20 more mouths to feed

John had to go buy hay again today. Unfortunately, our last load of hay had quite a bit of moldy hay (about 2000 lbs of it!). Luckily, the deal with the hay farmer is that he will reimburse any moldy hay that we can't feed to the horses, but John has to drive the moldy hay back up to Colorado in order to do that. Today, John took that moldy hay and they dropped it off at the hay farmer's winter cow pastures, since cattle are safe eating moldy hay but moldy hay can kill horses or cause permanent neurological damage.

The new mares and foals are doing great. I love the babies -- they are so brave and are always the ones right up at the fence waiting for you to bring hay to them. I'm pretty sure there are 7 foals in total. One is Bamm-Bamm, who has been here for a week, and there are 6 others. Four of the babies have blazes; two girls and two boys. Then there is a liver colored baby, who Pat says will probably turn lighter as she gets older and be more of a buckskin color like her mom, and a super young (maybe 1 month old) sorrel colored baby.

The rest of the horses are either yearling fillies or older mares. There are so many of them that even after day 2 we still haven't quite named them all yet. The good news is that they're all eating from our hands already! The only mare who is having a bit of trouble is a liver colored mare who likes to show us her rear end...hopefully that goes away once she gets more comfortable :) nobody needs a mare who is always threatening to kick!

This batch of horses are Princess/Disney themed -- which actually gives us quite a bit of flexibility in names. I also took a couple pictures of them on day one. Didn't have my phone on me today, so I didn't get any more photos.

Chip is on the left and Dale is on the right. The liver mare is photobombing :)

In this group, the mare on the far left is Rapunzel since she has an incredibly long mane.
Dale and Chip are the foals in this picture, but none of the other horses are named quite yet.

In this photo the white (actually called Cremello) horse's name is of course Snow White. The buckskin mare on the far right is named Guinevere, after the queen of King Arthur. The third horse from the right is a yearling filly who we have named Jasmine (after Princess Jasmine from Aladdin). The two blazed kids you see here are the two girls, and the liver colored foal is right next to Queen Guinevere.

Didn't quite get photos of all the horses, but that will come soon!

On another note, I had a really good day with Ginger today. It was her last training day before she loads up and leaves tomorrow. I walked her out into a new area and even though she was scared, she tried really hard to be good. It was a little too much for her to go into the barn (since she had to go under the roof and that was scary), but she stayed with me when we walked up and down the road a little bit. She also got to experience being tied up a little bit -- and ate a bag of hay in the process :)

Going to miss my Gingie... Really hope she does well with her new owner. She has the potential to be a really great horse if they take the time to earn her trust. Fingers crossed that my baby has a good forever home!

One Week

Tomorrow is Thursday -- which means a couple things.

1. I officially have only 15 more days here at Mustang Camp.
2. 20 mares/foals will be arriving tomorrow
3. The batch of geldings currently in training will have been here for 1 week

Simon -- my project yearling -- has been in "intensive" training for 5 days now. The first two days, the geldings were all housed in the big back pen together, learning to eat from human hands and getting used to their new temporary home. Since his actual training started, Simon's been blasting through everything. He is nearly caught up with Ginger, Greta, and June! And he's totally zen about it all. Halter? OK sure. Brush? Mmm that feels kind of good. It's so much fun working with him sometimes I have to remind myself that he can't go forever -- even if he thinks he can!

Mr. Simon feeling extra manly in his pink halter...

Ginger is actually scheduled to leave us on Saturday. Bambi is getting delivered to a family in Santa Fe, and John wants to be able to take them both together. Of course Ginger won't be quite done with the program yet, but she's come a long way. She now knows how to be friends with the humans, wear a halter, and walk on a lead politely. The walking on a lead rope is still a work in progress since we haven't worked outside of her comfort zone, but I'm very proud of her for what she's accomplished in the past month she has been here. A little sad to see my girl go too!

On another note, Roany doesn't seem to have any respect for the un-electric fence... He went on another adventure today -- so Pat and I climbed the hill to get up above him and threw rocks down to scare him back home. He needs to learn that it's not so fun to dive under the fence. The one good thing that came out of it was that I got to take pictures of a pretty spectacular view of the training yard from up on the hill:

Mustang Camp's Training Facility in all its glory

Shocking!

The rest of the mares and foals will be arriving on Thursday - all TWENTY of them! Holy cow...not sure how that's going to go, but we'll see. We think they might be getting Disney Princess names. At least some of them... I don't think there are enough princesses for all the mares to be named after!

