Oliver’s lack of body awareness included the problem of being oblivious to where his head was – particularly in relation to me. I was getting whacked with his head because he just didn’t recognize my body space. I adapted the technique in this video, to increase awareness of where his head was and increase his consideration for me at the same time.
Make sure that they are not hungry for this exercise – it’s not fair to do this with a hungry horse, specially at the beginning.
There’s a very interesting discussion about dominance raised by this video. Are we allowed to be dominant and can we still be gentle and considerate with our horse and dominant at the same time? Is that OK with our horse under certain circumstances? Come join us in the forum for that important discussion!
Every problem solved increases our bond with our horse, but that is specially so, when you solve a problem that helps you feel safer.
The Technique
BE CLEAR about what you’re looking for, so that you know what to praise them for and what baby steps to pause for a while, soak up and appreciate. To do all that, you have to know WHY you are doing a particular exercise and what you are looking to achieve. My goals in this exercise were about increasing his awareness of his head, so that I could keep myself safe around him.
And of course, if I don’t feel safe, then I will escalate him with any feelings of nervousness or anxiety too. Pause on that and pay attention to what a big deal that is.
What I was looking for, was for him to be so aware of my head in his space and for him to be so considerate of me, that he would gently lift his head up and around me to move. And no we didn’t quite get exactly that on the second day, but it was close and it has happened since.
Follow your feelings of safety and comfortableness to know when to allow your horse’s head in the bucket and use your feeling that something is Not Quite Right, to know when to ask them to step back. When my safety is at stake, my horse stepping back when I ask, is not negotiable. MY feelings of safety are as important as HIS feelings of safety. For me, it’s a reciprocal care. 🙂
I used some fairly high energy at times, in my attempt to get Oliver to back off and stay away until he could come in thinking about me and not just the food. Safety is one of the rare times these days, that I am comfortable about using such high energy, dominance type tactics.
If you don’t have any problem with your horse being rough with their head, then you could use this technique for a ‘feel good’ bonding exercise – feeling into your Inner Awareness for anything that you might need to change to achieve that close emotional feeling in such close contact – maybe (only MAYBE!) even having them happy with having their face gently stroked while they were eating.
Another technique that I had already tried, was stepping Oliver’s front end away from me each time he came too close and was unaware and rough with his head. That method of dealing with it didn’t change the behavior, although it might have done with another horse under other circumstances. Stepping his front end away was done by moving into a position where I could reach his nose easily and with my hand on the side of his face, asking the nose to lead the whole front of his body stepping away from me.
Those of you who are unfamiliar with some of the different ways you can use a stick for communication, let me know how many slightly different versions that you notice in this video. Some were more suitable for when he was close and some techniques provided higher energy when he was already some distance away and I needed it to send him even further. Yes it would have been nice if we’d had him in a place to respond to a gently waved stick – that’s where he’s at these days. But three years ago it took higher energy.
This exercise came AFTER a lot of the other awareness and other feeding awareness work – after the My Grass game (that you saw in your foundation principle)s after the other body awareness we had done at feed time by swishing the biting flies off him in the first Fast Track lesson. This technique is really an extension of Pay Attention to Me Please – “be gently aware of where I am and where you are while you’re eating from this bucket and let’s use this awareness to keep each other feeling safe”. (Click here to refresh your memory about “Pay Attention to Me Please.”) Use your Fast Track password for this lesson – at the time of writing this, that was … feel.
The Lesson:
Look for small progress, look for small changes that you can reward – like I rewarded Oliver’s energy change on the first day. The key to rewarding small steps in the right direction is being very CLEAR in your own mind about what you are looking for, so that you CAN recognize the baby steps forwards.
Soaking and appreciating each baby step forwards, that is what will anchor each step forwards into your new way of being together – so that each step forwards becomes your new ‘normal’, on auto pilot. And if you’re aware of how good it feels and you are appreciating THAT, it has even more impact on your whole life and is faster too.
That conscious appreciation is the fastest path to positive change in and out of horses and is at the core of why Fast Track is a fast track.
Inner awareness – noticing what your own body feels like before and during any exercise is another opportunity to develop that conscious intuition even stronger and if you’re new to our programs here, creating a habit of taking action on what you feel. That simple sentence is the key to world class horsemanship.
It’s so important that here’s a different way of expressing it. Take every opportunity to notice what the inside of your body feels like – and take some kind of action on what you feel – even if that action is as simple as deciding to understand what that feeling was about. If you can, follow up with some kind of quietening your of your mind to allow that understanding to flow. Often the answer is something that we need to KNOW, rather than something that we need to DO.
Like always, be prepared to stop what you’re doing even if you haven’t got what you wanted. I could have stopped even before I got that small change of energy on the first day and if my high energy in sending him back had to continue for much longer I might have. I know that much of the horse world when they are training horses, only stop when they get what they want – and whether they know it or not, that’s because they’re working with dominance almost all the time.
But if anyone doubted that this kind of stopping works when you’re working with reciprocal care for each other and co-operation, then the results on the second day were a validation for the way we worked on the first day.
The forum
There’s an interesting discussion around dominance versus leadership and the question ” Is it OK to use dominance under certain circumstances?” that is raised by this video and I would LOVE to have this discussion under this lesson on the forum. So come and join us there!
Click here to go to the discussion of this lesson on the forum
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