On Horseback!

Looking handsome!

And finally...I remembered to take my camera out of my pocket and ask somebody to get a photo :)

Amigo practicing direct rein head turns from the saddle with the bit - please excuse how awkward I look...

Amigo and Jericho did great today. Jericho especially. He's basically ready to go. Amigo's still got a little bit of cleaning up/review of his commands from the ground and in the saddle, and needs some more time walking around on a lead rope in the yard before he'll be able to be ridden in the yard and ready to go to his new home.

The new mustangs are doing really well. Bambi, Ginger, and little Timmy are all working on targeting their different body parts. Bambi really likes getting her withers scratched... Very cute. Momma June is doing well too. We introduced the guider ball to her today and she's already walking up and holding her nose to it like a pro. The only one who hasn't really made progress is Greta. We had to go back to Task 1, relaxed handfeeding, since she was getting agitated and started threatening and chomping at the air when we worked with her. It seemed a lot like situations where fearful dogs go up to strangers who are offering them food and bite them instead of taking the food -- which often happens because the dog wants the food, but once it gets that close and has a second to think, it's over threshold and feels like it has to bite the scary person. We're going back and going more slowly this time, playing what Heather told me is called the "Happy Face" game. Greta gets fed every time she's looking at me with both ears perked up - looking happy. It seems to be helping, but slowly. She will still pin her ears back as she is moving away after taking food, but in most of our sessions, she starts pinning her ears less and less as the session goes on. Hopefully progress is being made. She hasn't showed her teeth and flattened her ears since we've gone back to just asking for happy, relaxed handfeeding. Pat gets back on Friday and will be able to help clarify and set us straight if we're doing something wrong :)

Chester and Cracker Take the Yard

 A slow day here at Mustang Camp today. Since we've been getting so much rain, the yard is overgrown with weeds. Luckily, there's an easy fix - let the horses out to graze! Today, it was Chester and Cracker's turn to run loose in the yard. They had a wonderful time running around, bucking like youngsters.

Cracker hanging out in the yard.

We were originally going to do a conference call with Pat after her talk this afternoon at the Animal Behavior Society conference, but she must have been swamped after she gave her talk since we didn't hear from her.

Amigo and Jericho are both making great progress in their quest to become riding horses. The past couple days we've been getting them used to bits (having them put the bit on and eating hay/grain) and today they were both putting the head down and opening their mouths to get the bit. It's great to see such a perfect application of food for desensitization/counterconditioning in horse training. Not sure how other people do it without food and don't get horses that hate the bit... We even practiced some direct and indirect rein pressure (direct to get the horse to turn its head, and indirect to get the horse to take cross-over steps with their front feet) and they understood the bit cues immediately. No pressure needed - just pick up the rein, they can feel the cue, and know how to respond! Pretty cool stuff.
We also did some leading around in the training space, since Amigo's had trouble in the past with forging ahead. One method that had worked was swinging the lead rope like a helicopter so that if he forged, he'd smack himself in the face. Unfortunately, he wasn't generalizing it that well and would still forge ahead if he thought he could get away with it. Today, instead of using the lead rope, I just turned and walked in a circle every time he got ahead. Pretty soon he was walking with his head down (relaxed) and by my shoulder. Very proud of him!

Tomorrow, we will ride the boys again (as long as it's not raining/super muddy), and hopefully I'll remember to take a picture or two!

Comet and Dancer Go Home

Comet and Dancer were adopted! The two mares were from the winter El Rito pony group, and were dropped off at their new home today. John said the adopters were also looking for 4 donkeys...we just happen to have 4 of those sitting in the backyard :) hm....

Here's a picture of Comet from a couple days ago. Looks like I didn't get any pictures of Dancer before she went home...

Comet wanted some of the food I had...

We got a surprising morning rainstorm today, so we were rained out until around 1 PM. Spent most of the afternoon focused on the new horses. Everyone is doing great. It's really good news that June, the mommy mare, has started being more engaged. She was eating calmly out of my hand today and has even started offering behaviors. I wouldn't be surprised if she passes by the other horses on the next couple tasks since she doesn't have as much trouble with self control!

That's all for now. Bought plane tickets for my flight from New Mexico to St. Louis in September. Wish I could stay here forever but definitely excited to see the boyfriend again :)

Introducing...

The new mustangs have been here for 4 days now...and finally it's time for introductions!

The Geldings

Elmo - Age 4
Super sweet. We think he'll go through the program pretty quick. His coloring makes him look a little mule-ish.

Morgan Freeman - Age 7
Our old man... It's taken Morgan a little longer than the other horses to get comfortable enough to eat from our hands, but we think he will do okay. He needs to tame down really well in order to get adopted since he isn't very young.



Barney - Age 4

Almost as confident as Elmo, but not quite. Barney takes a little bit more precautions, but he's still doing great. He's going to be a great horse.

The Mares

Ginger - Age 8

She's our most confident older horse. Quite muscular and pretty big. If she keeps doing as well as she's doing, she is going to find a good home.

Greta - Age 10

Probably our most pushy horse in the new group. When the mares were all penned together, she was always picking on the other horses and getting mad at them for coming up to the food. Now that they're separated, she doesn't have to worry so much and is doing really well.

