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[blitzen_]

kelli was riding ben in the arena & rather than invite a confrontation (separation anxiety bullshit), i played with beej in the round yard instead.

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when he first came in. i'm going to harness this rolling business & maybe *try* to teach him to lie down. he's pretty good with learning 'tricks', so we'll see. he takes a while to 'tune in' hence the

Comments

[neko_loliighoul]

omg poor kitten! icant imagine how much that would have hurt.... gah gonna set off the waterworks again lol. shit is sad the last few days :(

[glenatron]

Yielding the shoulder is a game of angles. Think of a clock face. Your horse is in the middle, like the hand pointing to 12 O'clock. When you want to get the shoulder to move you want to direct yourself towards 11 or 1 o'clock to get the horse moving away from you and yielding their shoulders. Like this:

[glenatron]

Now I've watched the video I see where he's at a bit better. I'd say you're asking him in sometimes when he comes in, even if you don't mean to. You can use that to build a forequarter yield from the side by stepping away a little to put a draw on him. My aim in a round pen is to work towards having the horse turning in towards me when they change direction, especially with a more flighty horse like this one- turning away from you is still running away a bit. I like that you got him coming in off the fence at the end of that first video. That's what I'd be looking for.

Maybe when he rolls he's just letting you know you haven't rolled the round yard very well so he needs to do that himself.

[blitzen_]

yes, he usually takes a while of me asking a LOT of questions before he decides to grace me with his presence & turn nose in rather than backside in. i usually ask for direction change in two ways. one, a raise with my hand or change of shoulders to 'block' forward motion. this is usually how we do it until he's 'listening' and he'll change with his ass to me. i've used this method to reinforce with voice training him up and down transitions

[blitzen_]

i found it really hard working him whilst holding the camera too. he responds very well to eye contact & cos i was trying to look at the camera he took that as a great opportunity to take advantage. very interesting.