Meadowsweet Ranch

08/28/2024

Good advice, IMO.

08/24/2024

08/17/2024

To all of us that ride, and I know we all see professionals at Horse Fairs, Horse Shows, clinics do this too, so we think it's o.k.

When someone leaves a comments or a like here, I often click on their name to see their riding images on their page. I do this to keep track of what today's typical riding looks like. I see all kinds of riding. Some images and videos show very good balanced riding. What seems to be a common riding flaw that I see recently is with head position. So many riders post pictures of their riding with their eyes looking down. This might seem a minor issue, but it is not.

When your eyes are down, your horse can feel that your balance is forward, more over the forehand. This will put your horse onto their forehand. When your eyes go down, your head that weighs 15 pounds (7 kg) goes down and forward, and usually your shoulders fall forward as well. The fact that your head is up high at the end of an effective lever that is your upper body, multiplies the forward weight that you place over your horse's shoulders.

The negative effects this has on your horse show up in several ways. It makes both upward and downward transitions more difficult for your horse. This is because Horses need to push off or reach under with their hind, and you have shifted their balance off their hind. Lead changes become more difficult for the same reason.

Worst of all for riders, looking down makes it more difficult to develop "feel". I briefly had an argumentative student who insisted on looking down. She would argue with me when I said "eyes up", saying "I like to see what my horse is doing". I'd explain that with eyes up you can feel what your horse is doing and that makes all the difference.

If you look down when riding, just stop doing that. If you have to look down, move your eyeballs, not your head. If you do this, many improvements will follow. You will sit the canter better because your head and neck position will no longer interfere with your hips swinging to the 1-2-3 beat of the canter. "Eyes up". It's simple and fixes a lot of things.

