I bet Pavlov never trained his dogs to do this…
Ro is semi-trained to ground tie.
By that I mean she can be trusted to stand next to me as long as she thinks a cookie may be forthcoming.
If a cookie is not forthcoming, she will wander off to find one.
I think someone marketed this form of training and called it “clicker training,” but I just call it bribery.
Here’s what I’ve learned about clicker training bribery: if you bribe a horse enough, she will wait for you at the stall door, bright eyed and expectant. This is how Ro greets me every day. I am the Treat Dispenser, and she knows it.
Other food-related things she has figured out:
The Treat Dispenser (that would be me) has access to a magical source of Hay That Is Better Than the Barn Hay. Ro does not like the barn hay. She thinks it is inedible. She wants the good hay. It’s all grass hay, so I don’t know what her problem is, but she is Very Definite on this issue. I am Very Definite on the point that she is not getting another flake of hay, even the good hay, when there is perfectly good hay in her stall. No dessert until you eat your vegetables!
Through trial and error, she has learned that simply ignoring the barn hay gets her nowhere. I can wait her out. She has tried spreading it around the stall, but I just pile it back up in the corner for her. So she upped the ante: she spreads it around the stall and then trods it into the shavings. Imagine a kid trying to hide a salad in their napkin. Same idea, same effectiveness.
This battle may go on for a while. Right now, I am winning in the stall (barn hay and only barn hay), but she wins in her paddock at night (the good hay).
Actually, now that I think about it, I show up, feed her treats, ride her, sometimes let her out on the grass to graze a bit, feed her dinner, and then turn her out where the good hay lives. Someone else brings her in in the morning and consigns her to the stall filled with undesirable hay. No wonder she likes me. All I do is feed her. She probably doesn’t even know the Battle Of the Barn Hay is with me; she probably blames that on the morning feeder.
But she proved beyond a doubt tonight that she knows how our evening routine goes. Which is to say, she knows what she is supposed to be eating when.
After our ride tonight, I put a halter on Ro and stripped her saddle off. Since I like to pretend she ground ties and she likes to humor me, she stood there for a minute. Then she walked off into her stall, where she checked out her feed bucket (empty) and hay (barn hay). Since there was nothing edible in the stall, she decided tonight must be a grazing night and came back out of the stall and hung out waiting for me to finish tidying up the tack locker so she could go eat grass.
God forbid she ever figures out where the feed room is. I suspect she’d expect me to walk her through it every night, letting her pick out what she wants for dinner: I’ll have the alfalfa pellets tonight, with a side of beet pulp. And for dessert, a flake of hay. Not too big; I’m watching my figure. Feed the nasty vitamins to the horse next door; I don’t want any of those!
My pony is a pony!
I call all horses ponies.
I do this because deep down all humans are hard-wired to call animals and babies things that end in “-ee” “-um” or “-ins” sounds: doggy, kitty, snookums, pookikins, etc.
So I have been calling Ro a pony, but I figured she was probably just over 14.2/somewhere around 14.3hh. As everyone knows, anything between 14.2 and 16.2 is a wasteland height: too tall to get a pony measurement card, not short enough for the brainwashed legions who are convinced their feet will drag on the ground if they ride anything under 16.2.
My luck is infamous. Or, rather, my lack of luck is infamous.
For no other reason, I was certain Ro would be over 14.2.
But—she’s not. My trainer had a measuring stick with her, so we measured her this weekend. It was a real stick, with a level and everything. Ro is 14.1.
I really do own a pony.
I have to admit, it takes all the fun out of calling her a pony. I may have to call her a mini now.
My little arena flower…
All together now, to the tune of “My Little Buttercup”:
My little arena flow’r, who likes to spook at trees—
Dear little arena flow’r, won’t you try, oh please—
Come with me where branches lace the sky
And you and I might wander ‘long the trails by and by..
To fully appreciate today’s success, there are things you should know about Ro.
Like the way she can lose her mind. Over the summer, a particular set of circumstances traumatized her and caused me to back out of buying her—I felt like I did not have the experience to deal with her successfully. I also wanted to buy a competition horse, and the way things were going for her, I thought it would take at least a year to get her working just on her home turf. And who knew what would happen if she went someplace new and her fragile confidence was tested?
For the record, there was no mistreatment involved. It was all situational, and I think that’s part of what worried me so much. Who could predict what situations would cause her to lose her mind again? Fortunately, a move to a new barn had an immediately and very dramatic positive impact on her behavior. Her training got back on track, and she began to thrive again. After some internal debate, I decided I had seen her at her worst. I still thought it would take a year before we’d have enough confidence in each other to leave the property and try someplace new, but I felt like we could get there. Eventually. I bought her before I could change my mind again.
But always, always in the back of my mind I know what can happen if she loses confidence. As we continued working, however, I began to scale back my estimates. Maybe we’d be ready for schooling shows by spring. Maybe December. Last month, I felt she was probably ready to go to a schooling show as a non-compete. I wouldn’t bring a saddle—just Ro and some tranqs just in case she lost her nerve. And a beer for me and my nerves.
That would be the smart thing, of course—going to a schooling show as a non-compete for her first outing out, I mean.
So, what did I do?
We went on a trail ride today. Pony has never been on a trail ride. The last time I hopped on her outside the arena, her heart was beating so hard in her chest that my legs were vibrating.
She is still wary of the back of the arena, which is lined with trees and bushes. She is absolutely convinced a cougar lives in one particular tree.
I had no reason to suspect, in other words, that she would take kindly to trails.