Luckily, two of our horses are leaving this Friday (8/30), Bambi and Ginger. Ginger won't be quite finished with her training yet, but her adopter is a knowledgeable horse person and it shouldn't be a problem for him to work with her. I'm going to miss my crazy girl and her excited nickering every time I walk by...

I haven't made it "blog official" yet, but my latest project horse is Simon, one of the yearling geldings. When we divvy'd up the horses, I chose Simon since he was one of the most outgoing and friendly guys. For anyone who knows me, choosing the easy one is definitely not my thing! But my goal is to get Simon completely trained and ready for adoption by the time I leave. I'm headed to St. Louis on September 13th, which leaves me two and a half weeks to get Simon through the program. Pat said it was an ambitious goal, but she thinks it can be done. And Simon is cruising along wonderfully. In just the last three days of training, he's finished Zone 1 (out of 4) and we start working with the rope loop to introduce haltering tomorrow. Exciting stuff! And he's only been here 5 days! So proud of my little prodigy... I'll have to get pictures of him tomorrow.

We also put up electric fencing today around the perimeter of the backyard so the donkeys can run around the yard and eat weeds without us worrying about them going under the fence and disappearing forever. We had plastics clips and put up all the fencing, but we don't have the power source yet. The fencing looks pretty though -- a clean white strip (for now!) all along the edge. The electric fencing isn't just for the donkeys either...a while back Lefty discovered that he could push the wiring up and sneak under the fence to go graze on the hill -- and then he took Sugarfoot, Blitzen, and Roany along with him. They didn't get yard privileges for a while after that incident... Once we have the electric fence working though, hopefully we won't have that problem anymore!

Training Begins

Yesterday, we moved the current trainees out of the training pens in preparation for the new kids.

Empty pens, ready for some new mustangs!

Everybody seemed excited to go...we put some hay on the ground to entice them into coming to check out the stalls and the central space. They didn't need any extra encouragement!

Come on now, everybody line up to visit the main training space.

I was also able to get some better close up shots of the boys, since they were much more comfortable with us.

Alvin, with the crooked blaze and 1 blue eye 

Archie

Simon -- wish this picture wasn't blurry!!

Teddy, with McGraw in the back.

The girls are also doing great. All the mares and little Bamm-Bamm are now coming right up to hang out and eat single bites of hay from our hands. Unfortunately, the mares won't be going into training for a while. We should be getting our next batch of mares early next week, and the Flintstone gang + Lazy Daisy will be very helpful in showing the new mares and foals that there is nothing weird about eating hay from the humans.

"It's breakfast time, we're hungry!" The picture doesn't show it really well, but
Daisy's legs are actually the same length (or shorter???) than baby Bamm-Bamm's!

Guilt...

I hate it when something I do or say has negative consequences for somebody else. When is it right to bring a concern up to a person in charge and when is it considered tattle-taling? A quick Google search on tattle-taling (mostly to decide how to spell it...) brought up a bunch of parenting guides on how to stop pre-schoolers from being snitches. Society seems to so strictly condone any tattling (whistle-blower hatred anyone?). So when is it socially acceptable to "tell on" someone, and when is it a "mind your own business" situation? And when you need to tell something, how much detail do you include? Do you just bring up a concern or do you say "[name] said this"? Interesting things to think about...and cause you to regret the way you chose to approach an issue.

Anyway, on a lighter note, we've cleared out all the training pens in preparation for the new horses to start. I'm thinking that Simon, Alvin, and maybe Batman will be ready to follow us into training pens tomorrow. Everybody is doing great -- except Mr. Robin has still yet to eat from our hands. During dinner feeding, we made sure to drop as little hay as possible on the ground in hopes that he would quit being a vacuum and decide to eat from our hands. He did nose the hay in Pat's hand, but unfortunately he made contact with her finger, which totally freaked him out and he didn't end up taking any hay. Hopefully tomorrow morning he will be hungry enough to eat from us.

Since the old "wild" horses have been taken out of the training pens, Ginger and Greta have been reunited -- happily best friends as long as it's not feeding or training time; then Ginger becomes all bossy and feels the need to remind poor Greta what a grouchy old lady she is.

Ginger eating breakfast and Greta giving her a WIDE
berth to get to her own bag on the other side.

Day 1 For The New Mustangs!

