Vanna and her horsemanship

Desensitizing with handystick and string

Vanna should not move, she should relax with whatever I 'throw' at her. This makes a safer horse that uses his 'thinking' side of the brain, and not the 'reacting' (flight) one.

Vanna does not love this exercise (ears back) but she does not move, either. She's not really relaxed but she stands still for at least 15 seconds, so I reward her with rubbing her with the stick.

Same exercise on the other side of the horse. Whatever the horse is used to see out of the left eye, it could be a totally spooky object seen out of the right eye so all the desensitizing exercises need to be done on both sides of the horse (and last, on the front).

Backing up Method #1

Vanna should back up with me tapping the air with the stick. She backs up but is kind of lazy about it. She should back up much faster. But with me holding the camera, stick and string and try to talk and try to count, I really could not do more! LOL

Yielding hind quarters

Vanna should turn her hind away from me when I tap the air with the stick or eventually just point with my finger/look at it as I go towards it. She should step with her left hind in front of her right (crossing over). You start with one step initially but since Vanna is pretty good at it, she gave me already two or three.

Her inside front leg should at best not move, just stay on the ground and move in a circle. First, Vanna was waling around with her front a lot but the better she got with yielding her hind quarters the better she gets in just pivoting around with the front.

I am actually not trying to teach her how to count, the counting 1-4 does help in keeping a steady rhythm in tapping the air with the stick.

Backing up Method #2

You wiggle the rope and wave the stick underneath it from right to left to right and walk towards her. Since I had the camera I could not wave the stick. And I still don't get it why there are 4 different methods in backing up the horse. I even did not find an answer to this watching Clinton Anderson's DVDs.

Yielding the fore quarters

This should be one of the most difficult exercises. It takes a while until the horse understands what you try to teach him since the horse will back up, go forward or ignores you completely. Vanna does all three. So finally after watching Clinton's video again, I could manage to get one right step from Vanna. But most of the time she's still pivoting on her front leg (same as yielding the hind quarters) but in this exercise Vanna actually should pivot on her inside hind leg, not swinging her butt around and just bend her neck away. So this is something we need to work on! But we got a step and this is a beginning!