Bambi - Age 3

Did they give us a tame horse by accident? Bambi is not from the same area as the other mustangs. She is actually a pony from the El Rito herd, which is notoriously hard to tame -- as Mustang Camp experienced first hand this winter -- but Bambi is an anomaly. She basically tamed herself a couple months ago by showing up at a ranch and sticking around... She is already less flighty than many of the horses that are still here from the winter El Rito group and comes up for scratches. She just needs some work to make sure she doesn't become pushy/aggressive, but she should fly through the program in no time at all. Plus her coloring is beautiful -- this picture was taken right after she rolled in mud :)

June and Timmy - Age 14 and 4 mos

June is having the  hardest time transitioning to captive life. For the first 3 days, she only took a couple bites from our hands, and just picked up everyone else's dropped hay off the ground. She's doing much better now that the girls are separated. Little Timmy is just the cutest thing ever. I'll have to get a better picture of him. He's been eating out of our hands since day 1, and he can now do "easy" on command and also target his nose :) Can't wait to keep working with him and watching him grow -- both physically and in the program!

A couple more pictures...

Feeding the mares (and Timmy) in the round pen on day 2

Morning of day 3, got all the girls separated into stalls. Let the training commence!

The boys are still together, but as you can see, Elmo and Barney have no trouble sharing :)

Pat's heading off

Missed a post last night - Pat was borrowing my laptop to make some final touch-ups on the powerpoint presentation she is giving at the 50th Annual Animal Behavior Society conference this weekend. We will have a couple days without her here -- hoping everything goes smoothly!
Pat actually took her presentation and did a voice recording and stuck that on Youtube. It's an interesting short overview of a lateralization study she has conducted: http://youtu.be/Wlcz6y42eUI

The new horses are settling in. I would post pictures but I left my camera in the dining room tonight and I am now afraid of walking around outside in the dark without long sleeves and long pants and socks and shoes on. I guess I'll wait to do introductions until I have the pictures up. They are doing so great though! Especially proud of the two older wild mustangs that came with this group and are having a harder time with the adjustment.

More tomorrow after I upload pictures. Bedtime for now, another busy day tomorrow -- no such thing as weekends here at Mustang Camp!

New Mustangs!

We had new mustangs dropped off from the Forest Service today. So exciting!

But first. Can I reiterate how much I hate mosquitoes. A bunch of my mosquito bites are turning into boils...yuck!

So many mosquito bites...why????

Anyway, this morning we had to rearrange all the panels in the yard so that we could create a new round pen for the wild mustangs. It was hard work, but the set-up is beautiful now. In the afternoon we took a break on the roof and I took a snapshot of our handiwork :)

The new horses arrived in the late morning. A forest ranger drove them up in a trailer, and we just had the horses go right from the trailer into the round pen.

The set up.

Here are the new mares, plus a foal. We got some very pretty horses -- a total of 4 mares, 3 geldings, and 1 foal. 

I should have more updates with better pictures tomorrow. We still need to name them all too - so I will have those updates as well!

Mosquitoes, yuck.

I hate mosquitoes. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. Especially all the swelling and infection that follows. Ouch. Dear insect repellent, please work better.

This morning, we finished our breakdown of all the criteria that needs to be met in order to consider a horse "started under saddle". Looks like an average horse would take somewhere around 1 month to complete the program, as long as they are all prepared for training and don't have any weird underlying fear issues, etc.

Today was a slow day of training. Everything outside is still all muddy, so it takes some effort to encourage yourself to get out there and work with the horses :) but they absolutely make it worth it.

Spot
Stepping onto the mat and staying there is now no problem for Spot. Today, I wasn't able to get him separated from the donkeys to work with him, but he still did great and paid attention to me the entire session.

Lefty
Poor Lefty had a bit of a scare today. We were out in the yard hanging out by the old trailer when he tripped. He was already a bit on edge because it was sprinkling and pretty windy. Of course it wouldn't have been so bad except that him tripping and skidding away caused me to trip - which totally freaked him out. At least he came right back afterwards...

Roany
Mr. Roany Pony has a home! A local horseshoe-er is adopting him, but is paying for him to stay 2 extra months to get some more handling so Roany will still be here a while longer.

Amigo
Tested Amigo today on the criteria that we finalized this morning. It will be a good exercise for us to make sure he's solid on all of the steps to make sure he has the foundation to become a dependable riding horse.

Hammer
Today was a little better for Hammer. He was definitely still all bumpy, but seemed less upset about it than yesterday. We didn't want to push it though, so we just worked on a little mounting/dismounting bareback with him.

Getting 8 new horses tomorrow! One of them is a foal. Really looking forward to making it all the way through the taming process with these horses. I'll probably be able to get pictures as long as my camera doesn't scare them too badly.

Bye Sasha!

Sasha left this morning to fly back to New York, then off to Russia to visit her family. We will definitely miss her here - it's pretty different without her!

Sasha's last evening at Mustang Camp. Look at those ominous clouds...

Spot
Zebras are so much fun to train. Spot is so smart and once he is engaged in the training, he tries really hard to figure out what you want from him. By the end of our session today, he was consistently stepping onto the mat with both feet and staying on the mat (while treats were being fed at a rather high rate) until being targeted off. Now we just need to work on duration :)

Hammer
Poor Hammer got eaten by mosquitoes like crazy. Today his whole body was covered in lumps and he definitely wasn't looking too thrilled. He was a little grumpy during our training session, but I bet he really wasn't feeling so well.

Lefty
Took Lefty out to practice walking into the ground trailer again to prep him for learning to load in the trailer, but he was being swarmed by mosquitoes and biting flies, so I ended our session pretty quickly.

