Lofty Goals v. Reality (Mon. Jan. 17)

"Instead of telling our young people to plan ahead, we should tell them to plan to be surprised."
-Dan in Real Life (one of my all time favorite movies)


Things went so well that first day, that I thought I would be able to lock down "respect my space" in no time and be able to move on to something else. Not so. There was no one at My Barn when I arrived and Matilda's night time paddock mate, Black Jack the pony, was still in the paddock. I really wasn't sure what to do with Black Jack, so I just decided to ignore him. Not optimal conditions, but I thought I could manage.

Matilda walked up immediately, but stopped before she was on top of me. Good! Then she started testing me, nosing, stepping forward, then stepping back. She is getting a click each time she steps back.

One of the difficulties that I am going to have with this project is that I am teaching myself about the nuances of this clicker training at the same time I am teaching Matilda how to behave. This means mistakes will be made and progress will be slow. Here is where I made my first mistake.

I decided that Matilda was taking enough steps back that I could add in a verbal cue and teach her to back up on command at the same time that I was teaching her to stay an arms length away. It was too much. Matilda got frustrated, I think she was worried about moving too far away from me and the carrots, especially with Black Jack lingering and watching. In our second session she started pinning back her ears and chasing Black Jack away. I was worried that if I push her too far, her frustration and irritation with Black Jack might get transferred to me and things just might get a little too confused and muddled.

I ended up taking the verbal cue back out and re-thinking the space issue. When you are doing clicker training, it is apparently important to focus on ONE THING, maybe visualizing it in its totality. If I am going to teach Matilda to respect my space, that means she needs to keep a safe distance from me no matter where I am. I started moving into her left shoulder. She turned to face me, then backed away. Ah yes, this is what I am talking about. No mixed messages, no pushing for more steps back, just keep away from me. My ultimate goal now is that she is simply far enough away so that she can't punch me in the gut and I have to reach out to give her the reward.

I moved slowly around her, never further down her side than her shoulder. Things were certainly too tenuous for me to try to get to close to her back side. I just moved slowly from shoulder to shoulder and let her turn and back away. Very nice.

Before I left My Barn for the day, I had an apple to give her. I think this will be a nice routine each day: when she gets the apple, we are done, I won't ask her for anything else. When I entered the paddock, I was as far away from her as I could be, maybe 50 yards. She looked at me and started walking to me, I waited for her. She stopped so that her chest was about an arms length away, nosed my belly and took one step back. Click/apple!