08/15/2024

World Bitless Association
Credit to Dee M
START
"The experimenters trained a group of horses to touch a card with their noses for a treat. All the horses got this idea quickly.
Then the researchers introduced a light to the procedure. When the light was on, the horses no longer received a treat for touching the card. When it was off, they still received one.
Like us, horses learn through trial-and-error. If you imagine doing this task yourself, after a few tries you might realise that there's a correlation between the light being on and not getting a treat and you might stop bothering to touch the card during those times. The horses, however, didn't do this. Instead, they carried on touching the card regardless, as if they didn't notice the light had any effect.
So the researchers then introduced a higher cost to touching the card when you're not supposed to. A time out during which there was no target at all and the horses just had to wait around to start again. NOW the horses all almost instantly switched to only touching the card when the light was off and not touching it when it was on.
Here's why this is significant:
If horses were just reacting and forming habits based on their current experience, they should take a few tries to learn that when the light is on and they touch the card, they'll get a time out. It should take about as long as learning the first part did. But the horses didn't do this. Instead, they seemed to learn much more rapidly than would be expected from pure trial-and-error reactions. They seemed to have already noticed the salience of the light in the first part of the study but only chose to actually react to it when not doing so had a tangible cost. This means they were making a cost-benefit analysis of the situation based on their 'model' of the game. Not JUST reacting to the new consequences and having to learn the new rules.
This is a really subtle point and it's easy to miss it. ALL animals can learn through basic trial and error learning. In fact, you barely need a brain to do that much. But to be able to understand the future consequences of your actions by combining past and current information takes a bit more cognitive ability.
So why did the horses ignore the light in the first part? It may be that the effort to take note of the light was actually a cost in itself. There is a cognitive cost to any sort of processing and since it didn't 'matter', the horses could have been choosing to not engage with it. Once the researchers introduced a greater cost to ignoring the light, this changed.
Let me explain this differently.
Imagine you're participating in an experiment. The researchers say to you that you must go push a button in a room and every time you push it you'll earn $5 (or whatever currency you want haha). You can push the button as many times as you like and you'll keep earning more.
Then at some point the researchers turn on a light in the room. You're still pressing the button but now no money is coming out. You don't know why at first... You keep pressing it. The light goes off and you start earning money again. Now you've kind of twigged that it's probably something to do with that light but you're not totally sure. The light comes on and sure enough you stop getting money so you are sure now that this is why. But you don't stop pressing the button... You don't know when the light will go off and it's not worth stopping. It's very little effort to keep pressing it and you want to make as much money as you can!
It took you three 'trials' to understand the rule that light on = no money.
The light goes off, you earn some more money. Now the light goes on, you press the button, and immediately the researchers tell you to step back for 10 minutes. Nothing happens during this time. The entire experiment is just suspended for that time (so you're not 'missing out'). When you are allowed to start again, do you keep pressing the button when the light comes on the next time or do you now stop immediately? Well, you might keep trying ONCE. But as soon as you've seen that connection, that's it. You won't do it again because it's annoying and doesn't benefit you.
So it only takes you one - maybe two - trials to understand the new rules. THIS is what it means to have a 'model' in your mind of how the 'game' works. If you didn't have that model, it would have taken you the same number of trials as the first part (or maybe more because there are more variables) to learn the new rules.
The horses in this study behaved like you would - they had a model of the game in their minds and when it became in their interest to pay attention to the light, they did so immediately because they had already understood it and just chosen not to respond (because it wasn't worthwhile).
There are some serious limitations to this study - tiny sample size, no proper control group (they did make an attempt at it - just not a good one). Unfortunately that's pretty typical of equine behavioural studies because of the logistics involved. Still, it's not unreasonable to believe that horses are capable of this kind of cognition.
Which brings me to a tangible use for this information for those of us who use R+... Some of us want to ensure our horses are doing things because they want to so we might make alternative food sources available and aim for contra freeloading scenarios. What this highlights is just how important costs really are and that even just having to walk a short distance to get to the alternative food or having to wait a moment before being asked to do something else might impact the horse's engagement and motivation or whether they are truly contra freeloading or just that it's too much effort to go elsewhere... All things I know I think about a lot anyway but it's interesting to think about with this experiment in mind as well.
For more traditional equestrians it should highlight how incredibly easy it is to convince horses to do things with very minimal cost and that they are intelligent enough to problem solve to avoid even very small costs to themselves without needing to resort to manhandling or severe punishment.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that it's not about them learning something or not learning it. It's about the expected trajectory of that learning. The expectation with model-based learning is that the animal can understand more about the situation than their behaviour reveals because they are making a cost-benefit analysis and this is revealed starkly when the costs change. The immediate change in behaviour, as if the horses already understood the salience of the light, is what is so interesting. They didn't have to learn that from scratch. Yes, absolutely, introducing negative punishment made them learn more quickly - but WHY? The 'why' is that it changed the cost-benefit analysis. We get so stuck thinking of the quadrants as entities unto themselves that we forget that they actually just describe observations of learning patterns and hold no explanatory value in themselves."

08/15/2024

Here are some points you may not have thought about when your child is part of a from the ground up horsemanship program.

Make Them Carry Their Saddle
A father of a darling girl and I were talking last week and he said that he wanted his daughter to ride more and not have to do the work part of the catching, grooming, and saddling. I smiled as I explained.

Riding horses is a combination of strength, timing, and balance. Kids in this country are physically weak (unless they are actively involved with weight training and physical conditioning 4+ times a week.)

When you walk out to the field, you are clearing your stress from being under fluorescent lights all day; feeling the sun soak into your bones. As your body moves on uneven surfaces, it strengthens your legs and core.

When you groom your horse (especially currying), you are toning your arms and stabilizing your core.

When you carry your saddle, your arms, chest, and back are doing isolated strengthening work.

Being near horses, calms and makes you tune into the splendor of these empathetic animals.

When you ride at a posting trot, it’s equivalent to a slow jog calorie burn wise.
After a lesson, the riders are physically tired and mentally quiet and balanced.
Horses feel your heart beat and mirror your emotions back.
Riding large and somewhat unpredictable animals makes you resilient and pushes your expectations.

