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Post by horseguy on Dec 9, 2015 21:03:39 GMT
The zero to one deal was about a horse getting ready. He said before a horse does anything, he gets ready to do. If its something you want, you have to be able to feel him prepare, arrange his body, and give him time to prepare. It may only be a fraction of a second, but if you go through that feel, you get that brace, the next time you ask. In the same way, you can keep your horse out of some trouble, because you can feel him getting ready to go the wrong direction, or do the wrong thing. That is when you have the time to do something about it. After he does it, you're too late. So Ray would spend a lot of time on a horse getting ready. Then maybe he would turn loose of him and not ask. He rewarded the zero to one part. Once the horse is at one, now you could ask a whole lot more, within his physical capabilities. This quote is from the Ray Hunt thread, which I consider important because it reaches deeply into the essence of what we are doing when we work to improve a horse's movement. I named this topic How to begin to train a horse because the pre-movement place Ray Hunt calls square zero, of preparation is when and where change can take place in how a horse moves, and I want to explain my understanding of this process and how to begin it with a horse without digressing from the Ray Hunt topic. Out of respect for Ray Hunt the following is how I have worked to improve the movement of horses, using what he insightfully describes as square zero. Hunt says that most horse trainers begin at square one, and I think he is right about this. They want to alter, correct or improve a horse's movement while it is happening, but by then I it is too late. Still, since it is there in front of the trainer, it seems logical to begin there. It's not. Why, because I think that the movement of a horse has multiples of complexity in movement over how we move. It's different, and Hunt's insight about equine pre-movement is the effective gateway to actually changing a horse's movement. It's the easy way, but it has its challenges. How to begin? In the Ray Hunt thread I mentioned great horses like Riley, Mosby and Sprite because they were exciting to train because they had incredibly fast pre-movement or preparation. Riley was 17 H but he could do three variations of pre-movement in the time an average horse could do one. Riding him was like taking an unending very rapid multiple choice test. My point is that if you want to get good at moving into that pre-movement or preparation space with a horse that you want to train, don't start with a Riley or any rapid succession I-can-do-it-any-of-these-multiple-ways horse. Start with a methodical mover that offers you one slow choice, and be there with that process of the horse selecting its body preparation for movement. Just feel the horse's body move in preparation for a depart into a gait, for example, or something else that is simple. In human communication we might call this "prefacing". We've all known people who start their sentences with a preface like, "Don't take this personally...". Hang out with someone who always does this and you will be driven a little mad and want to shout, "Just say it will you!" That's where you want to get to with pre-movement or preparation with your horse. You want to become so familiar with their pre-movement that you want them to get on with it. I had a horse named Tommy that everyone loved. Tommy was sweet but he took so much time preparing to move that he would get so behind when we rode terrain that he could get o the required movement. He was a little dangerous that way. I kept Tommy around the farm for a while, even though I knew he would not make the cut when it came time to fox hunt of do anything challenging. I kept him because I wanted student riders to feel his slow motion preparation to move. You couldn't miss it. Tommy was a good horse to begin to feel how to enter that pre-movement space with a horse. Riley was near impossible. To enter that pre-movement space with Riley you had to give him incredibly difficult tasks that would stop his dance-like options in the micro seconds of his rapid fire pre-movement. You basically had to put him to a task that only allowed him one choice in the time allotted to prepare. Once you could limit his pre-movement choices, you could begin to alter his movement and improve it by getting involved so ever briefly in his preparation. Over the course of years Riley went from a bull in a china shop to a ballet dancer, never slowing down the pre-movement, just using the time allotted more efficiently. So again, if you think you have a Riley type, don't try to learn to enter that pre-movement space with that horse as your first horse to train in this Ray Hunt square zero way. Instead, find a slow deliberate mover like my old buddy, Piero. Piero's pre-movement preparation was like an expert pool shooter. Piero would "look at the table", pick one shot he though he could make, walk up to the table, lean over, place his hand on the green felt, settle and make the shot. Piero allowed the rider plenty of time to enter that movement preparation with him, and, I swear, offer openings to the rider help him improve it. If circumstances quickened, like in a fox hunt, he would speed up the process just enough to make it work and still welcome your involvement in the preparation. What an exceptional horse he was. Ray Hunt's square zero is, I believe, how to begin to learn to truly train a horse. Learning to enter that zero square preparation with the horse is the first step. On the Ray Hunt topic I made the distinction between horse training and horse sorting or horse bullying. Only horse training can improve a horse's movement. Horse sorting and horse bullying will not to improve a horse's movement because both those ways are ways around making real changes in movement. Only finding how to enter the pre-movement space, square zero, will allow you to change a horse's way he moves. |
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Post by jimmy on Dec 9, 2015 23:15:59 GMT
Horseguy, the horse you describe, Riley, some might call and over-acheiver. Those horses are almost always ready. Ready to do something, anything. The kind that most riders bore until the horse gets so frustrated with only being allowed to get ready, and being stopped from doing something, that they become dangerous, in a misunderstood way. Those horses have to be taught how to wait. But the same skill applies. If you can feel a horse get ready to let down, and get quiet, he can find a way.If you're too busy asking something of him, it's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.. If you miss those opportunities,, well with those kind, you may never get it back.