But we loaded her up in the trailer and went anyway. We had drugs on hand. For her. Unaccountably, I didn’t think to bring beers for the humans.
When we arrived at the park, her buddy unloaded first. She was dancing around in the trailer, but it’s hard to know what that means—she’s still not entirely comfortable on trailers and dances around on principle.
I backed her out of the trailer, turned her around, and prepared for Armageddon.
She blinked, looked around, saw grass, and started eating.
Not quite what I expected to happen.
I led her away from her buddy, again prepared for Armageddon.
She looked around at the trees and the trailers and the strange horses across the parking lot. Then she looked pointedly back at the grass. Time to eat?
Mmmm… k.
My little arena flower was entirely unfazed by the new surroundings. Or the trees. Or the bushes. Even with her buddy dancing around in anticipation, she remained calm and acted like the seasoned trail horse she most definitely isn’t.
I tied her loosely to the trailer and waited for her to throw a fit and start pawing. She stood there like that’s all she’s ever done.
I tacked her up. She blinked at me.
I mounted. She stood quietly and walked off calmly.
We headed down the trail. Trees! Bushes! Everywhere!
She jigged a bit, but for the most part followed politely behind her buddy.
When the trail widened out, I found out why she was jigging—my little arena flower likes to be in front.
Her ears pricked forward, she started to relax, and she marched onward with a purpose. I have no idea what that purpose was, but she had one. I let her get on with it; she was obviously having fun.
This is the horse that I thought would take a year of training before she’d be safe to take off the property. We had drugs in the truck and were fully prepared to unload her from the trailer, drug her, and head right back home. I was carrying my cell phone in my pocket in case we parted company. She might end up spending the night in the forest, but someone could darn well come find me and take me to the hospital.
I am so proud of my pony. She was an absolute rock star and absolutely exceed all my expectations in the best ways. She did spook at a ditch or two, but it was no more than a jump sideways and she always walked (walked! politely!) past the scary ditches when I asked.
In fact, the worst moment on the entire ride was when she saw—wait for it—a hay bale by the trail.
That made her spin in a circle and try to head back the way she’d come, and it did take a minute or two to get her past it. Past a hay bale. Past food.
So… a tree by the arena = scary stuff. Lots of trees in the forest = totally ok. In a stall, horse eats hay. On the trail, hay eats horse.
This passes for logic in Ro’s world. And I’ll take it—this would have been a spectacular first outing for any horse. For Ro? All things considered? I don’t know how to articulate how thrilled I am with her. I believed we’d get here eventually, but to be here now? It’s a beautiful, beautiful place to be.
Catching Up: Where We’ve Been
Murphey’s Law of Blogging says that the moment you can’t post, you will have 1,001 things to post.
When I took the blog down, Ro was coming along like a starstruck giraffe. There was progress, to be sure, but there was also stargazing and a deep-seated aversion to turning right. We were cantering circles at the safe end of the arena on a wing and a prayer—as in, wing the rein out to the right and pray she’ll go where her head is looking.
Then I took my blog down and at the same time, something in Ro’s head went *click.*
Suddenly she was reaching for contact at the trot and not running around eyeballing the clouds. Suddenly we were cantering around the entire arena. Suddenly we were turning right. We were cantering circles to the right.
I was over the moon. I called my trainer up. “Ro is awesome!” I said. “She’s like a real horse!”
Despite the fact that I wasn’t at the barn and Ro couldn’t possibly have heard me suggest that she had been anything but a real horse before, she took offense. That night, the stargazing giraffe was back.
We regrouped and regained our brief awesomeness. My lesson that weekend was fantastic. I felt like a kid at show and tell: and we can do this and we can do this and…
She is, my trainer agreed, just like a real horse now. She’s still green, mind you, but Ro and I are finally working together. I am still not entirely sure what clicked in her brain, but it’s like she’s decided riding can be fun and she’ll come to the party now.
Oh—and she trots and canters over poles on the ground without batting an eye. She is also super easy to see distances on at the canter. My inner Hunter Princess is squealing with glee and keeps whispering all the awesome cavalleti exercises we could be doing. My inner Hunter Princes would like to jump this pony. My inner Hunter Princess may just get her wish. I bet Ro would love it.
And then when I learned there are open spots in a clinic in late October, in a burst of confidence I decided to take Ro. If nothing else, I can see how she handles leaving the barn, going somewhere else, and having to work. I think a clinic may be the perfect first test of that, since it will be a little more relaxed than a show atmosphere. If she loses her brain, the clinician can help us find it again.
And if that goes well—she doesn’t run over the clinician or any innocent bystanders—there’s a little schooling show the last week of October. If nothing else, I’ll take her as a non-compete, just to get her out and about again. But if the clinic goes well, we might just enter a walk-trot class and see how it goes.
And we’re back, in a manner of speaking
I am in the process of consolidating some sites and trying to make my online life easier to maintain.
As a result, you’ll see some non-horse-related things appearing on this site. In fact, almost all of the pre-2007 blog posts are non-horse-related. They are posts merged from other blogs I have had over the years. There’s not much quality control going on, so I make no promises about the amusement or intelligence factor in any post on this site.
As I keep working on the merge, you’ll see the gaps in the archive fill in.
I’ll also try to clean up the design a bit.
But since the bare bones of the site are working, I figured I’d open it back up so I can keep posting new things.
Stuff is happening. Ro is going on a trail ride soon. She’s going to a clinic. She’s going to a… dare I say it?... show.
Detailed update to follow this weekend.