Basically the morning session was with each horse at liberty in the round pen, he showed people how to get the horse's attention and how to move them around using body language, a lot like Adam Shereston does.
Some horses would move from the slightest cue, others needed a series of cues, each one "louder" than the last. So Seraphina would move away with just a look whereas Chester needed the rope throwing behind him before he decided to cooperate! But then Eric showed us that once he'd got the idea that he couldn't just stand around eating and needed to take some direction from people, he soon realised that a click of the tongue meant "off you go!". A lot of it was very slow movement, he doesn't do join up where you send the horse away, it's all about being able to direct them around, getting their attention, ie having both their eyes on you, and having them "with" you, which took some doing with some of them as there were a lot of distractions! Once he'd got the measure of each horse, he showed the owner how to do the same, then they had to move the horse by themselves. Here's a vid of him working with Ali and Seraphina:
Kinna was a bit of a challenge, she didn't want to listen at first, then she started getting anxious and bombing round like a loony so he worked on getting her calm and paying attention. He also did some bending the neck to move the quarters, she's so bendy she was touching her nose to her side without moving her quarters at first but once she realised what he wanted, she was stepping round nicely.
So that was the morning groundwork session, I'll do another post for the afternoon ridden session......
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