Everyone who came seemed to enjoy it too, but what really surprised me was how easily ALL of the horses and ponies took to the obstacles. We had a huge variety of horses and ponies, different sizes, different ages, different temperaments. One would expect at least a few of them to act a little bit "spooky" with at least one or two of the obstacles! But no, everyone was having fun and quite active, but a tremendous sense of calm across the arena. Now maybe being Indoors helped, no wind to make things flap about, no distractions as there might be with an outdoor arena. I think that may have had some impact (we shall see in the summer!). But I don't think that was the main reason. I think the main reason was the human participants on the clinic. I think that Horse Agility attracts people who already do a significant amount of groundwork with their horse, plus those to whom having a relationship with their horse that goes way beyond just riding is very important. As a result, we had group after group of people who were calm and quiet around their horses, who were willing to take the time to let their horse sniff, investigate and think about the obstacle before going over or through it. The course was certainly not boring. We had flags, bunting, tarpaulins, narrow gaps, things for horses to carry, even things for horses to pull. People (and horses :-) were smiling and having fun and yet a tremendous sense of calm pervaded the arena at the same time. Calm breeds calm, across humans and horses :-)
I had great fun running a series of Intro to Horse Agility sessions on Saturday and it absolutely wasn't too early for the Xmas themed course! :-)
Everyone who came seemed to enjoy it too, but what really surprised me was how easily ALL of the horses and ponies took to the obstacles. We had a huge variety of horses and ponies, different sizes, different ages, different temperaments. One would expect at least a few of them to act a little bit "spooky" with at least one or two of the obstacles! But no, everyone was having fun and quite active, but a tremendous sense of calm across the arena. Now maybe being Indoors helped, no wind to make things flap about, no distractions as there might be with an outdoor arena. I think that may have had some impact (we shall see in the summer!). But I don't think that was the main reason. I think the main reason was the human participants on the clinic. I think that Horse Agility attracts people who already do a significant amount of groundwork with their horse, plus those to whom having a relationship with their horse that goes way beyond just riding is very important. As a result, we had group after group of people who were calm and quiet around their horses, who were willing to take the time to let their horse sniff, investigate and think about the obstacle before going over or through it. The course was certainly not boring. We had flags, bunting, tarpaulins, narrow gaps, things for horses to carry, even things for horses to pull. People (and horses :-) were smiling and having fun and yet a tremendous sense of calm pervaded the arena at the same time. Calm breeds calm, across humans and horses :-)
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You probably have to be from the North of England to understand the title.... ;-) "Twirly" being the pronunciation of "too early", in this case "is it twirly (too early) for Christmas"??? I'm not a fan of the shops shoving Christmas at us from the beginning of November.... For me, it loses the magic. December 1st would be quite early enough! But this November I couldn't help myself. I figured the 29th November is only a couple of days early..... So the Intro to Horse Agility clinic will have a Christmas theme to it. Ah well, might as well go the whole hog then! So that's one Christmas Course designed, a whole 11 (yes, eleven! not 10.... Christmas Bonus!!!) xmas themed obstacles, including some old favourites and a few new ones as well. And whilst I do have a collection of xmas accessories already, a girl and her ponies simply can't have too much glitter ;-) Plus, I didn't have all the accessories for the new obstacles . So that was a good excuse to go shopping! Found some great, fun items to spice up the course. Getting quite excited :-D Now that we're working at the higher levels of competition, we're facing interesting new challenges that will test our partnership and communication but also to some degree our "schooling". November's course includes one trot-halt and two halt-trot transitions and points will be lost if any walk steps are seen by the judges.