This is the other side of the getting ready part. The horse that catches on so fast, he's all ready a step ahead of you. That is not a bad thing. Ray liked horses like that.He looked for them. And those that were in trouble, after Ray worked with them, had that, where have you been all my life look to them. But it took a rider that can get ready as fast as the horse. That is why Ray would say the horse wasn't wrong. The rider needed more to offer him.
The down side of this is when got turned into "natural horsemanship". When clinicians focused on ground work, and people learned to endlessly, relentlessly, prepare a horse for something that will never come or be allowed to happen. Because they can't handle it. They don't even know what it is they are trying to prepare the horse for.
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Post by rideanotherday on Dec 10, 2015 11:39:21 GMT
The down side of this is when got turned into "natural horsemanship". When clinicians focused on ground work, and people learned to endlessly, relentlessly, prepare a horse for something that will never come or be allowed to happen. Because they can't handle it. They don't even know what it is they are trying to prepare the horse for. Pat Parelli has made a business out of this. He is one of the world's best marketers and he picked the perfect target audience - 40+ year old women who rode as kids, but quit as teenagers. They just want to get the "magic" back. Now, some of the skills that Pat teaches are handy in the "toolkit". I think where it misses the mark is teaching the progression of the horse. Not everyone has the timing, rhythm and feel to train horses well. Selling the "dream" of training your own horse...well, I've seen some VERY picked on, picked apart and frustrated horses as a product of this type of handling. |
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Post by horseguy on Dec 10, 2015 15:43:28 GMT
Horseguy, the horse you describe, Riley, some might call and over-acheiver ... The horse that catches on so fast, he's all ready a step ahead of you. That is not a bad thing. Ray liked horses like that.He looked for them. And those that were in trouble, after Ray worked with them, had that, where have you been all my life look to them. But it took a rider that can get ready as fast as the horse. That is why Ray would say the horse wasn't wrong. The rider needed more to offer him.
Riley was an over achiever. He was always ready. I think in the beginning after I bought him from a woman who was scared to death of him and he of her. He was a striker. I fed him and handled him for a month before I got on him. I guess that was my ground work, then one day I took him to the round pen saddled and rode him. He twisted a little, always getting ready to do who knew what. The following week I rode him on the cross country course almost every day. He discovered he liked to jump. We set a few land speed records for cross country. He could be on a very straight perpendicular line to a jump and he would change leads 3 or 4 times in the approach. He had difficulty preparing in just one way at first.
I love these kinds of horses. There are levels in polo, 2 goal, 4 goal etc. up to 40 goal (only Argentina can put a 40 goal team on the field). In America it stops at 24 goal. To be effective in polo you must have 6 over achievers like Riley above 12 goal. It doesn't hurt to have them above 8 goal. If any horse needs a job, it is an over achiever. Every day is game day for them. They do not get or like practice. Riley was too big for polo.
Riley pulling a toboggan in the early days
Riley working with hounds in Ohio where he finished his working career as the Master's/Huntsman's horse and is now retired.
