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.