Playground Play and Posing with Lexi

Goal accomplished: Lexi stands quietly while I
take a picture on the way back from our ride.

With these snowy conditions, I haven't been able to do much riding, but I have been able to work on small projects with Lexi that might otherwise get designated to another day. One of my goals has been to work with her on stopping and standing when we're out in the orchards. She likes going out and has a nice forward walk for a small horse, but she doesn't like to stop and stand. I've tried to convince her that if she would just hang out beneath an apple tree she'll be well rewarded, but she hasn't been convinced. And in Kevin's "playground," a part of the farm that's dedicated to fun, she gets anxious. It's a lovely spot with a small pond (though not one we can take the horses into) and some flat and hilly ground for galloping and lots of little logs for jumping. In the summer there's a water complex too, but it's full of snow today as is the playground in general. Every time we got out there, she wants to take off, which would be fine if there weren't gopher holes hiding under the snow and the potential for slipping. So my goal has been to get her listening even when she's feeling spicy.

The challenge with clicker-training Lexi in particular is that she's not food-motivated when she's tense. She has broadened her view of acceptable treats, but until two days ago I could rarely get her to eat one when we were out. When she did, she usually gobbled it down while she tried to charge off or held it in her mouth as she stared at whatever goblin might be up ahead. 

But we've been doing a lot of click/treating while walking out in the snow the past couple of weeks, and two days ago we ventured into the playground and walked around the pond and up the hill past the cross-country jumps that usually get her wired up. As usual she would start getting high-headed and "looky," but this time I asked her to walk figure-eights on the ground around me, then disengage her hind quarters, with plenty of clicking and treating for a quiet response. And pretty soon she was offering me behaviors. What if I drop my head to the snow? Click/treat. What if I stand quietly with my ears pricked? Click/treat. What if I touch this log? Click/treat. And so on.

And yesterday we rode out in the orchards and for the first time she stopped to take treats quietly and appeared to be trying to sort out what behaviors might get her a click/treat. What if I walk faster? Drop my head at the walk? Stretch my nose forward? How about a trot transition? The beauty of the click is that the response to what she's doing is immediate. She gets instant feedback. "Yes, that's a lovely walk." "Yes, rounding your neck and lifting your back is absolutely the right thing to do." And so she does it again. And again. And if I respond with perfect timing (hah!), theoretically I could make rapid progress towards whatever my goal is. 

The challenge for me is sorting it all out. Clicker training teaches mindfulness, because it's very easy to miss a clickable moment, or worse, to click the wrong thing because you're a split second late. So, for example, when tied for grooming, Lexi has her little buoy to target as I'm grooming. She has a small repertoire of behaviors which I'm working to "microshape." That is, I want to take her from touching the buoy with her nose stretched out and her neck flat and change her "shape" to an arched neck, her weight balanced and slightly rocked back so that she lifts her back at the halt. It's something Alexander Kurland calls "the pose."* We've been working on the pose over the last few days and today, as I was grooming her, I had her standing closer to the buoy, her neck lifted and her head more perpendicular to the ground than it has been, as well as her ears pricked. I was working to click her only when she gave me a more attractive look as she touched the buoy, a step closer to the pose (I'm not asking for the finished product. It's too soon!) If you were watching, you would have seen her moving her head quite a bit. What if I touch the snow? No? OK, how about wiggling my lips on the buoy? No? What about looking out across the distance with my ears pricked, with my nose almost on the buoy? Click/treat. Hurray! OK, what about pricking my ears with my nose on the buoy. Click/treat. Yeah!!!!! 

And so on. But if I mistime the click, I'm clicking her for turning her head towards me, or for pinning an ear, or for taking a bite out of the buoy, so I have to be absolutely mindful in order to click at the right moment. I don't always get it right and that's why it's a slow process, but it's always fixable. If something isn't working, I just go back to the previous step. 

Next up: Using play, and fixing as I go.

*Make sure to watch this video by Alexandra Kurland to see what "The Pose" will lead to (I hope) as my work with Lexi progresses.