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Post by horseguy on Dec 10, 2015 18:53:21 GMT
Pat Parelli has made a business out of this. He is one of the world's best marketers and he picked the perfect target audience - 40+ year old women who rode as kids, but quit as teenagers. They just want to get the "magic" back. Now, some of the skills that Pat teaches are handy in the "toolkit". I think where it misses the mark is teaching the progression of the horse. Not everyone has the timing, rhythm and feel to train horses well. Selling the "dream" of training your own horse...well, I've seen some VERY picked on, picked apart and frustrated horses as a product of this type of handling. I think that "natural horsemanship" would make a very good thread or topic on its own. I mention it here in relation to Ray Hunt because I think he is a real horse trainer as opposed to what the Parelli proc34ess does with a horse. And by now I would not limit it to just Parelli because there are so many imitators trying to cash in on his Big Name Trainer business model. I do not know how to describe it better than you have by saying he's selling a dream, not a training method. I have a different view of horse sorters who call themselves trainers. They do less harm that the dream sellers, but they also discard some really good horses. You write, "Not everyone has the timing, rhythm and feel to train horses well". That is true of brain surgeons too, but the difference is anyone can call themselves a horse trainer and try to get away with it, but if you do that as a surgeon, you go to jail. The net result I have observed over the past 50 or so years is that the pretenders have diluted the meaning of horse trainers to the point no one really knows what one is or does. I go back to the definition of beginner, intermediate master and expert riders I learned as a kid. A master rider can get everything out of a horse God put in it and an expert can get more out of a horse that God put in it. Either a master or an expert has the right, I feel, to call themselves a trainer, the expert being the better of the two. Today I see plenty of intermediate riders call themselves trainers, even some beginners. If we had a real Federation trainers would be licensed as they are in Europe. Until then, Parelli and his followers "are" horse trainers.  |
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Post by horseguy on Dec 12, 2015 13:05:02 GMT
Ray Hunt's principle of starting at square zero, rather than square one, continues to be a light bulb "of course" moment for me. It's something I have worked with and not thought too much about until now. I continue to think about training Riley, my big "war horse", and entering his square zero fractional moments with him. At first it was like those blue spark machines you see at a science museum.  Way more energy than was needed for what we were doing filled every nock and cranny of Riley's square zero. That energy clouded the view of most of who he really was. For example, it took me about a year to realize he had tremendous courage. In the beginning I thought everything he did came out of the blazing sparks of energy he had. I'm explaining this because the nature of the square zero moment of preparation or pre-movement is where you can potentially really see a horse. Yes, it is physical. A horse sets up their movement in physical ways in that preparatory space. They reach under themselves well or not well. They align their body correctly or not. There is a lot of physicalness to square zero but less than square one, I think. What is also there in that moment of preparation is, for lack of a better word, attitude. Riley's attitude was courageous. Like I said, I didn't see it at first because I was blinded by the sparks, but in time as we did more and more difficult stuff, he never set himself up in a defensive way. The way he approached a slide, a jump, a bank, everything was like a paratrooper who loves jumping out of planes because he's not at all scared. My horse Sprite, on the other hand, lacked courage. Her attitude in the square zero moment of preparation was like she was biting her nails. She was a great athlete, but like Elvis, every time she went "on stage" she had butterflies. But also like Elvis, when she got into the "song", the actual square one movement, she knocked it out of the park every time. That never really changed in her. It got easier, but she never had courage in her preparation. There is a lot in the pre-movement moment before a horse creates the movement. Today I am aware of attitude. I am wondering if Ray Hunt would have called this part of the horse's "mind". I say this because just like we must improve the horse's physical preparation in the square zero moment of preparation, it is there we can also improve their attitude, if needed. Once movement starts, it's too late. With Sprite, it was there that she needed encouragement. I had to sit as if I trusted her completely. That was hard for me sometimes. I had to fill the moment with my courage, and sometimes I was scared that her anxiety would limit her movement too much and we'd get into trouble once she executed her movement in square one. Scared riders couldn't do much with her.  Sprite So, what I am realizing is that square zero is always so different for each horse. With Riley the corrections in that moment were mostly physical, with Sprite they were mostly around attitude or mind. With Piero, who's attitude was always efficiency, it was both. I had to get him physically to do more than the minimum many times in preparation, and those corrections or improvements were physical and in his mind. Every horse is unique in square zero, I think. |
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Post by horseguy on Dec 19, 2015 16:09:33 GMT
In the last several years in my life, I have become more interested in the progression of training. I am more interested in the little things that develop into bigger things. In this video, I see the trainer going straight for the big things, in a big way. He goes right past feel and straight to power, and pressure release. He goes right past levels of pressure. There is no zero, or even one. He seems to start way up the scale, and the horses are hurrying to catch up. Even with the first horse, there is no attempt to allow her to take some curiosity in him. In the old school, they called this whip training or breaking, to teach a horse not to turn his but to you. He isn't too harsh, but its still a lot of pressure. Just another form of join up. The clicker is just an added element. What is happening mentally with the clicker? I don't find it any less passive, since the association is, oh crap, next comes a lot of pressure, so I'll face up. So in a way, the clicker elicits a type of anxiety. In the stopping, he again misses the progression. Part of a developing a good stop is learning how to slow down as quickly as you can. Taking uneducated horses and leveraging them into stopping is not bringing much finesse into the picture. I see a lot of pressure and not a lot of release, or even finesse here. The quote from Jimmy is from the How a Horse Jumps thread. I thought it applied here as well. It's about this video. In the video you see a professional trainer working horses. As Jimmy points out, he goes right for the "big things", the outcomes. What trainers often like to do is train a horse they can ride but the owner often cannot. They don't generalize the training so that an decent human rider can accomplish the outcomes. My post on the jump thread was about what I saw when the video trainer rode grayhorse's horse. My post, I realized after reading Jimmy's, was more from my old business perspective. A horse trainer wants to get the goals accomplished so he/she can send the horse back to the owner or sell the horse. The goal is to get paid. So I posted that I would do pretty much what the video trainer did but hopefully with more finesse and less physical throwing the horse around. Jimmy came from a purer place, he came from the underlying process. That's the struggle of being a professional trainer. You feel like if you give up the big things and completely trust the process, you will fail at the goals and not get paid. Jimmy has gotten past that. I have sent so many horses back to owners and a month or two or three later they complain that I didn't do my job. Of course, they have unntrained the horse but it is my fault. That's bad for business, so the impulse is to really focus in the outcomes. This thread is about truly training a horse. Jimmy's focus on the little things is how. It takes a lot of discipline to detach from the outcome enough to trust the process that the horse uses, but it works better. People call this process natural horsemanship and it is small "n" natural. It's a shame that big "N" Natural Horsemanship has taken this process to a whole other place where the big things don't necessarily come from the small things. In other words, focusing on the big things like the video trainer doesn't work, and focusing on the small things for the sake of the small things doesn't work either. Training is focusing on both, big and small and getting from one to the other the way the horse learns best. |
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Post by jimmy on Dec 19, 2015 18:26:30 GMT
Why do horses loose their feel? What makes a horse tune a person out? What makes them wait for you to make them do something?
