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.
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!
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