Engaging Readers, Conversations about Writing, and the Wisdom of Combining Horses and Words

My previous post, with its question about how to engage readers, generated a microscopic blip on the "stats" for my blog -- but more importantly it also generated a couple of helpful conversations. My friend Peter Reed wrote, "I believe that current social media is moving towards a visual sense only. Check out Instagram or snap chat. Both are predominantly visual .... It's getting more and more difficult to get people to read something longer and more complex."

The chart to the left, shared by my friend Jill Widner, reveals some sobering facts about reading and books. My novel faces an uphill slog towards publication for a good reason. But still: 43% of books are read till the end, savored I hope, and loved. And if 70% of adults haven't been in a bookstore, perhaps at least a certain percentage of those bookstore-deprived people have ordered books online, or directly from an author's site, as I've done on occasion. Why pay the middlepeeps when you don't have to?

As a child, I read voraciously. While my sisters and their friends usually used their 20-pence pieces to buy Cadbury's chocolate or other sweets at H. Williams* in Dundrum after Mum picked us up from school on Wednesday afternoons, I always bought cheap volumes of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Fabulous Five series. I read them by flashlight under my duvet at night, but loved more furiously Watership Down and The Yearling, which brought me to sobs in the silence of my room. And now I want to do what writers did for me so many years ago; they replaced the cold blue of my room with sailboats and islands and horses galloping down shale slopes and rabbits in deep underground warrens and dying fawns. (I read The Yearling only once, and can't imagine reading it again. It turned me against guns and hunting and any desire to eat meat; I cried for days, and while that might sound devastating and terrible, I think it's not: "The more a child reads, the likelier they are able to understand the emotions of others," the chart above says. Yes. That.)

Pam, a long-time, now-retired colleague, asked me a couple of provoking questions: "But the question in your blog is how does a writer engage readers. So, who will the readers be? How do you expect or anticipate them to show engagement? Are they going to be readers or reader/writers?"

I had to think about the answer for a while. I wasn't thinking of an audience for my novel Entangled Time as I wrote it. My sister Moira had read the draft and said it reminded her of a cross between Maya Angelou and the novel The Help. I think that works. It's literary, I hope, somewhat historical fiction, and perhaps is written in an accessible enough way to be appealing to an audience with an interest in topics such as racism, dying, love, the nature of God, physics, intergenerational secrets and family dysfunction. 

But that brings me to the question of the audience for my blog. I began it to track how I'm doing connecting with my formerly abused horse Lexi without a sense that I was writing "to people." That was the plan, anyway.  Then I got self-conscious and started writing for an imagined audience, so my writing took on a more structured, formalized feel. And now I'm throwing in writing as a topic and I'm wondering how few of my potential readers might love both horses AND writing. Should I split the blog up? Two blogs: Horse training (via the clicker), and a sabbatical-theme blog about writing and engaging readers? 

Oh, screw it. That's getting entirely too complicated. People are multi-faceted. If you're like my dad and you think horses are worthless creatures that "bite at one end, kick at the other and consume a hell of a lot of money in the middle," then ignore the horse posts. And if you just want Lexi stories and not all these words about writing and readers and theories about humanity, ignore the writing posts. Yes?

It's a work in progress, that's for sure. Now to figure out how to get the visuals that will hold the attention of increasingly visual readers!

*H. Williams image scanned by Brand New Retro and found here.

Percolating

Places to Percolate

I woke last Saturday with a sense of shock. I was done; I had turned in my grades. I was looking at six months without teaching. Vertigo -- immediate, unprecedented. I've been working in some way or another since I started babysitting at 12 years old. I had summer breaks in college and for my first few years of teaching, and years ago I had a quarter-long sabbatical to write about Sebastian Barry closely followed by another one to work on the breast-cancer memoir that I wrote with my mother.  But that was 16 years ago. Since then I've been teaching straight, including summers, without a break.

At the end of every quarter I turn in my grades and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I wake the next morning and think about prepping. It's who I am. It's how I've lived. I can't imagine what it's like not thinking about what I'm going to do for my next set of classes -- tweaking curriculum, adding a new activity, figuring out state-of-the-art software. So a moment of giddy joy on Saturday turned almost immediately into a kind of panic. But before I could plunge too deeply into the void, Azalea came in to remind me we were going Christmas tree catching the next day and I was able to focus my energy on the familiar -- getting out the decorations, moving things around to make room for the tree, not-thinking not-thinking not-thinking about having nothing to do for six months.