Amigo
Now that Sasha has left, Heather and I are teaming up to train Amigo. Today, we just took Amigo and tried to see where he was in his progress. We ended up working on being polite and having impulse control since he started getting frustrated and nipping/biting when he didn't think he was getting food fast enough. That was a big no-no, so we stood on the other side of a fence and worked on "easy" with duration (up to 10 seconds holding the "easy" position). To end the session, I got up in the saddle and Heather held onto Amigo's lead rope just in case, and we went from cone to cone and practiced turning, walking, stopping, and backing up. Amigo did surprisingly well at those things, so we know we really need to focus on that self control and teach him that all that other naughty stuff doesn't work...

Muddy shoes...

I swear that every time I look down, my shoes are a different color. This weekend they were basically drenched the entire time so they were dark brown. Now that the mud has dried, they're starting to look lighter in color. So much rain, so much mud!

One of our faucets had sprung a leak, so we were digging down to try and figure out what was going on. We took out the heavy-duty vacuum to see if we could vacuum up the dirt that was in the hole we were digging. Unfortunately, the dirt was too heavy so it didn't work well. But somebody else got to enjoy the vacuum instead :)

Chester the mule gets vacuumed - and loves it!!

What an adventure...

Yikes -- missed two days from blogging. It was quite the weekend! Took a day off from training to go to a festival in a town a couple hours away.

Friday night, the three interns (Heather, Sasha, and I) were hoping to drive up to Dulce, NM for the 55th Annual Little Beaver Jicarilla Apache Festival. Unfortunately, we had a little mishap with the directions and took the wrong road towards the freeway -- right into a thunderstorm. Oops... We ended up getting caught in the storm and being unable to go that night. I now have a new appreciation for paved roads... :)

The sky is starting to clear -- too bad the roads were still all muddy!

Saturday morning, we left again. This time we went the right way and made it up to Dulce without complications - yay! We made it just in time for the parade, which was just starting up as we parked.

We also went over to the pow wow and listened to singing and watched the gourd dancers. Ate so much fair food...fry bread, curly fries, amazing lemonade. We definitely felt a little sick afterwards :) In the afternoon, we went to watch the rodeo. I have very mixed feelings about rodeos... Seems a little crazy. I have a certain degree of respect for cowboys/cowgirls for the skill it takes to do what they do, but the animal welfare issue kind of overrides that. Especially in the events involving poor calves who are scared out of their brains and just trying to run for their lives. At least the bucking broncos are actually tame horses trained to buck.

The drive back from Dulce was...not quite so smooth. It had rained in Dulce in the afternoon when we were watching the rodeo, and Pat and John warned us that they had gotten a good inch of rain that afternoon as well. About 5 miles before we got home, we reached a low point in the road where water was flowing and it was questionably safe to cross. So, what other choice did we have? We parked the car along the side of the road, grabbed our stuff and started hiking. Made it home about 2 hours later after walking through a ton of sludgy muck and one flowing creek going through the middle of the road. Phew. What an adventure.

This morning, John and I went back to get the car, and on the way back I got stuck in some mud - again! Luckily John was able to pull me out and we made it back home in one piece. At least now I've learned how to drive in mud...if I ever need that skill again in my life.

Training today went well. After a day off and a long night, it was tough getting back into the routine. Sasha and I ended up taking a nap after breakfast since we were pretty pooped. Started training around 1 PM. It was Sasha's last day here at Mustang Camp today, so later in the afternoon, Sasha, Heather, and John saddled up to go for a ride. Unfortunately, shortly after they left, the winds started picking up, it started sprinkling, and yet another thunderstorm rolled in and that marked the end of the day for anything productive happening anymore...

Luckily, I was able to finish my training session with Spot and snap a picture of him right as it started sprinkling. Look how smart he is!

Spot "stationing" on his mat

A Father Son Visit

Had a little scare this morning...

At breakfast, John tells us that Amigo and Hammer's adopters are coming to visit today around 11 AM and see how the training is going for their horses. Everyone is excited since the horses are doing great and we think the adopters are going to be very pleased with the horses' progress. Around 10:30, we decided to take the three saddle horses (Amigo, Hammer, and Louis) out for a walk on the road before the guests arrive. As soon as Sasha went to halter Amigo, she noticed that he was all sweaty. When we walked out to the yard, Amigo was acting a little funny holding his tail slightly up and walking strangely. Although he hadn't been rolling on the ground, he was definitely uncomfortable -- so he got a dose of Banamine (basically horse aspirin) to relieve his symptoms and we put everyone else away. We spent some time trying to listen for gut sounds and take his pulse. His temperature was a little elevated but the Banamine helped with that, and we stood watch for a good 30-45 min and he started having gut sounds, his heart rate slowed back down to a more acceptable rate, and his temperature was down to the normal range as well. Heather and Sasha put together an herbal concoction that was supposed to help with his digestion and we gave him some probiotics as well.

Around 11:30 the adopters arrived -- luckily the Amigo scare was pretty much over and we were just waiting for him to pass manure. The adopters are a father son duo who own a ranch a little ways north in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. They are pretty special adopters in that they were willing to drive all the way to Mustang Camp in order to see their horses being trained and actually take part and learn how to work with their horses as well.

