So, since my last post (you know the debacle of break aways and run offs) we have been taking things very slowly. If you recall, I had to back up to the very beginning and that is where we have remained. Every day, I go through a routine of reviewing all her yielding behaviors and building her stretching routine (stretching the neck by taking her head all the way down to the ground then from side to side) followed by work with the longe whip. I have yet to put her back on the actual 25 foot longe line. I keep her on the 10' lead and let her walk around me at the end of that.
When I say I am at the beginning, I actually mean that I backed up to where I should have begun. A couple of days after the debacle, I had Matilda on the lead and bent down to pick up the whip, she immediately began to walk away at a quick pace. Something clicked in my mind at that point, realizing that picking up the longe whip was a trigger point for her. Over the last two weeks, "we" have spent a lot of time simply dropping the whip on the ground and picking it up.... picking it up slowly, picking it up quickly with a snap. Dropping it in front of her, beside her, or just behind her. Doing this on the left and the right. Clicking and rewarding her for standing still as I do all of this. It's exciting stuff, this asking the horse to stand still whilst I drop and pick up the whip ad nauseam.
Then I move on to the really exciting stuff. I move into her then away from her, holding the whip, still asking her to stand still. whee.
Sarcasm aside, I understand this is important stuff. Even when Matilda is at her best, she starts anticipating what I am going to ask of her. When we work on longing and she successfully stops on command, I move in to give her the reward and as I step back, she starts walking before I have set myself and asked her to "walk on". This is fine when she is at her best, but when she is at her worst it spells disaster. So, we work on her standing still as I drop and pick up the longe whip, I snap it and touch her with it, all the while clicking and rewarding while she just stands there. Then I back up to the end of the lead, get in position, wiggle the whip behind her rear hooves and say "walk on" she usually does and it always surprises me.
This is pretty much all we have done for the last two weeks. She is walking and stopping for me on command reasonably well. Like all of us there are good days and bad days, but the controls that I have on her now seem to be preventing colossally horrid days.
I did buy a halter that fits her and a new longe line, so that when the time comes I have one that is new and un-weathered, hopefully without any weak spots. I put a leather strap across the nose of the halter that I can attach the lead to so that when I pull, it tightens across the top of her nose, adding pressure like the chain would but gentler.
I figure that every day that she doesn't get away from me, I am closer to a world where she doesn't try. How much longer we will have to stay here, I don't know. I am going to try to come up with something new to add into the mix to keep us in a learning frame of mind; I can tell that we are both getting bored with this routine. It's a routine we have to stick to in part, but there is no reason why we can't keep adding to the repertoire. I have to go back to the book and see what else I am missing from our to-do list.
I will tell one funny story. We usually work in the jump ring, since the dressage (aka upstairs) ring doesn't have any kind of fencing. With the summer here, there are days when there are no gaps in the lesson schedule for me to bring Matilda in and we have to work very gently in the dressage ring. I do not do any simulated longing there. Last week while we were working in the dressage ring, she seemed to catch sight of herself in one on the large mirrors that sits at the far end of the ring. It took me awhile to figure out why she was standing stock still and staring. When I realized it must be the mirror, I thought I would simply walk her up to the mirror and let her check it out. As we approached the "other horse" I noticed that Matilda was getting more and more agitated, more bouncy in her movement, breathing harder, tense. I got half way across the ring before the thought occurred to me that perhaps she was challenging that other horse and, of course, that horse in the mirror was challenging right back.
I don't know if Matilda could see or discern that two dimensional image, but having the thought was enough for me. I wasn't prepared to face whatever might have come next from my already agitated horse and we turned around and left the ring. She did continually check behind her the whole way down the hill. I can only assume that she was making sure the other horse didn't follow.
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