I don't work with my horses often enough...

 

I don’t work with my own horses often enough -

Maybe some of you feel the same way?

Not enough hours in the day

Worn out from working with everyone else’s horses

All my energy is going into rehabs…whatever the reason.

Time will just slip right through my fingers and suddenly a month has gone by and we haven’t done a single thing together.

There’s something really incredible though, since I’ve made the shift to positive reinforcement training.

My horses can sit and sit and sit…

And they walk back into that arena acting like they’ve been practicing on their own

Like… they’re *better* than I left them.

Forrest and I left off working on some lateral moves and he had kind of gotten the idea in his head that everything meant sidepass, we had lost our cue discrimination between:

  • Hind end only

  • Shoulders only

  • And sidepass

as we were building up the sidepass.

Pretty normal and not a big deal, but I hadn’t gone back yet to tidy that stuff up.

So today I pull him out, in a brand new arena he hasn’t been in before, and within 5 minutes we’re cruising. Solid cue discrimination like he’d been studying the textbook in my absence.

Forrest is pretty amazing, but he was not like this in the old days

This is what happens when your training teaches the horse to become a puzzle solver, to think for themselves rather than just following along blindly with your “aids.”

It’s what happens when you train with rewards that motivate the horse and build positive associations with everything you do.

It feels like magic - but it’s not magic, it’s science. I’m no horse whisperer…

These are skills that YOU can learn and apply with your own horses!

Don’t forget to ask me about earlybird discounts and scholarship applications for SHA before 10/1/24!

Watch a clip of our training session here:

 

Building cue discrimination between shoulders over, hips over, and side pass with Forrest

Clicker TrainingBarbara ParksComment