Changing Equine Behaviour

Who else hates clipping? ✂️🙋‍♀️ Doesn't the hair just get everywhere?! No matter how much you try to cover up! 👨‍🚀 I hate clipping because it doesn't matter where I stand, the hair always seems to blow right in my face 😷 Do you hate clipping because of this too? Or do you hate it because your horse hates it? 🐴❌️ Does your horse... Barge, crush or drag you? 🚫 Stamp their feet? 💥 Not let you anywhere near them with the clippers? ⛔️ Rear? 🦖 Kick? 🦵 Spin? 💫 Why not teach your horse that clipping really isn't that bad? What if I told you that I can retrain this behaviour, forever ♾️ This is not a quick fix, their behaviour will completely change. So put down that twitch ➰️ put away the sedative and a vet call out 💉 and contact me for more details 📧 [email protected] NB. I can retrain the clipping behaviour, I can't do anything about the hair 😆💇‍♂️🐻

After yesterday's snow ☃️ my little Blue pony is looking unusually clean and white for this time of year ✨️ so I thought I'd take the opportunity to clip his legs before the mud returns and he resembles what can only be described as a hippo 🥴🦛 He used to be super reactive to the clippers on his legs and this is the reason why... Blue was rescued as a yearling after he had been abandoned in a stable by his owners 😥 He had been starved, was riddled with worms 🪱 and had a severe hoof infection which required intense veterinary attention and of course a lot of follow up care and treatment by his rescuers, which will have been very painful for him ⛑️ As a result, he hated having his legs and hooves touched and was very overreactive. He would rear, stamp his feet, kick his belly and barge his handler. This made clipping his legs absolutely impossible! ✂️ I broke the training down into teeny tiny stages for him. The timing for this training is so specific as with leg clipping the horse learns very quickly to remove the clippers by moving their legs far quicker than we can react 🦵💥 Here he demos a great Park - we can't begin to clip legs if he won't stand still! And I used correct negative reinforcement techniques to overshadow his fear of the clippers. I'm super pleased with him today 💙 when he used to feel the vibration of the clippers anywhere near his hooves he would snatch his leg away immediately. I've included a video clip from an earlier training session to show how he used to react. I do have a training progress video to share (when I actually make the time to edit it! 🤦‍♀️) Oh and of course, thank you to my lovely assistant Bob 🖤 he always likes to involve himself in clipping for some reason!! #clip #horseclip #clipping #changingequinebehaviour #equinebehaviour #horsebehaviour #equitationscience #retraining #pony #horse

❓️❓️Did you know❓️❓️ ▪️Failure to load onto a trailer is a deficit in the Go response ▪️Rushing on or off a trailer is a deficit in the Stop response Correct training allows us to gain control of each individual leg 🦵 so we can put them forwards, backwards or sideways with trained cues ↕️↔️ By going back to basics and training the Go response to Obedience level we can teach the horse to go anywhere we ask, moving forwards from a light pressure, including into a trailer or horsebox 🛻🚃 This is why alot of horses I work with who have problems elsewhere in their training, seem to recover spontaneously when their owners come to load them! Quite often described as magic 🎩 ✨️ it's really not, it's simply clearing up confusions with correct training 😄 Here are Mac and I practicing our Park response on the trailer. He loads on from a lovely light pressure but I want him to remain calm once in the trailer so we practice Park here🚦

One of my favourite ridden techniques is the "Long Walk". This exercise teaches the horse to step more underneath with their hind legs, which helps to activate the core, lift the back and lower the head 🐴 It is an excellent relaxation exercise and I begin all of my schooling sessions with my horses in this walk 🚶‍♀️ This exercise not only teaches the horse to take longer steps, it teaches them to keep their head and neck straight which encourages a lower head carriage. The head will not lower if the spine is not perfectly straight 🦴 This is a great exercise for any horse but in particular for anxious, spooky, nervous horses. If you think about these horses they tend to have a high head carriage, hollow back, look in all directions and take short choppy steps 👀👻 This video shows one of my lovely clients learning the long walk. This is early stages of the training and will improve week after week but already you can see her horse is more relaxed with a lower head carriage 🖤💆‍♂️

Sometimes, you've just got to get on with it, no matter what challenges may face you! This boy is star pupil this week 🌟 He is going through the backing process with me and for this week's session we were faced with the farmer and a crop of hay 🌾 and when a job's got to be done, a job's got to be done! 🚜 For those of you who train with me, you know I'm all for changing only one variable at a time during training. Well this was quite a big variable to add into the mix, but he was absolutely outstanding! I tested his basic responses as always, and deemed it perfectly safe to carry on with our session as normal, and here we are! This is a definite first for me! Backing a horse right next to a bale wrapper machine! Clever lad! 🐴🖤👏🌟