We took Hammer out into the large pen and I did a demo of "riding" with an arm over his back doing "walk on", "whoa", and "back" -- as well as the direct and indirect reining that we've been working on so hard. Hammer performed like a star! We let both the adopters greet Hammer and ask him to do "easy"s. It was very clear that both father and son were really happy that the horses were responsive to their requests and they were very interested in positive reinforcement training for their horses. Amigo also got to come out (having passed some manure!!!) and Sasha got up on his back and did a quick demo of riding him, going from cone to cone. About half an hour into our demo/training session, it was pretty clear that Hammer might not be the right match for the 60+ year old man. Heather got out Jericho, the horse she has been working with and riding around for a few weeks already. The adopters fell in love and we tried to convince them that Jericho might be a better match since he was less scared-y and already much further along in his saddle training. We think they will most likely take Amigo and Jericho - it's going to be a great match.

Heather and I worked with Hammer together later in the afternoon. I hadn't been working on ground driving with him, so it'd been about 2 weeks since he had done that. It was great to see how calm he was about the whole thing. We were slapping around the saddle pad on his back and he was standing there doing "easy"s like nothing was happening :) We were also able to saddle him and tighten his girth without much fuss at all. When we started ground driving, it was like Hammer hadn't had a break at all. We went cone to cone and soon I was able to stand back at his shoulder so that he would be in charge of where he was going and not relying on following me around as much as Heather was directing him with driving reins from the back.

Took Lefty for another walk around the yard today. We practiced having me walk on his right side as well (which is the scary weird side for him) -- we did this in the pen, just in case... then I walked out with him on the normal side (me standing on his left) and we went around the yard targeting all the scary things, ESPECIALLY the flatbed truck. I had him target the flatbed and then put his reward on the truck so he could eat off the flatbed. We'll definitely keep working on him so that we can get his trailer loading training back on track.

Roany came back today from Farmington after having been gelded on Monday. Poor guy has no more balls, but he's home! I guess we'll be back to making friends tomorrow.

No pictures today because I left my camera inside in the big Amigo frenzy this morning. Luckily all is well and the rest of the day ended up being pretty uneventful - phew!

The Hokey Pokey

It was a beautiful day today. Not too hot and the sky was gorgeous!

This morning we took Amigo out for a short adventure into nature. He has some anxiety leaving his pen, so he was pretty amped up when we left the property. Pat, Sasha, and I took him down the road and off to some grasses so he could graze, but it was soon apparent that he was too high-strung to eat and figure out that it was fun being outdoors. We ended up bringing him back into the yard and Sasha worked with him on leading him around the building. He needed some guidance and she had to prompt him to focus on her (both eyes facing her with his head lowered) a couple times until he calmed down.

Lefty:

Lefty enjoying some weeds in the yard.

Today I took Lefty out of his pen and into the yard. I'm going to be working with him on getting used to outdoors, so we started off by taking a couple trips around the yard and finding yummy weeds he could eat. He liked this game quite a bit :)
The only scary part was when John came out from the building and caught both Lefty and I completely off guard. Luckily Lefty didn't try to bolt -- he just whirled around a little bit and when I asked for an "Easy" to calm both our adrenaline levels, he obliged immediately and we took a second (or more like 30) to collect ourselves... It was great that he still did really well afterwards though. We went around the building one more time and walked calmly down into the other side of the yard too. My little super star!

Hammer:
Hammer's been doing great. I've gotten him consistently performing appropriately for direct and indirect rein pressure, and today we took a walk down the alley and around the yard with my arm over his back working on "walk on", "whoa", and "back". I also started working on belly taps, where he has to move his back feet away from me in response to taps on his belly. He kind of gets the idea but tends to back up instead of moving laterally. It's a work in progress :) Heather, Hammer's original trainer, just got back today from a trip to Texas. We may be working with Hammer together from now on, or I definitely have enough animals on my plate!

Twiggy says "put that weird contraption down and give me more hay!"

Donkeys:
Had a session with the donkeys almost by accident today. We were working with Spot and the donkeys came up. They're doing pretty well and even Whoopi, the scardey donkey, ate a little bit from my hand. Of course Gertie, Oprah, and Twiggy were being pushy and grabbing every last bit of hay we offered :) I even had Gertie starting to target her nose to my fingers and learning the bridge word "Dee" and getting fed a handful of hay. We probably did about 15-20 reps while I was standing there trying to get Whoopi to eat from my hand.

Spot:
My newest project is teaching Spot the zebra to station on a mat. He was a little nervous about the mat at first so we asked him to target it with his nose. Then, Pat did a little experiment to see if he could catch on to social learning. Pat went into the pen and stepped on the mat, and I would bridge and "feed" her. Spot knows to do the Hokey Pokey (see video), so he started offering to step his foot out and we just rewarded for successively closer steps to the mat until he was stepping onto the mat and we could feed him continuously for being on the mat. We will keep working on this until we can move the mat from place to place and have him come up to it and stay "stationed" on the mat.

Dougie:

Dougie's foot.

Dougie did fantastic today. It has all of us a little baffled -- he had a couple days where he just seemed like a different horse. The day before yesterday, he was threatening to kick us and would not let us touch him let alone catch him and clip on his lead rope... Today though, I was able to walk in, have him target his jaw to my hand, and clipped his rope within the first minute of being in the stall. He was also much better with Pat handling him. She was able to lift up  his infected foot, but she couldn't get it to an angle where she could see it very well. I happened to have my camera in my pocket so we asked Sasha to take a photo while Pat held the foot up. This is what it looks like...a bit strange - but nothing obviously lodged in there (e.g. a nail, rock, etc.). He's just finished Day 9 of antibiotics, so one more day and we're home free! He definitely feels a lot better and spent some time this afternoon running around in the yard with the other boys. They are so beautiful!

