Am 03.07.2009 um 14:59 schrieb jeanette.hopkins: My original question was really me pondering the two training principles that we should stick at an exercise long enough to get the benefit but that we also need to keep things in balance.
It's clear to me now that the full behaviour will take many many training steps to achieve so the answer seems to be "yes", keep working on it and "no", not all at once!
Hi Jeanette,
as my horse normally is more calm then other horses, i never had the need to really calm him down in strange situations because there are very seldom such situations. Last year we were some days on a horse exhibition, and Mirko was very fixed to the other horses that come with us (we had four horses from our stable with us)
about the third day he became really nervous and wouldn't walk away from the others without shouting to them. It took me a whole day until i found the idea of headlowering in my mind *sigh* because we never had to deal with that in stress situations.
so when i washed him out of sight from the other horses, i asked for headlowering for some minutes, and he clearly became more settled with the situation. He was not really calm, but listening to me and he stopped shouting. so although i never had used it before for really stressfull situations, it worked for us well.
While working on headlowering before at home, i found out that he had to be really deep with his head. Alexandra calls this "breaking through a glass ceiling", and it is really a difference. When he is helding his head deep, but not really deep, he will come up after the click very quickly - this shows me that he is just putting his head down and waiting. If he is really deep, Nose just centimeter from the ground, he will stay down when the click comes. There you have the horses own relaxationsystem taking over. So, if you never touched this ceiling, your horse maybe really never relaxes.
i have a little video where you could see this little tiny difference, which makes so big changes.
just my thoughts, because you didn't write about the "quality" of your headlowering.
greetings from Germany, Heike Uthmann
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