Tex is moving forward under saddle. At least, that’s the goal! Recently, I posted a bit of video footage from Tex’s second ride. He’s had about half a dozen rides now, most about 10-15 minutes long. We’ve been playing around with stop and go, as well as steering. I want Tex to be really confident with the basics before we begin more complicated tasks, such as faster gaits and riding outside the round pen.
One challenge for any training program is deciding how fast to introduce new concepts. If we move too quickly, the horse is liable to get frustrated and confused. If we go too slowly, some horses will get frustrated and bored. Finding the balance is the hard part!
Tex is a laid back little pony and learns new concepts quickly. Once he was pretty comfortable walking around with me on him, I started introducing a bit of steering, as well as adding a cue for moving forward. However, I realized over the weekend that he’s still a bit confused with the moving forward when I ask and definitely has trouble sustaining this for longer periods of time.
So, I think we need to scale back and just focus on moving forward for longer durations. At the end of our ride on Sunday, I had him moving back and forth between two cones, which was working really nicely. Having the cone to move toward gave him a reason to move forward.
Next ride, I plan to hang several more cones on the round pen so that we can spend some time criss-crossing back and forth, touching the cones. Our aim (eventually) will be continuous forward motion. Right now, we’re still at the stage of ten steps forward, stop and contemplate our surroundings, then another ten steps forward. Which is fine for now! I want him to have plenty of time to think through things.
However, I think I moved too quickly to working on adding a cue for moving forward, as well as steering. He was a bit confused a few times over the weekend and I think it was because we were trying to train for too many new things at once. If we can get steady forward motion, it should be easier to work on steering, as well as working on discriminating between appropriate times for starting and stopping.
I did get some video, but I haven’t had time to edit it yet. I’ll try to get a bit of it on youtube later in the week. He’s actually doing really well considering he’s only had half a dozen rides. It’s important, though, that we get some of these basic components really solid at the beginning. This will make later tasks much easier to teach.
It is a fine line trying to decide how fast to move lol! Did you do any ground driving with him to teach him the cues? That’s what I plan to do with Chrome since it’s still over a year before he’s old enough to ride. That was he knows go, whoa and steering. I think it will make things a lot easier. I know Tex is older though and you have a lot of horses to work with, so ground driving might not be something you have time to try. I was just wondering if it would help with him learning the cues. I can’t wait to see the video. It’s so fun following his progress. 🙂
Great points!
We probably should go back and do some more ground driving.
We did a bit, but not a whole lot. I think ground driving does really help the horse learn the cues before we try them under saddle. I did quite a bit of ground driving with Rosie last year, and am currently doing some with Takoda, one of our Saddlebreds.
I think he gets most of the woah, go and steering, the problem seems to be more sustaining motion for longer periods of time. I know with a lot of the ground driving and lunging we have done, I’ve had him on a fairly high rate of reinforcement and clicks. Often because I wanted to make sure he really ‘got’ whatever I was trying to emphasize.
It probably would be helpful for us to go back to the ground driving (and perhaps circling as well) and emphasize moving forward for long periods of times with fewer clicks. Right now I think we’re getting a lot of stopping because 1) he’s still not completely sure what I’m doing up there and 2) he’s looking for the next treat. This is also a situation where it could be beneficial to have a second person on the ground giving him additional direction and support.
I’ll let you know how it goes this weekend!
Mary
That does sound like it explains his behavior. I guess that’s a good reason to remember to fade out the clicker (which is something I have trouble with lol). I can’t wait to hear how it goes. 🙂
It can be hard to find the right balance between too many clicks and not enough clicks!
Instead of fading or getting rid of clicker, I think it can be helpful to think of the issue as “asking for more behavior for each click.” Once the horse knows many behaviors well, we can start stringing them together for longer chains of performance, with still the occasional click for an extra good job.
“This is where people often get into trouble. Rather than giving the horse time to stand around and think, they try and make the horse move forward.”
Mary – I love that statement!! Really gave me something to think about! Mind if I quote you in MY blog??
Karleen
Sure! You are more than welcome to share the quote.
I think we get a lot more in the end if we ask for less in the beginning. Although I feel like I’m still learning the full value of this principle.
Leslie Pavlich has lots of great advice on colt starting. She really emphasizes giving the horse plenty of time to stand around at the beginning and choose to move forward on their own. Which I’ve found to be very, very sound advice.
Mary