A Mini Adventure

Today we (Pat,  Sasha, and I) took the three saddle training horses out for a little "walk in nature". We probably didn't get any more than 500 feet from the property, but it was great for the horses to go out and learn that new places aren't so scary. They got lots of opportunities to graze on the weeds and grass growing outside. Hammer did great -- for the most part he was calm and having a good time munching on weeds. He did get a little concerned a couple of times, but his brain came right back when I asked him to do "Easy" (lowering his head into a more calm position).

Today was also a good day working with Lefty. I was able to brush him all over and make him pretty :) Here he is after our session. I had to hide behind a fence so he wouldn't come up and stick his nose into the camera again...

Little miss Annie the puppy is growing up fast too! She's been allowed to come hang out outside. Lucky for us she likes to fall asleep in the tack room and stay out of the way...

Short post tonight...I'm falling asleep. Hope for more tomorrow!

Target camera

Yesterday, we watched a video of the Half-tap and the Tap (http://www.hybrid-horseman.com/abouttap.html). It was interesting to see but I had a hard time convincing myself that it wasn't just creating more problems for these horses. Basically, these exercises cause the horses to become "drowsy" and in sort of a trance where you can do whatever you want with them for a short window of opportunity. Sounds like shutting down to me...or learned helplessness -- which is why he can show in his video "look I just did the Tap on this horse 16 times and it's not even sweaty!" I can definitely see how he could be very convincing though. I just can't see how bending a horse's neck against their will (with significant pressure on a bit) and holding it until they get wobbly and fall down can do any long term good. Pat said that at one point they had taught a couple mustangs how to put themselves in the sort of half-tap position (nose to girth and hold), and this behavior became fun for the horses. Because of this, she thought there must not be anything intrinsically wrong with the half-tap position -- but in reality, teaching a horse to hold a position themselves is very different from forcing the horse to hold a position. We did a quick demo with my arm. I pushed against her pressure to hold my arm bent for a few seconds, then I held my arm there myself for a few seconds. Definitely completely different experiences. So I'm not sure that her experiment with teaching a half-tap-like behavior really shows anything about the half-tap or tap themselves.

Today I worked with Lefty on petting the right side of his body. He's definitely got a left bias and prefers I stay on that side of his body, so I was very happy that he let me stand on his right side and do count-down petting all over. I came into his pen a little later with a book and my treat bag to just hang out, but ended up doing a session desensitizing and counterconditioning him to me sitting on a bucket and to my book. Once he was targeting my book, I took out my camera and had him target that too. This is what it looked like:

Lefty targeting my camera :)

My games with Hammer went well today also. I took him into the big pen so that we were working in a larger space - which can be a little scary. He did pretty well. We worked on walking around with my arm over his back, and to make it easier and so as to add some purpose to his walking, I occasionally had him target one of the cones that had been left out in the pen. He seemed to really like that. After our session I let him out to play with the other horses. It's fantastic being able to let them out to play. They are so beautiful running and bucking and chasing each other on the property.

Hammer is free! He knows there's still a little bit of food left in my bag though...

Jumping back to this morning at breakfast, John told us that we would be getting a horse back. Fremont is a mustang who had been adopted out in October, but the adopters say that he has gotten mean and started kicking and biting. Both John and Pat remember Fremont as a great horse who went through the program very quickly and was showing a lot of promise to become a riding horse. Pat suspects that Fremont's adopters were using "old school" methods of training where they just flood the animals until they've basically got a shut down horse who won't put up a fight anymore and is considered "obedient"...except that it didn't work with Fremont and now they want to send him back. We talked about the transition between the primarily positive reinforcement training the horses get here at Mustang Camp versus how their adopters will be training them. It seems that the horses generally do alright if the transition is to natural horsemanship (pressure/release training) but they get horses back who have become confused and frustrated in their new homes if they use primarily pure flooding and "dominating" the horses, since nothing the horses ever do is "right" -- there are no correct answers.

Loose zebra!

Today Sasha made us crepes for breakfast. Yummm! Crepes with caramelized apples and whipped topping. Basically I'm going to get fat living here eating delicious food for every meal...
As we were finishing up breakfast, we noticed the donkeys out with the horses and pretty quickly realized that Spot had broken through the fence. It was actually quite impressive. He had snapped a metal chain, and the fencing between the zebra/donkey pen and the mares was bent -- he even cracked the cement holding the fencing in place! It was a bit of an ordeal getting Spot back in with the donkeys while making sure he didn't charge and bite Jericho or Cisco, while also trying to rescue poor Comet and Dancer from the evil zebra monster :)


Today Roaney took a road trip to Farmington. He's getting gelded tomorrow and should be back by Tuesday. I was so proud of him -- I was able to get a halter on him without much complaining. Unfortunately we needed to switch him to a different one he could take with him to town and had some more trouble the second time around. Since we were in a bit of a time crunch, I ended up just walking him into the chute and putting the halter on from there. Once he was haltered and we clipped on the lead rope, we walked him up to the trailer. It'd been a while since his trailer training so it took a bit of muscle (on John's part) to keep him from backing away once he put his front feet up on the trailer. In the end he just wound up hopping up on his own and he got lots of yummy hay for doing that :)

I worked with both Lefty and Hammer today on standing to be brushed. A bunch of the horses were all dirty from rolling around in the mud left over from yesterday's big storm, but Hammer was the worst. He was basically a mud statue -- there was dirt caked on all over his body! Hammer was an angel for brushing as expected. I was so proud of Lefty. Even though he has a left bias and always wants me on his left side, I was able to work on his right side and get him to allow me to brush almost all over his right side (back to his hip but not quite down his back right leg). It will be a continued work in progress getting Lefty good with handling on both sides.

