run away from me.  I dig in my feet and shout “Nope!” in exactly the same tone that his neck tends to use when he resists me.  Exerting equal and opposite force, we’re statues at an impasse for a few seconds (which feel like minutes), before he relents and moves toward me, and we walk along as if nothing had happened.  These stationary tantrums are becoming rarer and these surrenders commoner, both of which I'm glad of.

Next I bring Gus to an outdoor ring that has at one end a short piece of wooden bridge (fetchingly, if inexplicably, painted lavender) and a tall PVC-pipe arch with strips of plastic tarp hanging from its cross-beam and blowing in the wind.  He hasn’t been in this area for months, and some horses have used it as an overnight paddock, so every inch is deeply fascinating.

I use his explorations for more lead-line practice.  I have to stop frequently to let him sniff the ground and ogle the surroundings, but a “This way, sir, your table is waiting” gesture almost always gets him started walking again.  We give the flapping tarp strips a wide berth — too much sensory stimulation already without adding that weirdness.  But the first time we approach the bridge, he eagerly addresses it.  He pops his front feet onto it and then rocks back down; he gets a click and treat.  Next time around, we stop next to the car-wash-like strips and I hold the end of one out toward him; he touches it gamely and gets a click and treat.  He walks the length of the bridge with all four feet and gets another click and treat.  This jazzes his brain and legs enough that he wants to trot, so we do that along one side of the ring.

We piddle around like this for awhile longer, walking and stopping and turning, and he’s a champ.  It’s a welcome change for us to be doing nothing — which, after all, is sometimes the very best kind of teamwork.

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.

28. VIDEO: Training clinic, part 1

Clinic day is here.  It’s bitingly cold and raw, but eight humans get lessons with nine equids, and everybody is a trouper — not least the instructor, Alexandra Kurland.  She’s a widely known pioneer of clicker-training for horses, garnering particular attention for her work with seeing-eye horses for the vision-impaired [check it out here].  Headquartered not far from Saratoga, she has provided many clinics for Sandy the barn manager.  I’ve heard so much about Alex for so long that I’m super-eager to meet her.  

Together we discuss our training interests and concerns so that Alex can plan what to offer each of us, and we all observe each other’s lessons, gathering in the arena or around stall doors to watch and learn.  Witnessing this party from his paddock, Gus objects to his exclusion with a blare of syncopated tubas and bagpipes every hour on the hour.  But after our lunch break, it's his turn.

When he and I walk into the arena, he’s mildly flummoxed to see so many people gathered at one end.  He likes them all; still, he’s not used to an audience.  Nobody can decide what we should show Alex — tricks like tilt-a-chair and retrieves to the pedestal? or “dancer’s arms” and other groundwork? — so we’re a bit discombobulated.  Also, I forget to switch to my smaller lead line, so I’m using the very long, heavy rope that’s for walking between paddock and barn, and the first thing Alex notices is how careless I’m being with that rope.  She can tell I’ve never learned rope-handling in any systematic way, and that becomes our lesson.

We unleash Gus to go and roll, while Alex has me hold a halter in my two hands in front of me as she moves its lead-line around.  Even when the line is very loose, I can feel minor weight shifts and drags and releases; of course horses can feel those too in their jaws and heads.  We take turns being the horse and being the handler, walking each other around the arena, to refine my sensitivity to how every hand, arm, and body movement may translate to a feel in the halter.  All the while, Gus is mostly content to sniff around on his own, though occasionally he seems to mirror our activity [see video below], and finally he strolls over and pokes his head between us: “Whatcha doooo-in’?  Can I join in?”