An interesting afternoon.....

Today I went to Ali's pony club where my friend Tanya keeps her horse. They had an "éthologue" visiting and she'd booked a session to try and improve her confidence and her seat after a recent fall. Being a nosy sort of person, I tagged along. Just as well as it happens because he couldn't speak great English so I had to translate.......

A lot of what he was saying we'd done with Adam already in our passenger lessons, he didn't go into the whole "where are their feet exactly" thing but he did ask her to forget about using her legs and turn her whole upper body where she wants the horse to go, "imagine you've got an extra set of eyes on your chest and they need to face the same way as the eyes on your head" he said. "point your tits to where you're going" was how I translated that......

And above all, be supple, don't tense up and breathe in time with the horse's movement. "Ride like Lucky Luke" he said......it doesn't matter what you look like, it's how it feels to the horse......

Pretty much the first time I've seen a Frenchman riding without hauling the horse around (although he rides with more contact than me, ie any at all) and kicking it to bits, too........He's called Olivier Cayre, his site is here

Could definitely see a difference in Tanya's riding too, she was a lot less stiff towards the end of the session. Would be interested in seeing how he works with horses on the ground.

Good things come to those who wait......

My little Silky hen has been brooding eggs for several weeks and finally her patience has been rewarded, sadly only one egg has hatched, the others were from the bigger chickens and as our cockerel is a dwarf breed, he can't get up on top of them to do the deed!!

Now she has left the other eggs and gone to sit on a bunch of duck eggs in the corner of the stable. Maybe she'll have more luck with those as our drake, Confit, has been rogering the ducks enthusiastically for weeks!

A fun afternoon.....

Got invited to take part in a car rally today.Not the "how fast can you drive round a course" sort, but a kind of treasure hunt in the car. We blagged a lift with Guy & Sarah, knew we'd win because Guy is outrageously competitive........and we did!!

Saw some nice Appaloosas en route, and went down lots of little roads we'd never seen before, lots of nice countryside (once we'd worked out that EtV meant "enjoy the view" on the instructions and wasn't some obscure cryptic clue *rolls eyes*). Éowyn was only sick the once.......

Apparently as the winners we now have to write the next one......

Naughty baby girls......

We had to go and fetch the babies home from Bonneville today because they had escaped from the big field up there, they can just step through thte tapes! We will have to redo the fences up there once the commune have finished digging up half the field to lay pipes.......

So I wrestled with 2 kids, 2 horses and a dog for several kilometres, some of it in the rain.Even acquired a 3rd child for the last bit! All the girls were very good, except Éowyn who was very whingey, apart from when she got to splash in puddles. Still, all good character building stuff........

Kitten update

The kitties are three weeks old now and are finally starting to look like cats! They're wobbling about on their little legs and attempting to escape from the basket. Lali is very patient at picking them up and putting them back in........

Adam's weekend, day 3

This morning started off with Marianne doing some work on leading a horse safely. After that, Adam did a bit with the babies, just getting them used to seeing us from all angles, not asking them to do anything in particular but just putting himself in position around them as they moved about. Then we did more direction from the ground with Gandalf and Maverick, getting them to back up, being aware of where they need to put their feet when they make certain moves, even doing a little obstacle course!

Then after lunch was connecting the groundwork to the ridden stuff. First of all we had a "passenger lesson", we sat on the horses and just felt how they moved around, identified when a particular leg left the ground. Adam moved them from the ground, it was very strange not knowing where your horse was going to go or when it was going to go up a gear! After that, we got reins on the headcollars and got into directing them just by taking the rein off the neck to turn, timing it so we ask for the turn as the feet are in the right place to be able to do it.

Adam asked me to direct Gandalf away from the gate (and Mav on the other side of it) and instead take him down to the opposite end of the field. This proved to be extremely difficult because he wanted to stay with Mav. I couldn't pull him around to direct him, I had to get him going then try to direct him by taking the rein off his neck, if he tried to circle back I had to keep him in the circle til he was facing away again, but he kept coming back to the gate and stopping, it took me about 20 minutes to finally get him to the end of the field. If I'd had his bridle on I could have simply pulled the reins and insisted. Makes you think........

Adam's weekend, day 2

So today we started with a lesson on how to hold the ropes Adam uses as it's not as easy as he makes it look! Simple little things like when you coil it up, twist it slightly so the loops don't twist themselves into funny shapes......

He uses the long ropes because you need to give your horse plenty of space. A lot of horses are lead around on short lead ropes with people standing at their head or shoulder and they can't turn their head to check stuff out, so they end up moving their feet instead and that's when we get stood on. We use 12 foot ropes with our horses, but Adam's are 24 foot so that takes a bit of getting used to!

But before working them on a line, we learnt how to direct them without one. Adam used the same signals as another horse would to move them around. You have to look where you DON'T want the horse to go, so to move them off, you look about 2 feet behind them and bring your energy level up. If you want a horse to go forward, you need to be behind his shoulder, if you want to stop him, you need to be in front of his shoulder. You look in front of his head to stop him. The angle between you and the horse is very important. All this takes a lot of getting used to, he had to help us with the positioning.........

