OK..so have started to read Alex Kurlands book and the penny has finally dropped. Boy, do I feel fired up with enthusiasm!
I can't believe how close-minded I have been. I can't believe I spent so much time argueing with you guys about how IH was the only way. The more I read about the +R approach, the more I believe that this is what has been missing in my relationship with Polly. I know that this will work with her.
Catherine - I understand now what you mean't about needing to change my whole approach rather than just dabbling in CT. I've ordered lots of books from Amazon!
Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for pointing me in the right direction and sorry that it took me so long to 'get it'!
You just don't know how happy it makes me feel to see you here - welcome!! I am just so impressed with what you have written and the courage it must have taken to have such a rethink - I know all the rest of us "IHDG +Rers" will feel the same. All those hours of writing posts, worrying about whether I'm about to be sacked for doing too little work have become sooo worthwhile!!!
So, here's to many happy years of a completely new relationship with Polly and lots of fun. And you know where we are if you ever need any help.
Well done, it takes courage to change but you will be well rewarded by the relationship that will develop with your horse.I am working with a client at the moment and she is thrilled by the change of attitude to her horse using PR, for six years she was unable to catch her horse in the field and now can put headcollar on a very willing horse. The client is now so enthusiastic by the change in her horse she is reading everything she can get her hands on and keen to put it in to practice! Love Sue
Polly and I had our first clicker session yesterday afternoon and it was fantastic!! It only took around 5 minutes for her to make the connection between the target and the click/reward.
I'm also going to take this new approach with our little welshie too. She has some issues with fly spray etc that I think we can work through.
Thanks again for all of your encouragement and I'll keep you updated on our progress.
Great to "see" you on here! Sure you'll pick up loads of info and ideas as to how to progress +R style, and look forward not just to the change in your relationship with Polly, but also to the change in you and how you deal with life's daily stresses.
Brace yourself for some life-changing experiences as you travel down this road - some comfortable, some uncomfortable, but all are necessary and each experience brings its own priceless reward for your horses and for you.
Hi Nikki, another beginner here! I need to learn more about training this way but have made a (very) small start and my horses love it. I've got a problem with loading my gelding and have gone down the pressure halter route in the past, it became dangerous and nasty and I never want to go through that again. I'm hoping to use CT for all kinds of things though. Good luck, and let us know how you get on.
Great to see you on here (I'm Marie (Crunch) just in case you didn't realise) I'm so pleased that you have decided to look into +R training - it opened a whole new world for me when I converted just over a year ago.
Don't worry about IHDG, you have taken the same route as I have taken. It was some of the guys on here that finally converted me - I argued with the best of them before I converted!
I'm grateful for having the IH (and other methods) experience though, and because I converted just after I had booked on all the IH courses I still went along and they did teach me a lot - even if most of it was learning how I didn't want to train my horse.
It's mad, but these last few weeks have really brought it home to me how much training with +R has helped me. I broke my leg pretty bad last week, and even though I am on cruches and have limited amount of movement I can still work with my horse in the field and we can still learn new things. I can take a chair in the field and we can have fun without me even having to move around with him. I doubt I could ever acheive that with the methods I employed in our training previous to +R.
So, I hope you and Polly find the +R route as exciting and enlightening as I have and I can't wait to hear about some of your stories
Its great to hear how much progress others have made with their horses. Gives me the encouragement I need to carry on down this route (although we have encountered our first problem - will start separate thread!).
I just thought I'd let you know that although I started using +R many years ago I only picked up the clicker again a couple of months ago so I'm sure we'll have similar challenges ahead and it'll be nice to speak to someone in the same boat.
I also wanted to say that, when you have finished your mountain of books, I have the 4 clicker videos from Alexandra which you'd be very welcome to borrow. It's nice to see someone getting it wrong occasionally and you just don't get that from a book!
Glad you've found +R, spread the word, you never know someone might actually listen.
It's a long journey Nikki! Hope you brought good walking shoes
Sorry to hear about your leg Marie. For obvious reasons (the DGers know!) I have avoided Internet use of late so didn;t know. How lovely though that you can still train your horse. A lesson to other methods maybe, he he!
Its great to know that their are people at the same stage as me. It can all be a bit overwhelming when I think of how much I have to learn.
CT sessions going well. Generally,
the biggest challenge for me is learning not to respond to undesirable behaviour. I'm a bit of a reactionary so I'm hoping that this new attitude will spill over into other areas of my life!!
Marie - Sorry to hear about your leg. Hope you are on the mend soon.
Diane - Good to see that you're still about. Hope you are feeling better about everything now. What did you find the biggest challenge when changing from an IH to the +R ethos?
Nikki
p.s. I've put piccies of my two girls on the 'Who are we?' thread!
Hi Nikki.Very pleased to see you travelling down this path , its certainly an interesting one.
Yes I'm with you I found it very hard to 'not react' when my horse was doing something I didnt want.I think with the Ih mentality you always feel as though its up to you to be demanding a change in the situation and should be doing something about correcting the horse always focusing on what the horse isnt doing for you instead of what he is doing right.
Again my biggest teacher in this was Ben.When you watch him work with a horse his patience is amazing.Watching him work taught me how to 'chill' for want of a better word.I now finally am able ( most of the time) when things are going a little awry or Maddy is taking a little longer to understand what i'm trying to teach her, to stand back and just wait.Letting the horse have time to work it out for herself or even just give myself time to think through the situation and think about where to go next.Whereas in the old days I would have felt like I should have been doing things ( very often making the situation worse)
It does take time to become that sort of person but the more you practice in every day life the easier it gets.The times when I learn the most are the times when its all going wrong.As Ben says it's easy to train with +re when the suns warm and everything is going well.It's when it's cold and things aren't so easy that training with +re really tests you.
really pleased to see you here Nikki.Carry on the good work,it's very rewarding.
