Notes and Hightlights

I'm going to quickly post some of the Hightlights and Notes I got from the blogs I listed 3-4 posts ago, while I have time :).

NOTES...
*Interesting fact - EQUUS means equal to us.
*We bring horses into OUR environment and provide for their needs - food, water, farrier, dentist - but all of these are physical needs. Like humans, horses have mental and emotional needs also - how do we cater for these? Mostly we don't.
*Play "Me and My Shadow" - You give your horse 51% of the leadership while you take the 49% so they are the boss. Your job is to shadow, i.e, copy his behaviour and stance, try to feel what he was feeling and focus on the things he deems important.
*Interesting fact - Horses learn 4x faster than humans and are exceptional "one time learners". A human example of this is a child being told not to touch the hot iron, but still does it, but will never do it again.
*Human decisions regarding the emotional state of the horse and therefore the strategy to use have a 50:50 chance of being right! If you were wrong, you can always try the other thing! There are 1000 fresh starts every day.
*There are five areas of confidence to the horse; their Leader, Themselves, their Herd, their Environment and themself as a Learner. If you protect these areas , the centre ground and therefore the learning relationship, will be easy to find. For example, if your horse is unconfident away from his herd, then do the things you want to do in his pasture - don't take him away and expect him to 'behave' as you just ignored of his 5 confidence areas.
*Me and My Shadow -You can revearse the balance so you have 51% of the leadership and your horse has 49% so he has to shadow you.
*Great tip: Play with you 'best' horse first, then take that feeling to the next best and so on...
*RBE - Safety
  RBI - Comfort
  LBE - Play
  LBI - Incentive
*Win the 7 games, but win for both of you... try to think of the human winnning, but the horse winning the prize!
*The yo-yo game is the game of equilibrium - equal motion in opposing directions.
*There were a number of interesting points to consider when playing circling and the most important is a thing called 'positional truth'. This is where you body does the same things every time it makes the same request and the movement is different for different requests.
*Another useful tool for the circling game is dividing the circle into quadrants and measuring progress by quandrants.

I ran out of time :(. I'll post more Sunday!

Keep it Natural,
                  Kaylee