What I know about myself is that the best way for me to write is to not write. I have to do nothing* in order to write freely. It's how I think. And it's impossible to do enough nothing when I'm working.

So Saturday I prepped for the Christmas tree, and Sunday we went and chopped down our Charlie Brown tree in the woods in a wee bit of a snow storm, then drank hot chocolate with Peppermint Schnapps to get warm before the drive home, and Monday I paid bills and cleaned things and continued not to think about the nothing that is waiting for me, and Tuesday -- which is today -- I ran on the ditch bank through snapping cold air, feet breaking through the thin crust on the snow that fell last week, and finally allowed myself to think about the nothing.

And this evening, after Azalea left to hang with her boyfriend, I made a plan. Right now I have a journal where I will write morning pages, and I will have this blog which is my baby-step move towards fulfilling my sabbatical promise. And tomorrow I will ask the Peoples of the Internets what you all think about how a writer who writes best by doing nothing can do something to engage with readers in the new world beyond the garret. 

For the moment, that's enough. I await your suggestions, peeps.

*And by "nothing," I mean I need time to be mindless, walking, running, cleaning the house, riding (for although riding itself is mindful, many of the chores around riding allow space for that "nothing" in which writing develops).

I'm Not Afraid of that Monster!

I'm Not Afraid (Video -- also posted on FB)

Today, when I got to the farm, I found myself in a text conversation with my sisters, so didn't go "catch" Lexi right away. Afterwards, as I was pulling items out of my storage space, I heard thundering hooves and looked across to see who was charging around. It was Lexi. She was galloping and gallivanting at the bottom of her paddock. When she saw me she whinnied and charged up to the gate. I got the distinct impression she had been trying to get my attention, and when I wasn't getting her more subtle hints, like nickers and pacing the fence (and probably smiling, or touching various potential targets), she got irritated and decided to see if thundering hooves would make me pay attention to her. I had intended to go straight to riding, but she was so happy I figured I'd better do some fun stuff with her for a bit, so before riding out in the orchards we “played” in the round pen. I put a bunch of "monsters" in there for her to pick from. She went from one to the other. She upended the green bucket. She nuzzled the old saddle pad. She pawed at and tried to eat the tarp. She lined herself up by the mounting block for me (and actually tried to step up on it -- I'm hoping to ask Kevin if he'll help me build a bridge for her if I buy the materials).

And I imagined what it would be like to have a baby, a furry little sweet-faced Lexi baby whom I could play with using this kind of training. Instead of the traditional sacking out ritual, where you do a kind of dance with the horse wanting to take off and you putting pressure on and then removing it right before the horse is about to leave until he or she finally decides the thing isn't scary after all, instead of that the horse picks the pace, decides to play with the monsters as he or she is comfortable, learns that approaching the monster is a choice that's rewarded with a click/treat. I could go so far with a baby long before I ever sat on his or her back. We'd be dancing on the seashore together with no tack in no time. We could audition for Cavalia or Odysseo! It would be great!

OK, back to reality. I have no idea what I'm doing, and both of us are just fumbling around trying to figure each other out. But it's fun.

In gratitude to Lexi. (And now back to those papers I have to read before Monday!)

Playing statues -- Or Why It Is Better to Use the Clicker than Round Pen "Join Up"

One of the beauties of clicker training is that one can use it anytime and anywhere, for just a few minutes here and there, and accomplish training and skills and self- and horse-awareness that translates to work under saddle. (At least, that is what I've read, and that is what I am experiencing with Lexi.)

And before we go any further, here is a caveat. I am not an expert either at horse training in general or clicker training in particular. But I do know what I've seen and read about clicker training for both dogs and horses is that it's positive, fun and effective. Imagine how much more amazing our results would be if I knew what I were really doing!