Hammer also got to work on some more saddle training.  He did really well today with my arm over his back doing "walk on", "whoa", and "back". I was able to start adding more pressure on his back and have my right arm all the way over. I was even able to move my right hand a little bit as we were walking. Hammer thought it was a little weird at first but got used to it pretty quick after I had him walk 3-2-1-treat a couple times.

Last but absolutely not least I also worked with Dougie today on getting his foot in the water bath. Today, we did the session without a lead rope and he did great and stood with his foot in the water bath for over 10 minutes. We also experimented with spraying his hay with water before feeding it to him (realistically it's getting sprayed as it is entering his mouth!) to desensitize him to the spray bottle and also see if it would help with his cough that would happen part way through every training session. It definitely did! No coughing and he actually started recognizing the spray as a cue for the food to come. I would spray once before taking the hay out of my bag and he started turning his head towards me when he felt and heard the spray. Yay Dougie!

Monsoon!

I was so excited about Amigo's success yesterday that I forgot to mention that we had an overnight guest last night. He was passing through the area searching for arches in the canyon. Apparently there is an arch right near us that's about 14 feet long. Maybe some day I'll find some time to go hiking and ask Pat to explain how to get there :)

This morning started off as a pretty normal day. Had coffee this morning -- it's Saturday! Went out and cleaned pens and fed all the horses, then spent some time in the greenhouse. If I'm not careful I'm going to start falling in love with gardening! There's just something so calming about pulling weeds and pruning tomato plants...


Today was the last day I had to work with Roaney on desensitizing and counter-conditioning him to the chute. He must have had a good experience yesterday since he was happy to get separated from his pen buddy Lefty and walked right into the chute. Throughout the day when I wasn't working with him, he seemed to be standing in the chute waiting for somebody to walk by and give him food :) guess he's just about ready to go get gelded on Monday -- nobody's told him yet what they're chopping off...it'll be our little secret until he wakes up from the sedatives with no balls. Ha! Poor Roaney...

This morning, Lefty's eyes were looking a bit infected. Vixen's eyes were infected yesterday and Pat worked with her on targeting her eye to a q-tip to put on medication. I did something similar with Lefty. We started out with a damp rag and I had him target his eye to the rag, then target and hold for 5 seconds on each eye so I could wipe them off. It only took him about 20 minutes to get comfortable with me and get used to the rag and start targeting and letting me clean out his eyes. Later in the afternoon I transferred "target eye" to a q-tip, which I sprayed with medication and in about 10 minutes he was all done for the day. So proud of Mr. Lefty.

For Hammer today, we tested him on each step of the saddle training regimen to see how far along he was. He did great and scored "Reliable" on the first 4 tasks, then we tested a couple more and found out where he was stuck. For the rest of his session, we worked on "walk on", "whoa", and "back" with my arm draped over his back. At first he had trouble understanding what he was supposed to do when I wasn't standing by his face and guiding his head, but he got "walk on" and "whoa" really quick. He really wanted to orient so that he was facing me to do "back", but I gradually worked with him on it so I could place my forearm on his back and stand facing somewhat the same direction as him and getting him to take steps back. We'll keep working on that tomorrow.

Dougie did well today. You can really tell that his foot is feeling better. He's walking on it and even lifting the other back foot up (leaving all the weight on his infected foot) to swat away flies. We didn't get very much foot soaking time, since right after we had filled the bucket, he decided he would pick up the other foot and put it in the bucket too! Or something like that. Whatever he was thinking, he ended up stepping on the rim of the bucket, pouring out all the water. Oops... Since we couldn't work on that anymore, Pat wanted to work on having him lift his foot so that we can easily look at it. Dougie was a super star at this. By the end of our session, he was lifting his leg up in a slow relaxed motion and allowing Pat to hold it up for 3-5 seconds. I was just the treat dispenser for this part :)

Sasha and I also worked with the donkeys today. Twiggy, Oprah, and Gertie did great and were really interested in eating hay from our hands. Unfortunately Whoopie was not so excited about it, but she did come up and eat a little so that was great. After maybe 15 minutes, Spot the zebra finally realized what was going on and came over so we ended our session. Here he is doing "target nose" as we're leaving the pen.

The picture of Spot is deceivingly bright...it was actually starting to rain and a thunderstorm was coming in. We put all of our training gear back into the tack room so that it would stay safe and dry, and we all headed back to the building. Right after we got back in, it started pouring like crazy! I spent the rest of the afternoon reading a book "Evidence-Based Horsemanship" (http://www.evidence-basedhorsemanship.com/). It was an interesting read -- lots of good stuff connecting brain and behavior.

Around 6 o'clock the rain subsided - had a good inch or so of rain! - and we dug trenches so that the water could drain from the pens and the horses would have some dry land. There were huge ponds! The river started flowing too and the muddy water looked like a giant river of chocolate milk. Should have gotten a picture...