The 2 halt-trot transitions involve "parking" the pony in front of an obstacle, the handler passing through and then asking the pony to join the handler at trot. At the lower levels, we had to learn to park the pony in front of an obstacle and then join the handler at a walk. So we have the elements of "halt", "wait" and "join me" already in place and Fat Pony is really quite good at that now. The challenge is now to teach Fat Pony "join me at trot" and to have him be able to understand the difference between "join me at walk" and "join me at trot", since either might now be required in a competition and I don't want Fat Pony to start anticipating one or the other. The parallels with schooling and dressage training are clear! The trot-halt transition is even more interesting, as the obstacle is to trot the front feet only over the pole and then halt. So not only does the transition have to be super accurate, but the pony has to be quite confident about halting with the pole under the middle of his tummy, where he can't see it very well! To trot over the pole without touching the pole will require an active trot going into the halt - the beginnings of collection and taking the pony's weight back onto his hindquarters! The more involved I get with Horse Agility, the more I see the benefits and the challenges. It started out as something fun to do - and it still is fun, more than ever! - but it's also taking us on a journey that is about developing and refining communication; and about developing the pony's suppleness and fitness; as well as keeping his brain busy and having fun :-) Every now and again, an obstacle comes up in the monthly video course from the International Horse Agility Club that I think "that's too easy". Invariably, whenever I think "that's too easy", I am wrong! In the 2014 October course, obstacle number 9 was "put on a cape or cloak". That's just a sap to Halloween, I thought to myself, a daft bit of fun for the big kids amongst us..... So, of course, I did not practice the putting on of the cape or cloak before starting filming. Only to discover that, once I was wearing the cloak, obstacle number 10 (send horse through the scary corner at trot whilst the handler stays outside) went completely to pot. Fat Pony did not seem to understand that he was to go through the Scary Corner (at any pace, let alone trot!), whilst I went around the outside. Fat Pony would only follow me through the corner, or follow me round the outside, although both with some hesitation and a slightly unhappy look on his face. Since we have the "handler goes round the outside" version of the scary corner pretty much nailed, at both walk and trot, this was - surprising! So we stopped filming and I set out to understand what was going on. In fact, it was quite simple. The cloak was hiding my body language from Fat Pony. In particular, it was masking my shoulders and completely obscuring my arms and hands! As soon as I pushed the cape back and freed up my arms such that Fat Pony could see them clearly, he did the obstacle perfectly! Quite a revelation! I know that we've been building up body language communication, but I didn't appreciate quite how subtle it really is, how significant the putting on of the cape was to hinder Fat Pony's reading of my shoulder position. I also didn't realise just quite how much Fat Pony is reading my hands! He is clearly reading them to a very great degree in determining which direction to go in, even more remarkable given that ponies don't possess these digits themselves! October's course was an extremely challenging one, both technically and due to the sheer number of obstacles that were new to us. But Fat Pony rose to the challenge and gave me some amazing focus and connection - all at Liberty in an open field. With the end result that we gained enough points to achieve promotion to Advanced level :-D Very excited! And very very proud of my chubby little pony :-D The non-horsey OH likes to play with the ponies, sometimes, especially Fat Pony, as he's so playful and likes to engage (FP, not OH ;-) So, as we need to work on the Hula Hoop for this month's horse agility, I asked the OH to please practice the hoop if he plays with FP.
Clearly something got lost in translation somewhere, as OH came to me and said, "FP's doing really well at the hoop, he puts his foot in at least half the time without touching the hoop. But I think I've taught him the hokey cokey"...... Fat Pony's "putting his foot in, but he won't wait, he puts it in and then takes it out, puts it in and takes it out"........ LMAO! It didn't take long to work out what happened. In all training, timing is critical. In order for learning to take place, there needs to be a release or a reward (we work on reward) and if the timing is wrong there's a good chance you not only don't teach the desired action but you may inadvertently teach an undesired action! Whilst the OH has grasped some of the principles of breaking a movement down in order to teach it, he doesn't always see all of the components. In this instance, the 3 components are 1. step cleanly into the hoop (when asked); 2. wait until further instruction; 3. step cleanly out of the hoop (when asked). In the teaching phase, all 3 of those components get rewarded. Once firmly established, you can then move on to combine all 3 elements into one movement, without having to reward each one (increasing reward intervals). The OH had realised only 2 of the 3 components, namely 1. step cleanly into the hoop and be rewarded; then OH was asking Fat Pony to step out of the hoop and be rewarded. It didn't take many goes before Fat Pony had "learned" that you step in the hoop, get a reward and then step out of the hoop and get a reward. In Fat Pony's mind there was no "wait" element. In Fat Pony's mind, you put your foot in, you put your foot out, you put your foot in, you put your foot out..... And that..... is how you teach your pony the hokey cokey :-D Yesterday, we helped out a local fun ride by volunteering as jump stewards. What was interesting, for us, maybe not so much for the riders involved...., was the way that some of the horses and ponies reacted to our presence. Or more specifically, the set up of a car, in the woods, with chairs, with people in the chairs. Some horses decided that this was quite a worrying state of affairs and that this kind of set up may be perfectly fine on the roads or at a show ground but quite clearly this did not