We got more mustangs today! These are the first of the batch of 30+ horses we will be getting in the next week or so. They were the ones who we helped process when we went up to Bloomfield last week, so we got to "meet" them there.

We were supposed to get 9 geldings, 3 mares, and a foal, but one of the geldings was kept behind since he was sore and had some swelling after his castration last Friday that he is still recovering from. So we ended up getting 12 horses today. They are all coming along great -- all but one of the horses has already started eating out of our hands. And they're all named! This batch is cartoon character themed. Unfortunately my camera started acting up and didn't want to be functional in the evening, so I don't have pictures of all the horses yet... So I've found some replacements.

Geldings

Batman -- the bully of the group. We thought he would be pretty wild but he is actually one of the boldest horses. He's covered in scars, which we thought meant he was the omega animal... turns out it's most likely because he's been picking too many fights!

Robin -- the only horse Batman doesn't try to attack 24/7. He's the pretty sorrel. We thought he would be one of the easiest to tame since he didn't seem super flighty at the holding facility and the he was a staff favorite, but he's the only one who hasn't eaten out of our hands yet.

Batman and Robin. Batman has a star on his forehead that looks like a bat, but you can't see it very well in the picture :(

Alvin, Theodore, and Simon -- 3 yearlings who are best friends, so they had to get named after the chipmunks :) Alvin has a crooked blaze and one white (Edit 8/23: did I write white?? I meant BLUE!) eye, Theodore also has a blaze but it runs straight down his face and white stockings, and Simon has a star that's shaped like a shield.

L to R: Alvin, Simon, and Theodore's butt behind a pole...

Sylvester -- a pretty black yearling. He's still pretty timid but willing to eat from my hand after he's had some time to think it over.

Archie -- named Archie because his star is rounded at the top like an arch...and Archie is also a cartoon character.

Quick Draw McGraw -- this boy is 4 years old, and we thought he would be a bit wilder since he was quite a mess when we handled him up in Bloomfield. He's given us a great surprise though. He's one of the first to walk right up to you and grab a big bite from the hay in your hand. He was a little upset that there were fingers in his food, but he's getting over it...

Sorry, no picture of Sylvester yet,
but this will do for now.

And Quick Draw McGraw.

Same for Archie.

Mares + Foal

Here are the girls and the baby.

Daisy -- she's the one on the far right in the picture. "Daisy" fits her, since it's often a cow name and she is quite the chunky monkey...

Wilma and Bamm-Bamm -- Momma and baby are named after the Flintstones characters. Though I just looked it up and apparently Bamm-Bamm is the adopted child of the other two adult characters (not Fred and Wilma Flintstone) so who knows, maybe Wilma is getting renamed Betty to be more correct - or maybe she's staying Wilma because the name fits her better than Betty...(that's too much of another cow name but she's much more feminine!)

(Edit 8/23: Wilma is keeping her name!)

Mary (Edit 8/23: Mary is getting renamed Pebbles, since she's part of the Flintstones family) - she's actually the one closer to baby in the picture. We think she might be Wilma's older daughter, since they look so much alike and baby Bamm-Bamm spends a lot of time hanging out with Mary  Pebbles too.

Of course, to get the horses to start coming up to the fences for food, we needed a decoy horse to show them there was nothing to worry about. Who better for the job than sweet Fremont, who can always use a bit more hay :)

Secret Webdiary...

Well, so much for "there isn't supposed to be an audience for this blog"... Passed 1000 views a couple days ago -- and I thought I'd take a look at the stats Blogger kindly provides. Pretty cool actually.

Such is the power of the internet. People I don't know (this is an assumption, since I don't know anybody in the Czech Republic, Australia, Italy, Canada, or the UK) have somehow found their way to my blog.

Back to important matters of the day -- the mosquitoes are back! And worse than last time... I guess I will avoid posting more nasty pictures of the bites all over my legs. It turns out that the mosquitoes must be biting me through my clothes - pretty sure of that, since I never ever walk around naked... It's almost gotten to a point where we feel like "We need to be outside....10 more minutes?"