Rach ( Rh on Dg)
The hardest thing Nikki is trying to unlearn all the habits you've picked up over the years. Examples, shouting at horse, smacking for incorrect behaviour. I've never really been a hitter anyway (my whip is a fly scarer ) but I used to shout occasionally. I am much more patient these days - with people as well as horses/the dog.
I still carry the whip though. This is for the flies in summer (to keep them off Henry's head) and also because I have a fluorescent and reflective oojah on the end - very handy for blind bends where I hold it straight out and cars make an effort to drive round it!
I've found the biggest challenge in all this is accepting that when it's going wrong it's down to me and right now I'm having to look deep inside myself for some answers. I've never been a hitter or a shouter, I know the +R theory, I've attended some excellent workshops on the subject and had one to one help from experts too, BUT my horse is telling me I'm still not getting it quite right and there's no place else to look but inside of me, AND this is after I thought I had already looked inside of me - so it's time for a deeper delve!
I'm so lucky to have a horse who is willing to keep on stretching me rather than just giving in to me. I wonder if she's read Jung , because what she seems to be telling me is:
"who looks outside dreams, who looks inside wakes"
I believe the problem with IH and other similar methods is that the focus is on making the people feel better about what they're doing - hence using words like 'lovely' rub, 7 'games', 'bond', etc. All great feel-good factor stuff for humans, but not much help to the horses.
Jan made a very good point in that we now look at ourselves when training errors occur, rather than seeing the horse as the one with the problem. Very true.
I saw a 'NH' clinic this weekend, where the training seemed very much about getting results quickly and some of the pressure to me was outright bullying. Again, very 'feel-good' for the human, but it looked to me like the horses were starting to shut down mentally. Just my opinion of course.
In a way, I feel that this is true Intelligent Horsemanship, in that its not a system based on 'If horse does this, you respond like this'. I feel that you really have to use your brain. This is helping me to be less 'reactionary'. I'm having to slow everything down. Rather than thinking 'Oh Polly is playing up...I'll circle her and back her up and make her do what I want', I'm now thinking 'Oh..ok, here's a challenge. Whats the best course of action, or indeed, inaction here?'.
Polly seems quite amazed that she isn't being chastised for anything. Today, I was leading her and she decided to stop as she wanted to go back to her hay. Instead of tugging on her leadrope as I would have done previously, I simply stood quietly next to her facing where I wanted her to go. Amazingly, she didn't turn around and try and head back to her hay. Clearly, my change of behaviour puzzled her and without any prompting she decided to walk with me after all.
The challenges seem to come thick and fast but giving myself time to think about how to deal with a challenge means I come to the right conclusion more often.
Jans comments reflect my own experiences. Polly, although clearly enjoying our new relationship, is not prepared to do things quite as they are set out in the books! At first, I thought 'Oh dear..perhaps this isn't going to work for us after all'. But I realise that you just have to try a slightly different approach. I understand that if Polly isn't 'getting it', its my fault for not being clear enough.
Hi there. Quickly before I forget, Diane I love the idea of the flourescent thingy on the end of your whip as a traffic control.... I will have to do a lot of work desensitising Geri to that, I think at the moment traffic would be the least of my worries if I was to carry that!!!
Jan, I just wanted to comment on your comment about has your horse been reading Jung.
I have recently attended a course on Equine Assisted Psychotherapy, which is based on the idea of horses facilitating the therapy situation. The reason this is so powerful is because they do do exactly what you say in your Jung quote. They hold up mirrors to us, they do not allow us to escape from the realities of how we behave, they do not lie to us and as a result we cannot lie to them. This leads us to introspection, to the quote (also Jung) that I read at the Equine Insights Symposium... "Enlightenment is not about imagining figures of light, it is making the darkness conscious". In short, horses encourage us to become the people we truly are, to rise above ourselves and the way in which society has caused us to behave.
EAP is a powerful tool for change in humans in which I believe the horse plays the most important role, more important than the counsellor or the behaviourist. My only concern about it at the moment is that there are people out there using it that do not truly understand horses and how they function, and there is great potential for misuse and even abuse of the horses in question, as there is in many yards across the country with many ordinary horse owners.
Hx
We are very fortunate to have the relationships with our horses that we do, it is a very humbling experience, isn't it?
Your Jung quote is one that struck a chord with me when I read it in Tao of Equus. I’ve found that making the darkness conscious is impossible to do unless I look deep inside myself.
Queca is certainly encouraging me to do that and so be who I really am and not what my experiences have changed me into. My good fortune is that she’s an unrelenting teacher, so there’s no getting away with half measures! One little bay horse is taking me further than anything else in my life ever has – yes, that is very humbling.
It’s good to hear your concern about the people out there using EAP. It’s a concern I and some of my friends share. Horses are indeed a powerful tool for change in humans, but they must not be compromised in the process and I fear this may be happening with some of the organisations offering EAP. Eg, the first chapters of Tao of Equus were a delight to read – LK seems an excellent psychologist and therapist, but I was saddened and disappointed by later chapters that indicated a lack of true understanding of horses.
Perhaps that is your vocation, Helen! – to come up with a way of ensuring that EAP facilities are fully informed about horses as well as people.
Current Topic - New Convert to Positive Reinforecment.
Boy, do I feel fired up with enthusiasm! 