With the time change, I've had little opportunity to ride in the evening, but occasionally I've had time to run out to the farm and spend a few minutes doing ground work with Lexi. Today we worked at Playing Statue, in which I click/treat her for standing still. In the picture below, you can see her standing on her mat. I've taught her to stand on it while I'm grooming her, and today I worked on having her stand on it while I saddled her up. 

The above picture shows her on her good side. The next picture is her bad side; i.e. she prefers to keep me on her left (common with many horses) and so she had moved a step back off her mat as I was going to get the saddle. But beyond that, she was very good. We are also working on having her "smile" for the camera. I'm trying to capture her when she's looking straight ahead with her ears forward. She rather likes to frown at cameras, so teaching her to look pretty for her pictures is a goal for me!

Now, it's possible to teach horses to stand free for grooming using the old round pen trick of sending the horse away if she moves, keeping the pressure on till she shows signs of wanting to connect with you, and then removing the pressure so that eventually she learns that the best place to be is standing right by you. This is called aversive training. When you use aversive training, you do something the horse doesn't like in order to get her to do something you want her to do. Using pressure to send the horse away when she's moving around as you groom, then removing that pressure as soon as she looks towards you (or flicks her ear in your direction), teaches her that if she "joins up" with you, she won't experience pressure. This kind of aversive pressure doesn't have to be cruel. My sense is that old-time natural horsemanship cowboys use it all the time, and it can be light pressure used with such meticulous feel, timing, and balance that the horse rapidly connects to the trainer and feels comfort in being with him. 

Many natural horsemanship trainers tell you they're simply using herd dynamics to communicate with the horse. I had a horse many years ago who would follow me wherever I went -- including over jumps and around cones in intricate patterns -- and whom I could ride with a rope around his neck. The initial connection happened because he imprinted on me at birth, and then a good horsewoman from these parts helped me hone it. However I've also seen it used in a way that clearly caused distress to the horse, and I've seen plenty of "cowboy" trainers advocating such methods whom I wouldn't want anywhere near a horse of mine. Then a year or two ago I read a study that indicated horses are not as relaxed and connected as we think they are when they are trained using round pen "Join Up" as popularized by Monty Roberts.  In fact, pressure-and-release round-penning likely causes stress in horses. So while I could send Lexi away with fanfare every time she moved a foot and she would learn to stand still to avoid the pressure of being sent away, I prefer to have her stand because she wants to, not because she's trying to avoid something.

That being said, I do combine some low-key traditional pressure/release horsemanship as I work her, in part because I don't know how NOT to, and in part because I think light, mindful pressure-and-release is helpful.

Anyway, as we worked on Playing Statue today, I started by asking her to stand on her mat. When she did, I clicked and reinforced her with a treat. I then started moving away from her, telling her to stay and walking towards the fence where I had my pads waiting. At first I just moved one step before clicking her and returning to treat her, but eventually I could get all the way to the fence and back without her budging. Early in the session, though, she was quite restless, so I took the opportunity of doing some "reinless" driving, where I ask her to move around the pen as if she is wearing long lines, using my hands as though I have long lines in them. We worked on walk-trot-walk transitions and threw in a couple of beginning canter transitions (more on that another time), and I focused on having her bend towards me and accept me on her right side (eye), because it's still hard for her to be soft when I'm on the right. Periodically I'd move back to the mat and ask her to stand, and I'd groom her or rub her for a bit before asking her to go back to work. I think that helped her with the concept of standing still on the mat when I went to get her pads and the saddle. She had come to see the mat as a place of rest and stillness. We finished our lesson after I was able to go get the pads, put them on her, then go back and get the saddle and put it on her without her budging.  Keep in mind that Lexi didn't like being saddled much when I got her. She would put up with it, but make her displeasure known by snaking her neck towards me or biting on the wood at the grooming station, as well as by swinging away from me as I brought the saddle over to lift it onto her back. So it was a lot of fun to have her standing free in the middle of the round pen as I put the pads and saddle on her back.

In gratitude to Susan Signor, who got me started on this fun path!

And then I messed up....