The answer is no one waited for them.
Like Ray alluded to, if I ask you do move over or come to me, but instead of giving you a chance to do it, I pull or push you. So easy to see, the next time I ask you, you brace. You get ready to not go, to brace against the pull you know is coming. That will be more on your mind than complying, at first. Then you'll do it, but your defenses were all ready up. So then it takes a pull or push to get you to move.
I think that is what takes place. So you get something, but its never as good as it could have been, had the horse been allowed to sort things out. That is where you can think more along the lines of signals, rather than always the pressure/release paradigm. So if we want those big things to happen, we have to start smaller, and allow the horses mind to pitch in. With a young, green horse, that takes time. But its even true of harder, jaded horses. If you can get their defenses out of the picture, and just wait a little longer it is surprising what can happen. That is what I have been trying to get done, the older I get.
I all ready know I can make one do something, believe me!
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Post by horseguy on Dec 19, 2015 20:36:20 GMT
One interesting thing about training polo horses, as opposed to jumpers or dressage horses, is the game requires that the horse and the rider wait. As the game unfolds you have to wait at times to see how it is changing before you commit to the play. The game intensity goes high out of sight, then it stops and you wait and see. Horses quickly get that the game is about the ball and they want to run to the ball like 8 year old soccer kids who swarm the ball. You are there very alone with your horse waiting. You wait together. You both have to let the ball go. It's a nice fraction of a moment here and there in a very fast game. You both wait and then you move off quickly into the play together, until the next change makes you wait. Like Jimmy said, you get moments to sort it all out and for the horse to pitch in. Maybe this is why polo horses love the game so much.
I suspect that working cattle is like that. You must have to wait, sometimes long, sometimes very short, to see what you are dealing with in terms of a cow you have to move.
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Post by rideanotherday on Dec 21, 2015 12:13:42 GMT
I suspect that working cattle is like that. You must have to wait, sometimes long, sometimes very short, to see what you are dealing with in terms of a cow you have to move. Working cattle is very much waiting on the cow to move. It can happen very quickly for the most part. Cows can be really fresh and reactive. It's a lot about letting the horse's natural sense help them stop the cow and control it. This video is Special Nu Baby and Matt Gains. The "waiting" part happens really fast in this video. |
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Post by jimmy on Dec 22, 2015 15:46:55 GMT
Waiting in cutting and cow horse training is a big part of it. If you want your horse to learn to read the cow on his own, you have to not jump the gun on him. You have to sit really still, and not distract him from his concentration. Otherwise, they wait for you, and stop watching the cow. So in many ways, it's contradictory to other times. Usually, we want our horses to learn to wait for us, or wait for direction. Which is why both horse and rider have to watch and read the cow. The tricky part of all this is that many times the horse moved when we wanted him to wait, which moves the cow when didn't want it to move, and other times the horse waited when he should have moved. There is such a fine line in this, going back and forth across that line in seconds. This is evident in how quickly things can fall apart in a hurry in a cutting pen situation.
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Post by horseguy on Dec 23, 2015 14:43:43 GMT
Waiting in cutting and cow horse training is a big part of it. If you want your horse to learn to read the cow on his own, you have to not jump the gun on him. You have to sit really still, and not distract him from his concentration. Otherwise, they wait for you, and stop watching the cow. So in many ways, it's contradictory to other times. Usually, we want our horses to learn to wait for us, or wait for direction. Which is why both horse and rider have to watch and read the cow. That is just like polo. You want the horse to learn the game, so you have to not distract them from it all the time by giving cues. |
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