We had a discussion about Classical Conditioning today during class-time. There are a couple different names for Classical Conditioning. It's also called Pavlovian and Respondent Conditioning. To put it basically, it's learning by association. An animal (or human) learns that one stimulus predicts the presentation of another stimulus, until the association has been formed and the first stimulus starts eliciting the same physiological/psychological responses as the stimulus it is associated with. One of the examples that we used in class is my newfound fear of bushes. What is the association? Bushes = Giant swarms of mosquitoes. It only took a couple times of experiencing a cloud of mosquitoes rising from the bushes and attaching to my arms/face for me to start wanting to avoid bushes, and when I can't help but go through them (to reach the fence along the road, to dump manure out  in the dung pile, etc.), I can feel my heart start beating faster in anticipation of those nasty buggers.

We also discussed one of my new positive associations that I developed here at Mustang Camp too. I love donkeys. I had never before really had an opinion of them, but now seeing a donkey makes my heart melt a little and just writing this makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's going to be sad if we have to see them go, but they're pretty well prepared to start a life with humans. All 4 of them are now happy to act as couches and let us lean on them while we scratch them, and I can drape myself over Gertie's back and put a significant amount of weight on her and she just stands there and makes snoring sounds while she enjoys getting her belly scratched. My sweet ladies are also going to be in for a treat once we get the electric fencing put up so we can let them hang out in the yard and graze down all the weeds :) Right now we can't let them out because the fences aren't good enough for them -- they're small, so they can sneak underneath much more easily than the horses.

Houdini

I was really going to write a blog post last night, but I found this gem on the internet: http://kristinandkayla.blogspot.com/
Spent the rest of the evening looking at fantastically cute pictures with genius photoshop skills.


Just started watching a DVD series by Lauman Training (more here). Kitty Lauman is a very successful natural horsemanship trainer, and its really educational to see negative reinforcement methods being used with finesse and skill. The only weird thing she does is that she continuously repeats "Good" while she's working with a horse. It gets kind of old pretty quick -- especially when she's working with a wild mustang who cannot possibly find the "Good" verbal to be any sort of happy thing...

Update on Training
Everybody is doing really well. Spot is now standing on his mat and letting me brush him all over. Today, he was even sort of enjoying it :) Speaking of Spot...we went out this morning to do morning feeding and found that Spot had somehow managed to get into the neighboring pen with Dasher and Bambi. The first thing we checked was fences -- no, they all looked in tact. All the doors were still latched too. There seemed to be no possible way for Spot to have gone though the fence, unless he apparated... It's still sort of a mystery. The only way we though of that might have been a possibility is that Spot managed to somehow roll his way under the fence. There was a part of the ground by the fence that was all scuffed up which supported our guess... Hopefully he only made it under by accident and hasn't learned to squeeze under fences to get to the other side. Then we'd have quite a problem on our hands!

Ginger, Greta, and June are also doing great. Ginger is now letting  me pet her all over her body. Greta is getting close -- probably just one or two more days and she'll be there. June is taking a little bit longer to get comfortable with me reaching back on her body, especially on the right side, but we'll get there pretty soon. Very proud of my girls. They've also all learned to be polite and get out of my space...too bad they had to learn that because they all had bouts of being pushy brats :)

Bloomfield, NM

As promised, here are pictures from our adventure to town today. We headed up to Bloomfield, NM to help out the government agencies (BLM and Forest Service) process the new mustangs. All the boys (except babies) had to be gelded, and everybody needed to get age estimated, dewormed, vaccinated, branded, and tested for Equine Infectious Anemia (commonly known as a Coggins test).

Age Estimation
Estimating a horse's age is sort of a fine art. Especially when you're dealing with wild mustangs that REALLY don't want to have anything to do with you, let alone have you sticking your fingers in his mouth to look at his teeth! Their teeth come in and change from baby to adult teeth at different ages (adult teeth come in around 3 years of age) and as they get older, the teeth sort of change shape as they get worn down.

Here's the chart they had handy. Of course the vet wasn't referencing it though!

Here's a picture of the crew working on gelding a mustang. I took a picture of the removed parts, but decided against posting that here for the more squeamish...

Chuny was Dr. Heidke's tech and everybody else was in charge of holding the horse in place. It was interesting to hear about the different veterinarians' preferred positioning of the horse for a gelding. Dr. Heidke likes her patients on their backs.

This is the set-up they had out at the facility.

It wasn't the most ideal, but it got the job done. There was a short funnel before the working chute, but it was such a drastic change that the horses would shove themselves through 2 at a time and we ran into that issue a couple of times. Now if only they would take something from Temple Grandin's facility designs...

And finally the question of the day...why isn't this horse a buckskin?