Image taken from Alexandra Kurland's
Clicker Training Your Horse

Last weekend, I took Lexi to my friend's place for another lesson. She was reluctant to load again, and it may be she'll just be one of these horses who doesn't like to ride in the trailer. I hope as she gains experience she'll become more and more reliable about loading, but for the moment she's still somewhat iffy. Still, I was happy with how a little ground and target work got her in the trailer, and she rode with some restlessness but no explosions out to our destination about 50 minutes away.

Then we got there, and I messed up. I had tied her slightly differently than before, deciding to use a short quick-release trailer tie. When I unhooked it, I didn't do it properly and she ended up getting a bump on the way out of the trailer when her lead rope got caught up. Being Lexi, she panicked, pulled back and fell. Again. The last time it happened she panicked because the butt bar terrified her, but this time it was my fault. I wanted to harangue myself for not making sure everything was perfect, but there's no point, especially with horses. I had to just move forward, knowing I was likely going to have a problem to fix later on.

She got up and I checked her over and then we went for a quiet walk and started some clicker-training "long line" work (I'll explain it in another post), and she was excellent the rest of the day, including a fairly relaxed dressage lesson despite the howling wind and the presence of the ever-terrifying piebald calf and his Great Pyrenees dog best friend.

But then I went to load her. And she said no. And no again. And so an hour later there we were, working on loading in a howling gale while occasional drops of icy rain spat out of an ominous sky. I kept in mind Alexander Kurland's story of her horse, Peregrine, who has never learned to be totally comfortable in a trailer. (I was binge-reading her blog a while ago and I'm pretty sure she was talking about Peregrine when she mentioned a horse whom she always needed to work on the ground a little before asking to enter the trailer. He was never totally comfortable with just walking in.) Anyway, I watched Lexi carefully as I worked to combine the little bit of clicker training I knew with traditional work. Away from the trailer I asked for slow lateral work at a walk and slow trot. Close to the trailer I let her relax. When she put her feet on the ramp, theoretically I could click/treat her to help increase her desire to continue into the trailer, but Lexi won't eat when she's stressed, so I had to move back towards more traditional methods, which was to let her rest on the ramp, and then ask her to back up and go to work when away from the ramp.

Eventually I saw her turn her head towards the trailer every time she passed it, her ears indicating she wanted to be in it. But she could only stay on the ramp (or in the trailer as she gained confidence), a second or two before her anxiety got the better of her. I worked hard to anticipate how long she could tolerate being in the trailer, using Kurland's "Four Second Rule," which says that if the horse can handle something for four seconds, click/treat in three. Since Lexi won't eat when she's stressed, I couldn't really use clicker training to reinforce her, so instead I would simply ask her to back out of the trailer before I thought she was going to leave herself. Once out, we'd do a little slow work, and if she turned her ears towards the trailer, I'd invite her to load. Eventually she was walking all the way in, and finally she stood quietly while I fastened the butt bar. The drive home was quiet, and she unloaded well at the other end.

Clearly I need to work more on all the ground work we're doing, but I feel OK about how things went. Safety and relaxation are my goals. Lexi wasn't relaxed about the trailer at first, but she was safe and not panicky, and our work was slow and quiet, which helped her to maintain her sanity.

I love what Kurland says in the image above, which I took from her book, Clicker Training for Your Horse, an excellent book to jump start your clicker training adventures: "Any time you think you have all the answers, some horse will come along to tell you that you don't. You can never stop learning and evolving. The key to good training is to always be looking for new ideas to add into the mix." I know I used to think teaching horses to load was pretty straightforward. Not with Lexi -- in part because of my own mistakes. But it's a perfect opportunity for growth and new learning.

In gratitude for learning.

Why Clicker Training for a Horse?

Here Lexi is targeting a small buoy.
I taught her not to chew wood while being groomed.

When I first heard of using clicker training for horses, I couldn't imagine it. I've been trained traditionally, in Ireland. The natural aids: seat, hands, legs, voice. The artificial aids: whips, spurs, crops, bits/hackamores (if these all sound cruel to non-horse people, they are not. Whips are not used for whipping -- or shouldn't be -- but for gently directing the horse. A light touch of a dressage whip can ask the horse to move into piaffe or another advanced move and help keep the cadence. It's a touch, barely a tickle, not an attack or an abuse. Ditto with spurs and the other artificial aids).