Hope tomorrow is more dry :) but for now, it's time to think of a simple research project I can do with the horses in my 2 months here... Pat and I talked about some of the pointing research and an article on delayed reinforcement I read last night. We're bound to come up with something interesting to try out on the mustangs!

Amigo becomes a riding horse!

It's my 3rd day here at mustang camp.

This morning for our training session we worked on teaching the dogs to "range out". Pat wants Annie the puppy to become her antler dog. Basically, this means that Pat will take Annie out hiking and send her out to look for antlers (e.g. by smell or sight). Upon finding an antler, Annie is supposed to bark continuously until she is released. Pat is already working on having Annie bark when she shows her the antler, so that behavior has already started. Today, we brainstormed a shaping plan to get Annie to travel and investigate in the direction of our finger point. We started this off by pointing in a direction and rewarding as soon as she looks that way. The reward does not come from the handler -- we wanted her to be continually focused away from the trainer, so the reward was thrown in the direction of the finger point. Pretty quickly we were getting a couple steps of movement in the indicated direction. Pretty cool stuff - and especially illustrating the importance of the location of the food reward!

We've been working with Dougie on placing his foot in a bucket so we can do warm water baths to clean out his infection. Yesterday, we got him stepping into the bucket pretty consistently, so today we added the water. At first, he would take his foot out as soon as the water got past his hoof, but by the end of the session this afternoon, he was keeping his foot in the bucket until I led him away. Hopefully that means his foot is going to heal sooner and he'll be feeling better!

I've also been working with Lefty and Roaney. Roaney is going to get gelded on Monday, so today I worked on having him walk into a chute (just like he will have to at the mustang clinic) and touching him on the neck where they will give him the IV injection sedative.
Lefty did fantastic today. When I went into the pen to separate Roaney, Lefty was a bit of a basketcase and I was worried today wouldn't go so well. But as soon as I walked in with my treat bag and walked AWAY from him instead of towards him, his demeanor seemed to shift and his body relaxed a bit and he approached instead of continuing to move away from me. I started off by having him do "Easy", which is a calm position of putting his head down with his neck straight. It was good for him to do a behavior where he didn't have to touch me at first but could get food reinforcements for doing the right behavior. Once we did a couple "Easy"s, I had him target his nose, then his jaw. Once I had him target his jaw and did count-down petting on his jaw, he was the Lefty I remembered from yesterday. Pushing into my space, super comfortable being around me, bumping me with his shoulder so I would scratch an itchy spot. At that point, I wanted to work on haltering him, since that was something he knew already but had never done with me before. He was a pro. Right from the beginning he was targeting the halter and then doing "Push" with his nose deep into the halter so that it pushed right over his ears. I was able to completely put it on and take it off him 6 or 7 times before I decided he was great and there was less and less benefit in continuing to do it over and over again. At that point, I realized that he probably had some lateralization issues. He was most comfortable somewhat wrapped around me with his body behind me and head coming around my right shoulder. When I tried to come around to the other side, he would side-step so that only his left side would be facing me at all times. Instead, I stood in front of him and had him target his Right Jaw, then the right side of his neck and did short (5 second) count down petting on his right side. I'll have to keep working to hopefully get him good on both sides.

My main project horse is Hammer, who will be adopted as soon as he is broke to ride -- we're still quite a ways away from that, but he can wear a saddle pad strapped to him while we do "fake" lunging. I have him follow a guider ball since he wasn't responding well to using pressure behind him to get him to move. Hopefully tomorrow we can reintroduce the lunge line, but he's basically free-lunging with me (just with a guider ball to show him where to go!), and we can change directions and occasionally get just the hips to swing around without him stepping closer to me. Today Pat said that I should take him home since he's the perfect size horse for me :) tempting, but he already has a home and there's no way I could keep a horse...



Here's Amigo, who is being adopted by the same people who are taking Hammer. Amigo's further along with his saddle training. Sasha is up on his back walking around the large pen for the first time. They did great!

Feeling the hind legs

Got to ride bareback for the first time today! Thank you Mr. Cracker the hinny :) And for the first time I got instruction on something to think about while riding other than: keep your heels down, keep your back straight, keep your hands up.

I was supposed to be feeling for when Cracker's Left Hind leg hit the ground, but I can only feel the front legs. Sasha was leading and had me do a bunch of exercises with my eyes closed so that I could feel his movement. It helped a lot with balance and figuring out my weight -- especially when we were stopping -- but even when she called out "now" every time his LH hit the ground it did not match with any beats I was feeling! Sasha and Pat both said not to worry, that it will come with time. Pat says she'll come help out next time.

I was going to post all about the success I had with training today but I'm exhausted. We were just watching a horse training DVD "Success Under Saddle" on how to saddle train a horse, and I was so tired I kept dozing off :)

Short post today, hope tomorrow night I have some better updates!

Day 1 of Mustang Camp!

First full day at Mustang Camp.

I'm already learning tons, just talking to Pat and the other intern Sasha.