Working with horses is so much more than learning how to ride.
So parents, make your children carry their saddles. Don’t do the hard parts for them, as long term it actually hurts them. To advance with their riding, they must get stronger. You can help by doing the high parts.

I love having you all at the farm, and am so grateful to get to share these fascinating animals with you.
Hannah Campbell Zapletal

08/14/2024

Ferdie and Deluxe watching Sebastian's hooves being taken care of. They come watch when I'm in the barn grooming Tequila or working on the awful fairy knots she LOVES to get. Photo courtesy of Sebastian's owner.

08/14/2024

Addison and Oliver. Oliver is our newest lesson horse and Addison and Oliver seem to be forming a special bond :) Photo courtesy of Addison's mom :)

08/13/2024

Advice from a trucker.
If this is how you trailer your horse on the drivers side, please stop it immediately. Yesterday made the 3rd time in recent years that I’ve had to put a semi in the ditch (maintained control, not wrecked) to keep from decapitating your equestrian friend with his head 3 1/2 ft. over the center line on a narrow road. Thank you!

08/06/2024

2024 Summer Teen Camp Highlights
3 days of successful trail riding. Education time was spent learning about the horse's brain.

08/04/2024

Start looking forward to our show next Tuesday!
Here’s our lineup:
Dr. Adam Cayot with Peterson Smith Equine Hospital + Complete Care
Erna Valdivia
Wayne Holder
Mireille Doffegnies owner of MD-equine Therapy

07/31/2024

SAVE THE DATE for Singo Night at Main Stay Therapeutic Farm, Inc. on Sept 27th from 6:00pm - 8:00pm! All ages welcome!

07/27/2024

If you teach lessons, if you take lessons, if you're thinking of getting your own horse, or if you just like horses, worth the read, .

A small stab in the heart is what you feel when you put up the day's riding list and you see riders sinking heavily in their shoulders when reading which horse they are assigned for the lesson. A small stab in the heart for that horse that for an hour will carry around a rider who has already decided that he does not like his horse. A small stab in the heart for the horse that did not choose the rider himself but still does his best, lesson after lesson.

Riding is a privilege and something you have chosen to do. If you chose to ride at a riding school, your instructor assumes that you actually want to learn how to ride. The instructor's highest wish is that you get good at it.

Often there is a plan and a thought as to why you are assigned to that exact horse. Before you mount up next time, ask yourself "what can this horse teach me today?" All horses have something to give, a feeling or a new tool in the box.

The art is actually in being able to get a lazy horse to move forward, to get an uncertain horse to gain confidence, a naughty horse to focus or a tense horse to be released. It takes work. If you think a horse is boring, it's more likely that you don't ride the horse as well as you think! It's not easy to be confronted with your own shortcomings, but it is in that very situation that you get the chance to truly grow as a rider.

The excuse that "it's not my kind of horse" is actually a really bad excuse. A good rider can ride any kind of horse. A good rider has trained many hours on different types of horses to become a good rider. A good rider can find and manage the gold nuggets in every horse.

If we absolutely want to ride, it is our duty to strive to do it as best as possible, even if it's only for fun. We owe it to every horse that carries us upon it's back.

Copied and shared with love for all of our horses, ponies and riders 🐎❤🐎

07/25/2024

Please join us for our 2024 Wild Horse Fair presented by Operation Wild Horse - Veterans R&R !
Weekend festivities will include:
Mustang and B***o Veteran Trail Challenges
Mustang Demos from Professional Mustang Trainers
Craft Vendors
Meet the Mustangs and B***os
Raffle Prizes
Guitar Raffle
Food Provided by Pixie Dawgs!
10am to 5pm Saturday and Sunday
Free Parking
$10 Admission for Adults and Children 12+
FREE Admission for Veterans and Children under 12