The Bridge

So this summer is probably the first time I have been consistently using a "bridge" in my training. Backing up a little (Mommy this is for you!) -- a "bridge" or bridging stimulus or marker is something used in animal training to note when an animal is doing the correct behavior and you want to "mark" it, and then give the animal its reward. A popularized use of this technique is called "clicker training", where the bridge/marker is the distinct clicking sound that a clicker makes when you press and release the thin metal or plastic tongue.
You can learn more about the world of Karen Pryor Clicker Training here: http://www.clickertraining.com/

I've been doing a lot of thinking about when and why use a bridge. It's interesting the seemingly ambiguous rules people come up with in terms of when to use the bridge and when it's not necessary. It's also educational to mingle with people on both extremes in terms of bridge use -- the ones who never ever use a bridge, and the ones who will always, no matter what, use a bridge before they reward an animal.

So...in what circumstances is a bridging stimulus going to enhance your training, when is it going to do basically nothing, and when is it going to hinder you? These questions are actually (I think) really important and all too often ignored -- or never posed.

We've had this discussion at work a couple times before. I guess work has never come up in this blog before -- this is where I work/learn/get inspired/everything : http://drsophiayin.com/

There are a couple different scenarios where a bridge is beneficial:

1. The behavior you are trying to get is very exact (e.g. getting a dog to perk its ears up - or just one ear? Who's up for the challenge...)
2. The behavior you are trying to get is at some distance away from you - basically there is some physical block between when/where the behavior occurs and your ability to present the reward at that time/location (e.g. having a cat turn it's head away from you)
3. The bridge is buying you time before your animal goes over threshold. This is the case where you want to reward a behavior (e.g. Benji not exploding when he sees a kitty running across the room), but if you just hand the animal the reward, it is likely that they will have gone over threshold by the time the food gets to them.
• I think that this last one is the reason why we so often feel the need to use the bridge when working with the mustangs here at Mustang Camp. It is such an enhancing tool (and not just a trainer habit).

And when is a bridging stimulus useless?

You've already started giving the reward. I actually catch myself doing this all the time. I'm saying "Yes!" as I deliver the food. What is Benji tuned in to? Most likely the hand coming at his face.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, when does the bridge hinder your training?

I actually had to think about this for quite a while. This is what I've come up with - and maybe it's not the right answer, maybe it's not the most complete answer, but it's a start. And a start at discussing the notion that maybe we don't always want to use a bridge.

1. I'm so concerned with accidentally bridging an incorrect behavior that I have accidentally lost any behavioral momentum and my animal is no longer interested in trying to earn reinforcement.
2. I am positioning my reward so that my animal continues along the same trajectory it is getting rewarded for. For example, I want my zebra to go station on a mat and I want to reward him for taking steps towards it, should I bridge and then reward (and run the risk of my zebra stopping and looking at me for a reward), or should I just present the food along the trajectory my zebra is taking to his mat in a way that he keeps moving toward it?
3. Along the same lines as #2, the final scenario I could come up with where a bridge would hinder my training is when I don't want my behavior to end. I want my animal to continue performing the behavior, and I will give sequential rewards to maintain this behavior. Technically, a bridging stimulus marks the end of a behavior. Naturally then (or so it seems), wouldn't I want to avoid using a bridge for a behavior I don't want my animal to stop performing? (e.g. asking a horse to turn its head -- and keep it there!)

On another note, I was also thinking about the term "dog trainer" versus "animal trainer". Really, what "dog trainer" in the general sense implies is somebody who trains everyday pet owners on how to train their dogs. "Animal trainer" on the other hand brings to mind a person (the trainer), working directly with an animal to teach it some behavior. Somehow, these are two very different things -- and it's interesting to think about how different types of people with the same or similar educational backgrounds/hands-on training experience would be more attracted to one or the other.

Headed to Bloomfield tomorrow to check out and help process the new mustangs we will be getting. Guess I should get to bed!!

Three Musketeers

I was waiting to share the news until it was absolutely certain-- loading up in the trailer and traveling to their new homes is about as sure as you're going to get!

Hmm...who's leaving in that trailer?

The three crazies -- Louis, Zarvona, and Hammer!

Now that the three boys are gone, it's gotten a bit quieter around here. You wouldn't think that just three horses would make such a big difference, but it really does.