belong in the woods!!!! Cue eyes out on stalks, suspicion and even the occasional bit of snorting. By a process of elimination, we came to the conclusion that it wasn't particularly the car in the woods, nor the chairs per se, but people sitting in the chairs was clearly just WRONG as far as some of the horses were concerned. Of course, not all the horses that passed us were worried, just a small handful, but for the ones that were we found that if we stood up and moved away from the chairs, the horses immediately calmed down quite alot. Perhaps they thought we were being eaten by the chairs! I find this interesting in a number of ways. This is a type of scenario that the "Scary Corner" in Horse Agility is designed to address. Originally, the Scary Corner concept sprang from Roadworks, but our fun ride scenario fits the bill very well also. What they have in common is that it will be a more pleasant, safer ride if the horse's confidence can be built up, together with the horse's trust in its rider, so that the fear response can be replaced with a combination of confidence and curiosity. On a personal level, it did make me think, yes I do do all this Horse Agility with my ponies, and I have accustomed them to many different types of unusual stimuli, but would they accept a car with chairs and people in chairs in the woods? Knowing my ponies, I might assume that they would probably march up to the people and try to frisk them for treats, lol, but that is exactly the danger of taking things for granted and I'm now intrigued as to exactly how they would react! The next time I have a dry day with some spare time at the weekend, I'll be roping in the other half to get out the chairs and come and sit with me in the field, just to see how the ponies do react :-D Bah, humbug! Well, I suppose that after such a superbly dry and mild September, the rain had to play catch up at sometime. Fat Pony's diet pen is suddenly awash with mud, although, thanks to a quantity of rubber stable matting, it now has a reasonably sized dry oasis in the middle which is keeping it usable to still restrict him part time. And gives us a nice spot to play "step into the hula hoop" which is an obstacle we need to improve for this month's course and breaks up Fat Pony's boredom. Meanwhile, the deluge outside has prompted me to book an Indoor arena for an Intro to Horse Agility clinic at the end of November. So, no matter what the wind and rain might throw at us, we should be able to have some fun :-) October is always an exciting month. Any excuse to dress up the Horse Agility course with a seasonal theme! Slightly disappointed that the "2 flags" obstacle isn't in the Halloween course this year, but I'm sure I'll be able to improvise :-D The "scary corner" will become the Halloween Spooky Corner and the curtain obstacle is in, so I can dust off last year's "creepy cloth" curtain - well, maybe not dust it off, mwaaaahahahahahahahahahahaha...... The standard of entries in the Horse Agility has been going up and the bar is being raised to keep us all challenged! There are some new obstacles again this month, a zig-zag corridor using poles, to be completed at a fast walk and an offset weave, the weave to be completed with the handler maintaining the same leading position throughout the obstacle. I predict that the tight turns will make the leading position a challenge, there will be a tendency for the horse to go ahead or drop behind through the turns. Backing over a pole isn't new to us, but we still haven't cracked the not touching part. Stepping into a hula hoop with the front feet isn't new to us either, but again we haven't yet cracked the not touching part (sensing a theme here?). The spooky horses tend to avoid touching, but you have to get their confidence up to approach the obstacle in the first place! The confident horses are easy to get close to the obstacle, but tend to just walk all over it! So either way, it makes for a nice challenge! What is also new to us this time is stepping into the hula hoop with the back feet! Again, no touching allowed for full marks! So the pony has to step into something with it's back feet, which it can't see at the point of stepping in!, without getting spooked by the thing that it can't see round its back legs, and without touching! No pressure there then :-) Finally, the precise back up is making another appearance. This month it's 10 steps at Medium level. The handler can be anywhere, so I'm reasonably confident that we can get a straight back up by me standing in front of the pony. But getting exactly 10 steps, not one more and not one less, requires the pony to not only listen to your request for backing up, but to give you single steps on request. I've found that even numbers do seem to work better than odd numbers, the 5 step back up was a killer, so we shall see what happens once we get practicing. Well, it was touch and go whether I would be able to get an entry in for September. So feeling a great sense of achievement for having managed 2 entries (Liberty Silver and Medium) in the fastest time ever i.e. the full course only set up on the afternoon of the last day! Half an hour practicing the box, which I'd only shown to Fat Pony once, plus the wagon wheel which we’d never seen or tried before and then an hour’s filming before the light disappeared!
Of course it wasn’t perfect, the box in particular, but Fat Pony was an absolute dream to lead, despite the fact that he hasn’t had anything of what I would call work or Horse Agility course practice this month. But he has been getting leading practice as part of his current daily routine of being taken from his bare diet pen to a restricted grazing pen and back again. It's quite surprising how a little thing like consistent leading from "stable" to field can have a massive impact. Competing in July was hard work. September was no work at all. Fat Pony was motivated, connected, light in the hand (even on grass) and came to play with a positive expression. Our partnership at Medium level finally feels as though its coming together! |
About meI started Horse Agility as a way of making groundwork more fun. It was something I could do with my semi-retired old boy and his small, cheeky, pony companion. What amazed me was how much it improved the ponies' general confidence in the process. I compete at Advanced 1 star level on line and at liberty. Archives
December 2016
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