When I started riding in the U.S., I learned about "natural" horsemanship, a way of working with horses that allegedly taps into their roles as fight-flight animals and our tendency to approach as predators. Simply put, when we apply pressure, horses should move away from it. When they move, we release instantly. The release helps horses realize they're on the right track. The idea is to apply feel, timing and balance to help the horse gently recognize you as a leader (an alpha mare, if you will), and gain the horse's respect and obedience. The old masters of this way of riding were incredible horsemen. Their horses were light and responsive and calm. Horse and human together looked like that mythical beast, the centaur -- half-horse, half-human, fully connected.

When I first got my own horses over here some 25 years ago, I read the books by Tom and Bill Dorrance, watched Ray Hunt in action at a clinic in a local town, and audited two or three Buck Brannaman clinics. I also cliniced with a few local "natural horsemanship" trainers and watched others put on shows at the local fair and other equine events. I realized early on there was a wide variety of ability amongst those who called themselves natural horsemanship trainers, and often people who didn't take on the label were equally effective "horse whisperers." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that horsemanship was horsemanship, regardless of the equipment and the labels. The masters of "natural horsemanship," Tom and Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman, had simply found a different way to communicate with horses than the classical dressage riders like Nuno Oliveira. Ultimately the goal and end result was the same: Horses in harmony with their riders; soft, flexible, connected.

When I came back into horses after a decade away, I had lost all sense of confidence in what I knew or how to connect with horses. It's not just that my muscles were unused to the feel of a horse under me. It's that my sense of how to "talk" to horses was fragmented. I learned French as a child, living in Switzerland, but we moved to Ireland when I was eight. A few years later, I could recognize words here and there, and sometimes I could piece together a fragment of meaning, but the sense of fluency and ease I was used to was gone. Same with horses. I knew what the bridle was and knew in theory how to put it on, but everything felt awkward. I had to think through the steps, re-organize myself when the noseband got in the way and ended up in the horse's mouth along with the bit. It's been almost four years since I started riding again, and I still don't have the sense of confidence and ease that used to make riding so easy.

Still, some 40+ horses later -- some ridden only once and some ridden multiple times -- I have a better sense than I did when I first mounted Blitz and began to feel my way back to the language of horses. And now I have a new kind of dialect to add to the traditional language of horse training and the "natural horsemanship" words I learned a couple of decades ago -- clicker training.

I became intrigued with it when I went to a movie with a dog-training friend and she mentioned that she had moved to clicker training for her dogs instead of the traditional way that she had used for so many years. She loved it, and she said her dogs loved it and were always eager to "play" when she began training. More than a year later, I signed up for a few clicker training lessons with my friend's clicker trainer, Susan Signor of Dog Dilemma. My dog Muffin loved the lessons, and I loved playing with her at home. Right about that time, Lexi came into my life. When Susan heard I had a horse, she told me she would help me use clicker training to train my horse, if I was interested.

I was. But I was also dumbfounded. I couldn't imagine how to incorporate clicker training into horse training. It seemed anathema to everything I knew about horses. There is a well-established controversy in the horse world about feeding treats to horses. Some people do. Some don't. Some are adamantly opposed. I always have, although in small doses, and have never had a problem with horses learning to bite as a result, but I know others have concerns that horses can become aggressive with treats. The idea of using food rewards to train riding didn't fit with what I knew and went against what many wise horse people counseled. I also had no idea how it would work logistically from the saddle. But still, I was open, especially given how joyful my dog and my daughter's dog were when we did our clicker training sessions.

And so I embarked on our clicker/target training adventure. I don't want to drag out this essay, so I'll just say that incorporating clicker training does not mean throwing out the traditional "yield to pressure" training that helps horses learn. Once I figured that out, clicker training became conceivable in ways it hadn't been before. I still use most, or all, of the methods of training I did before, but have added the clicker and the target to help speed up Lexi's understanding of what I'm looking for. It's also just fun, because it teaches her to start making choices about behavior, thinking for herself, playing. And I'm not very good at play, for various reasons, so it's helping me, too. But more about that later.

In gratitude for new ways.