The quiet isn't going to last long though, we are getting 25+ more horses any day now! This Friday, Chuny (the Swiss jockey), Pat, and I are headed up to Bloomfield to help out with the processing (branding, gelding, etc.) of the newly caught mustangs. As soon as they've been vetted (Friday), they will be headed our way right afterwards. I'm guessing Monday at the earliest - assuming weekends still exist in civilization :) They have 34 horses, and we get to choose the ones we want to take (or more likely, see if we can pick out the ones we are pretty sure we DON'T want to take). It should be a pretty exciting day. It's been a couple weeks since I've been off the property!

On another exciting note, we harvested a cabbage from the garden today! We had 9 heads of cabbage, and I went out and harvested the largest one for dinner tonight. Freshly picked cabbage is absolutely delicious, even just plain! Very mild and crisp. We decided to make cole slaw -- yum!

 

John didn't get back from delivering the horses until about 8 PM, so Pat made dinner. Along with the coleslaw, she also cooked up some deer steaks. It was my first time having deer -- pretty tasty, thought I can't say I can tell the difference between meats...

Deer steak cut up... pre-seasoning/pounding/coating

Progress

Got called out by my Mama this evening for not posting on my blog regularly enough... :) oops!

We've been pretty busy here at Mustang Camp. Chuny, our newest intern arrived on Sunday. She was a jockey in Switzerland for 8 years, so she definitely has a lot of horse knowledge and experience. Today, we finished training a little bit early, so we had some time to do a little riding lesson. Pat had us take turns riding Cracker and feeling his hind legs. I wasn't quite as lost as the first time I rode him... Apparently my body can feel it and move with his feet, but my brain's not there yet. Progress though!

The wild horses are also making great progress. All my mares have now been haltered, and June has passed Ginger in completing the halter task by letting me put on her halter the "normal" way.

I snapped a couple pictures this evening after feeding time. Ms. Ginger sure is pretty...

Ginger's going to get adopted pretty quick - she's such a looker!

Sweet Greta -- it's crazy that I can say that now... Look at that muscular body though.

Little Timmy and Mama June in the background.

I finally got a good picture of Prancer's weird coloring too. Anyone know what that's called...? 1/2 Bay 1/2 ???

He's color confused...

 Last but absolutely not least, Fremont is recovering from his little encounter with Spot the zebra. He's on oral antibiotics, and his leg is looking way better. Basically all the swelling is gone, and it's looking pretty dry too. Here he is eating his evening grain + medication:

Poor guy still looks pretty chewed up.

Fremont still looks like he's in pretty bad shape, but he's starting to get some meat back on his bony skeleton...slow and steady.  He needs to be dewormed and put on some Equine Senior though to help speed up the weight gain. Once he's nice and healthy, Chuny is going to be training him to be a saddle horse. He should make a great saddle horse since he's got a very sweet and calm demeanor.

I ♥ Donkeys

I love donkeys! I've been spending more time with these sweet girls the past couple of days, working towards getting them halter broke so they will be trained if/when they get re-homed. Now that I've worked with them a little bit, I've started getting a better idea of each of their personalities.

Twiggy
She's the lighter colored donkey you see standing straight towards the camera in that picture. I guess you could say that Twiggy is our boldest donkey. Nothing you introduce really fazes her -- and other donkeys beware, if Twiggy wants something, it's hers! So far, I've been able to pet Twiggy all over, give her hugs and kisses, halter her, and flap a rope all over her body. Wild burro? What? Where?

Oprah
Ms. Oprah was our second-most outgoing donkey when I first started working with these guys. She's the donkey standing on the far left side of the photo. When I haltered Oprah today, I realized how much smaller her head is than Twiggy's. It's crazy! One other important thing about Oprah: as the weeks go by, she's starting to look rounder and rounder... I think there is little doubt that this sweetheart is pregnant!

Gertrude (Gertie)
You can't really see Gertie in the picture. She's the only donkey not looking at the camera - tsk tsk! Gertie has come a long way since we first started training the donkeys. She was pretty timid at first, but now loves to come up for scratches. She's the pickiest of the donkeys when it comes to food. Smart Gertie loves grain. When we get new wild mustangs, they often don't know to eat grain, and will even spit it out if you give some to them by accident mixed in with their hay (OK lets be honest, you probably hid it there on purpose)... The donkeys don't seem to really have this issue, and Gertie will only take the hay from you if there's grain in that bite too -- but luckily she'll work for scratches no matter what. Gertie is the last donkey who I've been able to halter, and I've flapped the rope all over her body without any drama too.