Pat just got a new German Shepherd x Heeler mix. Her name is Annie. So stinking cute! She's 9 weeks old. Pat has been teaching her a new trick every day. Today I did a little demo with Annie of Repeat Sits Backwards and converting that to Repeat Sits on the Left Side. Of course the little puppy did fantastic and was readily doing Repeat Sits on my Left Side away from the wall and stopping all on her own. Later in the day when I came into the room she ran over and sat :) I gave her some love and when I walked forward she was in perfect heel position looking up at me. She even stopped and sat when I stopped walking. Yay Annie! She's hopefully going to grow up to be a great dog. A couple concerning things though: first, she has a low threshold for frustration and needs to learn better impulse control (Pat says she's going to play the Leave It games with her, so that should help), and second, I've seen her chasing her tail and suddenly grabbing at and biting her back legs. I'm not sure what to make of it. The biting seems to be displacement when she can't get what she wants and gets frustrated. I only saw the tail chasing once though and I was able to call her attention and get her to chase a tug toy.

Today I met all the horses (and the zebra!)

First, there was Lefty and Roaney. I worked with the two of them a little bit, just hand-feeding and feeding them out of a bag of hay. Lefty is, as Pat put it, more committed to whatever he is feeling -- he is comfortable and in your face one second and suddenly the wind blows the wrong way or I shift my weight wrong and he's snorting and running away. Roaney on the other hand is more cautious than Lefty, but also less spooky.

Next was the pen of three big boys. Chester the mule, Cracker the hinny, and Denali the mustang. Cracker is Pat's riding horse, who gets used when the mustangs are being saddle trained and are going out for a ride and need a seasoned buddy :)

Next, I met Dougie and Louie. Dougie (or Douglas) has an infected foot and  had been in quite a bit of pain until Pat put him on antibiotics last week. He's looking much better and putting way more weight on that foot. We are training him to put his foot in a bucket so that we can do a warm water bath to help speed up his recovery. Pat is training Louie to be a riding horse. I didn't get to interact with him much, but he was looking really good from a distance :)

Then came Jericho (gelding) penned with Comet and Dancer (the mares). The girls are done with the training regimen and are just waiting for homes. Denali is being broke to ride by Heather, one of the other interns who has gone back home for a few weeks.

Next, I met Sergeant Spoticus (aka Spot) the zebra and the four lady donekys. Spot is a temperamental young man who spends his time defending the gate between his pen and Denali's. The donkeys are being kept by Pat in hopes that one will mate with Spot and we will have Zonkey babies :)

Then we have the four black ponies. There's Vixen, Blitzen, Dasher, and Sugarfoot. Vixen's the most flighty, both Blitzen and Sugarfoot are working on a behavior called stipling (please excuse my terrible lack of ability to spell), where they cock one of their back legs. Dasher fell into a water trough last winter and suffered from terrible frostbite, so she spent the winter indoors -- and as a result has become a spoiled monster child -- a far cry from her more mustang-y black pony buddies.

Next there's Hammer and Amigo. The two of them have already been adopted, but they are still here to get additional training. Sasha is working with Amigo, who is showing great progress. Hammer was Heather's project, but I may be working with him so that he doesn't get to far behind Amigo's progress since they're going to the same home.

Then there's Cisco. Really the only way to describe this horse is that he's a beautiful giant. We used him today so Sasha could learn how to grind hooves (which they are doing with Amigo).

Last but absolutely not least is Zarvona. I believe he is the most flighty/spooky horse we have at the camp right now. He has been at camp for over a year now. Sasha is working with him now, going back through all the behaviors he has previously learned and filling in where he has forgotten or regressed on tasks. Zarvona is a fantastic example of lateralization, which Pat is giving a talk about at the Animal Behavior Society's annual conference later this month.

It was a long day, but so much fun. Looking forward to learning more tomorrow, the day after, and for the next 10 weeks!!!

The start of something new

Today marks the beginning. I'm not exactly sure exactly what is beginning - other than this blog. Maybe it will go no where, but for now, it's an opportunity to write. And there's no way to get better at writing than to write. Basically, there isn't supposed to be an audience for this blog. That way there's no need to worry about what people think, how someone might react, etc.

This past weekend, I traveled to Seattle for the first annual SPARCS conference - that stands for Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science. The overall "SPARCS Initiative" is to get the ball rolling in terms of discussions on canine research and where it is, where it has been, and where it is going. I was lucky enough to attend in person, but the entire conference was also broadcasted FREE via live streaming for everyone and anyone to attend -- and even participate in the conversation via a twitter feed.

After coming back from Seattle, I've spent the past 24 hours either sleeping, eating, or visiting websites, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages -- anything I can find and subscribe to in order to stay inspired. I guess I also spent some time playing with the puppies. So much doggie withdrawal after no contact for 3 whole days!

A little bit of housekeeping for myself:

Goals for this blog

• Post DAILY updates on things I've learned at Mustang Camp (starting 7/10/13)
• Read and review a research article at least 1x per week

General goals for this summer

• Get a manuscript complete for the memory study
• Read books: Dog Sense (Bradshaw), Dogs (Coppinger), Inside of a Dog (Horowitz), How to Behave So Your Dog Behaves (Yin)
• Read and take notes: Dog Behavior, Evolution and Cognition (Miklosi)

We'll see how this goes! I have one more week before leaving for New Mexico. Going to help my sister move into her new house. We are going furniture shopping in the morning, and then I need to pack things to ship over to Mustang Camp so that my stuff is there when I arrive. Hopefully tomorrow I can get some work done for CattleDog Publishing too. I've been meaning to update the Behavior Assistant's Protocol for months now; really need to get that into working condition for Lauren.

Love this web-diary format. Hope it continues to go well. I really doubt that I will get very much writing practice from this if I continue with using such a relaxed writing style, but maybe my article reviews will be more serious. We'll see how it pans out.