Don't wave that red flag at me!

(This is a backdated post ... copied from handwritten notes)

'Lillian' had taken 'Luke' to a training with a local horseman for some assistance in building a communcation base with 'Luke'.

And so, today, she was showing me some of the excersises she was shown to do. It was all relating to desensitising, personal space and 'respect' (so often miss-interpretated!!) from the  horse towards the handler. 

Being interested, I watched her do some of the excersises with 'Luke'. It seemed to indeed have helped in building a more communicative relationship between the two. 'Luke' has been known to be a 'troublesome' horse and he's done various amounts of damage to objects and humans that were in the way. Yet I have liked him from the start and luckily I never had any problems with him while handling him).

The excersises involved a long stick with either a plastic bag or a red (or any colour I guess) flag at the end. I have seen this done by various other horsemen before. 

This 'tool' was, from what I understand, meant to be a help in keeping space and also as a form of encouragement to the horse in as much as 'get out the way' - 'go this way' etc etc.

Here I'm afraid to say that 'Lillian' isn't the best at explaining things - and she knows that by now. :)

So, equipped with a long stick with a flag at the end, I proceeded to copy the excersises that she had been shown in the clinic. Much of it was about change of direction, going around or over obstacles while on a long lead rope as well as various turns etc, without allowing the horse to run you over or walk into you.

I'm not quite sure but I think it made no sense to either me nor 'Mr F'. If what I am doing doesn't makes sense to me, how can it makes sense to 'Mr F' anyway?

Much of the moves in the exercises I could do with 'Mr F' anyway, it is one of the things we experiment with when I take him up into the fields. 

Still, there were things that we learnt that I thought were quite handy. One of them was that 'Mr F' had to learn not to run towards me when unsure or unwilling. It's a private space kind of thing. Interestingly, I never had an issue with this until we started with these exercises.

But I decided to continue with them and was quite eager. 'Mr F' on the other hand wan'st quite so keen. Most the time he would look at me as though to say: "Come on ... I am doing all I can to teach you what to do ... stop flapping that stick and flag in front of my face! We don't need this."

Yet, ignorant me, I thought I'd know better and I continued with these excersises every day, thinking that we were progressing really nicely. And so I didn't even notice that 'Mr F' was getting more and more fed up with just the sight of me ....