silkyraven | Lesson with Judith! (Reply)

So moving into the second period of lockdown or whatever we’re calling this I’m determined to keep up some enthusiasm for training with Dino. To that end I have booked myself some video lessons with the ever lovely Judith! We took some video last week of what we’ve been up to talk about in our first lesson:

Watch on YouTube

Judith noticed that he’s bending round me quite a lot which unhelpful in the walk and a tiny bit unsafe in the trot as he tends to fall on top of me. To improve this I need to:

– Make sure I feed him in front on him and not in front of me

– Do some work in protected contact along a straight line: this could using spare fence stakes and some string, or over the poles, so he walks straight and is discouraged from curling round on top of me.

The second issue we have is that the leg waving is back with a vengeance! She suggested two tactics to try and get on top of this:

– Catching him very very early as he starts to come to a stop, before the leg can come off the floor and reward very heavily. Also reward heavily for standing still

– Teaching him to lift the leg on a queue (possibly me lifting my leg) so he can do it sometimes!

We could also look at an alternative behaviour such as backing up. We need to think about ‘standing still’ as an action, not just as ‘doing nothing’. Given that he can stand still when he’s being tacked up it might be helpful to do some work on this on the hard standing as well as in the field to try and reinforce the idea what standing still is a good thing to do at times when he’s not being tacked up too.