Hi Julie,

   From your background stuff, as Gracie is also reactive to you I would actually be inclined to just start with yourself as decoy. Don't separate Gracie from the other horses other than the rails as usual.  If she respects electric fence tape, I started with Jedda in a (non-electrified of course)  tape yard 9 metres (yards) x 9 m in a corner of the paddock, but as Jedda doesn't "do" running away from people unless they have ropes in hand, on the second trial I reduced it to 3 m x 3 m. This was big enough for her to give enough extra distance for herself to be comfortable if she needed extra space. While we're doing CAT Belle and Pedro have access to Jedda over the fence and one or both will often stand close by. Belle sometimes does the advance and retreat along with the decoy! So you haven't watched the seminar yet? To compare with what Dolores says, and remember she is the expert on this, this would be my approach:

    Put Gracie in the yard, go back say 10 metres if she's relaxed with you there, and steadily walk towards her right side. As soon as she shows the slightest behaviour indicating unease, stop and mark that spot. That's your threshold. Walk back to your starting point. Now you start CAT.

   Approach and stop at a point well before your threshold, even 2 yards or more before it, remember you're working sub-threshold with CAT, not trying to "cause" behaviour. At that distance Gracie may just stare at you with her ears pricked, so turn and walk back to your starting point. If she pins her ears or shows any beginnings of a stressed behaviour wait. As soon as the behaviour changes to an approximation of what you want, walk. Stand away there for a while to let her process what just happened. Remember you're not trying to figure out what she's thinking, just observing her behaviour as she displays it, and responding accordingly. Gradually go closer, in response to her reactions, you turn quickly and walk away on any signs approximating to friendly, you know horse body language so I don't need to set it out. If nothing is happening while you wait, just wait, don't do anything to try and initiate a behaviour, this is the hardest part for clicker trainers, as the waiting can literally run into minutes sometimes. The processes you can't see happening inside Gracie's brain are the important things, but you are watching ONLY her behaviours, and shaping only those which are helpful. It's important to mark your progress so you don't inadvertantly change the distance of approach, but if you do make a mistake and push her over threshold into some reactive behaviour, just give more distance on the next approach. Like with CT, we're splitting not lumping.

   Jedda sometimes walks to the back of the tape pen, and stands there. Cynthia said "She's bored", but remember even here we're not analysing her behaviour, we simply note what she has done, and wait as usual. My decoy will walk away on an ear turned in her direction, or a soft glance back, or relaxed blinking, and before long Jedda will turn and walk back to the closest point on the fence to the decoy approach.  This week she pushed her chest right to the tape so when Kate approached she was even closer in effect, but that was Jedda's choice, her behaviour, and Kate was suddenly standing 2 feet from Jed's nose, and walking away on little head turns towards her, blows through the nostrils, etc. Sometimes on approach at this distance Jedda would put ears back and turn her head away, but as someone on 5Q pointed out, often during switchover the subject will try an old behaviour which worked in the past to get distance, and we've figured that as Jed's body remains relaxed and the behaviour ceases again within 2 or 3 trials this MAY be the case (not that we are analysing her thoughts, OF COURSE ;-P.)

   I completely bolloxed up our first 2 trials so don't worry if you don't get it exactly right at first, and as Dolores would say, report back! are you going to report about it on the zen CAT list? it's easy to join and there should be more people joining all the time, I had another request for details this morning from someone who's been following the discussions on TCTT. I'll cc this reply to the list anyway. Good luck! I'm CATting this afternoon too....

Love,
Laurel :-)