#head shy

[the-moon-is-a-friend]

That moment when you want to talk to someone about your issues but you're afraid you're adding more problems or they'll find you annoying or that they never really treated you as a friend or they'll assume you're lying or-

[blazed-chestnut]

Use something completely unassociated with the initial fears. In other words, instead of using a halter or bridle, use something else. In this example she used a cloth. 

Take it slow in small steps. Reward a head down/relaxation. Progress from there to the object rubbing their face, messing with their ears, etc...

Clicker training!

[blazed-chestnut]

Head Down

Just laying the hand on the poll as opposed to downward pressure.

Place a hand on the halter too. This could even become a secondary cue!

Try your best to stay with the horse when they throw their head around. Otherwise they learn to escape pressure by throwing their head. 

Do not treat if horse attempts to mug you when you go to reward. 

[redemptionhorsemanship]

I've decided to keep with this theme of backwards and Touch It for the rest of the week at the least. I've added in work with the ears as well,and he seems to be quite happy with the familiarity of it all.

So i spent a good 20 minutes around his head, neck and ears today. I feel like I made the most progress so far because by the end I could hold and handle his ears and rub his poll. His head still isn't as low as I'd like but the fact I could do these things without him surging backwards or flicking his head away was a huge leap. I made sure that throughout the rest of the session I played with his ears every now and then to remind him that I can touch them whenever I want and not just at the beginning.

I achieved this process by asking him to put his head down with slight pressure on the lead and slowly rubbing around where he is comfortable (cheeks, nose and neck) and progressing up towards his not so great areas. The key has been to watch him and retreat from those "iffy" areas before he pulls his head away but I've found it quite hard to read that because he can appear so confident then suddenly he flips. So what I ended up doing was rubbing nice and slowly, and if he flung his head away, I'd up the ante and begin lightly but quickly tapping around his neck and face, so making MORE commotion when he tried to escape and when he settled back down, I would go back to rubbing slowly. If he gave me a sign of release, such a licking and chewing, I took my hands away altogether. The first time I actually took my hands right away after he released, he went into full shut down mode. His head dropped below his withers, his eyes almost roll back into his head and his eyelids slowly shift from being salmost completely closed to about halfway open. His eyes have a blank look and he's quite obivously off in lala land...his happy place. This is the Right Brain Introvert.

Luckily I have been watching a lot of tutorial videos about how to deal with this situations, which is basically to mirror them. Slow yourself right down, don't try to snap them out, move slowly and perhaps rest a hand on their withers or pat them slowly and gently. Whatever you do, DO NOT try to force them out because this horse will come out fighting, guns blazing, likely to charge, rear, buck, strike and do whatever it feels it needs to do to fight for its life. This horse goes to it's happy place because it's been overloaded and needs a moment to process, and if you push it harder, it's like pushing them over a cliff.

The idea, really, is to not create situations where the horse feels it needs to go to this place, however, it is also important to stay progressive which means pushing thresholds, and sometimes this means that the horses bubble gets burst. In this particular situation, I'd tried lots of gentle and passive ways to get over this issue with him but his ability resist outweighed my ability to stay with him, so I had to approach it differently. I don't think anybody ever intentionally sends their horse to this place, but don't panic if it happens. So long as you know how to deal with the horse that shows up then you will be fine. I have found, personally, that treating him appropriately in these situations makes our relationship stronger because I gained his trust by not pushing him off the cliff.

If you want to learn more about Horseanality, a good starting place is here: http://www.parellinaturalhorsetraining.com/horsenality-horses/

So I went on to backwards and I'm astounded at how well he is doing. It's getting so fluid and snappy now. I wanted to really pay attention to my own focus today. I know I have been guilty of looking at him and not really watching how he goes backwards. So today I made sure I picked a point behind him, a tree between his ears, and asked him backwards. I really noticed the difference in his demenour. He was a little unsure at first but eventually I was getting straight backwards from most of the points. Yoyo game is still a bit wonky. it seems to get wonkier with the distance between us, whereas with the porcupine gane and driving game, I'm right in front of him the whole way. I did backwards through the barrels too and that was good but he still tips in to investigate the barrels.

After that I did some circling and disengaging around the barrels. I figured this was good preparation for the next pattern that we will be doing which is Figure 8. I'll probably start on that one next week.

Touch It game was a bit off today. He almost appeared to be a bit bored with it but he's still not touching the two barrels, so I'm reluctant to move on. I ended up leabing the two barrels in the pen with carrots on top of them and I am hoping he will be brave enough to investigate them of his own accord.

Lastly I did his feet. He let me pick up and hold and rub on both his back feet. Yay! What a champ!