Then we did more of the same but with the lines, directing the horse to go, stop, left and right just using our position, with no pulling on the rope at all.

This is the start of the foundation of his work, getting the horse to trust you to be able to set his direction and support him in where he goes. Horses are always looking for understanding, which they know they can get from other horses  but not usually from us!

What was very important too is not to direct any energy at the horse, not to chase at them because that just means "go away" and then you've lost them.

We also spent a lot of time looking at the way a horse moves, because if you are aware of which leg he hasn't got his weight on, asking him to turn so he uses that leg rather than trying to pull him the wrong way makes total sense. A lot of horses resist being pulled in a certain direction because they physically can't go that way due to the way they're standing.

Adam's weekend, day 1

Well, Adam is here and he did a demo for us this evening with my friends' horses. The first one was Gimy, a big Trotter, who can sometimes be disrespectful on the ground. The photos clearly show how Adam begins by mirroring the horse's movements, as another horse would do,  to "support" them and begin to gain their trust. Gimy came from a trekking centre and is very "switched off", he was ridden by loads of different people many of whom couldn't ride very well, so he quickly lost interest in people. It's very important to work with him during his short attention span, and try to show him that we will listen to him after all.

Then he worked with Jinelle, Gimy's field mate. She is never left on her own because she totally panicks when her friend goes out of view. At the start of the session she was very anxious, galloping around and calling for Gimy. There is no point trying to work with a horse in such an anxious state, so Adam somply "got with her", copied her until she started to realise he could be her support as well as another horse can.

Towards the end of the session, she was much calmer and at that point he was able to start teaching her some things:

More horse whispering

I have just spent a fascinating weekend in Brittany watching Adam Shereston working with my friends' horses. He came to us last year,and his methods are very different from"traditional" ways of working with horses. We realized we'd barely scratched the surface, so he will be coming back here next weekend. In the meantime, as Mary-Ellen had booked him up in Brittany,I seized the excuse to have a child free weekend and went to watch.

He worked with 7 different horses, all of which were of course different, but it was really useful to see him use his methods over and over again because it really does take time to absorb how he does things. Also, as each horse had different "problems" (Adam says it's not the horse that has problems, it's us who create the problems) I had the opportunity to see how he adapts his methods to deal with different horses.

This bay horse belongs to M-E's friend  and won't let people touch his feet, he becomes very agressive and she has had vets and farriers refuse to work with him. Adam spent a lot of time getting him to trust him, he said it would need an awful lot more time to get him over his fear which he deals with by becoming aggressive, but he certainly made a difference in the time he had with him, the horse actually offered him a foot at one point (which of course I missed with the camera)

One thing I saw again and again was a horse trying to keep Adam in front of his head as that's where they're used to seeing us, they position themselves so they can always see us there. Adam gets behind their shoulder so they can gradually get used to seeing us behind them as that's where thay are when we are on their back, this is why a lot of horses are fine in hand but not ridden. He also gets them used to seeing us behind them from both sides, a lot of horses are happy with us on the left but not on the right, Chris's horse Rocky was not at all happy with him on the right at first........

Something that came up with M-E's Bretty was a horse often doesn't see the point of things we ask him to do which switches them off, Adam was trying to get him to back up which he did at frst, then obviously decided it was a pointless exercise because he was in a big field and didn't need to go backwards, he could easily turn round! Adam didn't insist, just went on to work on something else, he says you must take what the horse offers you and work with that and not get stuck on doing one particular thing if it's not working.

I'm really glad I went because I understand a lot more now, it's all fresh in my mind before our clinics this weekend. Several of the people whose horses he worked with during an earlier session turned up later the same day or the next day to watch some more because it's a lot to take on in one go!

The kittens are a week old.......

....but they still look more like ferrets than kittens! The ginger one's eyes are starting to open.

Interdressage

We sometimes do Interdressage competitions, where you do your dressage test at home, get someone to video it then upload it and the judges mark your test from the video. I't great for those of us who can't get our horses to an actual show.......

Anyway, this month there was an in hand competition which I had given up hope on being able to do with Sky because it hasn't stopped raining long enough. Still, the sun came out this morning and so I brushed the worst of the mud off her (don't think we'll get too many marks for turnout), and hampered by my two offspring, went out to do the test. First we had to overcome her fear of the horse eating sign next to the car park......


She actually did really well, in spite of Ali yelling at Éowyn, and Éowyn insisting on being in the video with us.......right at the end she saw a dog and got a bit distracted, but apart from that it was fine.

Here's the video: Interdressage March 2010 Class 8

Oh NO!!!!! A Dog!!!!

My friend Jane has gone off to the UK for a week or so and we are looking after her dog, Ruby. Aliénor is delighted of course and poor Ruby has to suffer being dragged over a series of makeshift jumps in the garden (Ali wants to do dog agility, the fact that we don't have a dog is neither here nor there.......mind you, she's pretty good over the jumps all by herself).

The cats, however, are NOT impressed one little bit......