Whoopi
Finally there's Whoopi. She's the bigger girl standing in the front right side of the photo. Whoopi is our most timid donkey, and I was having terrible luck being able to get her engaged in the training sessions with the three other pushy ones out-competing her. This morning though, Pat was out there with me and when we each had 2 donkeys to pet, Pat was able to get Whoopi to enjoy scratches on her neck! In the afternoon, I went back out specifically to work with Whoopi, and she's definitely making progress. At first, she would only let me stand on her right side (meaning she is a right-biased donkey), but I could reach over her back and scratch her left side. By the end of the session I was able to stand on either side and scratch her neck/body, but whenever I moved to a new spot she would get uncomfortable again. I'm certain we'll continue making steady progress, but it just won't be quite as speedy as her 3 penmates.


Mustang Update
It's been a while since I said anything about the progress we've been making with the mustangs. I've been focusing on the mares (Ginger, Greta, and June). All three are making fantastic progress.

• Greta has long outgrown her fear-chomping, and we've been working on getting her haltered and getting her used to human touch/petting.
• Ginger had a phase where she tried out different things to see if she could gain access to the food in my treat bag more quickly than I was giving it to her... She had to learn pretty quick that the only way she could get the food was by doing what I asked, not by being pushy. That made me leave and not come back -- not so ideal for a horse that wants to do just about anything to get you to hand them some food (even food on the ground isn't good enough!). I've also started feeding her an early afternoon snack, so she doesn't get super hungry and feel the need to be pushy for her food. Now that we've implemented changes for a couple days, Ginger is more polite, and we're back on track. She's also learned that humans are a great source of scratches. Watching a fresh mustang's lip wiggle in pleasure as you scratch them is a pretty fantastic experience!
• June is doing great. She was slow to start but now she's all caught up with Ginger! Well on her way to being a wonderful horse for somebody.

Ms. Ginger has a bad hair day.
I messed up her forelock scratching her face :)

Hay is for horses

John drove up to Colorado today to pick up some more hay for us. It was supposed to be a good day to do that - no rain forecasted.

Of course when does weather ever cooperate... As Pat and I started our first training sessions, we had a short downpour. About 5-10 minutes of giant raindrops. This actually happened about 3 separate times today. When we didn't see many trucks going by as the day came to a close, we became a little concerned that John might get flooded out. Especially when Pat got a text from John saying "no tarp"...meaning John hadn't brought a tarp with him to cover the hay and keep it from getting wet.

As we were prepping to feed dinner to all the horses, the rains started again. We decided that we would finish feeding, then drive up the road to meet John where the rainwater had probably started running and created a stream in the road that he wouldn't be able to cross. About halfway through feeding the horses though, the rain stopped. A couple minutes later, John pulls up with hay in tow. Somehow - miraculously - he had managed to make it all the way home without getting rained on. No wet hay for us!!

On a less positive note, Fremont has a pretty bad infection on his leg. Spot had gotten loose in the same pen as Fremont overnight 2 days ago, and Fremont got bitten up pretty bad. We had put some stuff on his bites to cover them up and keep them from getting infected, but it looks like we must have missed one - or this one was from something else. He had a deep puncture wound just above the outside of his knee, and his leg had gotten all swollen and there was pus draining from the wound when we saw it this morning. Poor baby... He's going on antibiotics and we've been putting antibacterial creams and been washing it out. Unfortunately Fremont's still in pretty bad shape weight-wise from when he had been at his previous adopters. Just hoping that his body is strong enough to fight off the infection. Fingers crossed for the sweet boy to recover.

Object Permanence

It rained most of the morning today, so Pat and I spent some time talking about research and trying to figure out what we want to investigate. We were going along the track of looking at equine ability to follow a point -- based off of the current research on canine, primate, marine mammal, and other species, but we found something even more simple that needs to be documented in horses: Object Permanence.

Object permanence is the cognitive understanding that an object still exists, even if it gets hidden from view. Piaget described 6 stages of object permanence in child development, which go from a lack of object awareness (Stage 1 - infants 0-1 month of age) all the way up to developing mental representations of objects and working with them in your head to solve problems (Stage 6 - reached by around 18-24 months in human toddlers).

Although there have been some controversial discussions on the issue, the general consensus in dog research is that it seems likely that dogs are capable of reaching Stage 6 Object Permanence. They join great apes and certain species of parrots (e.g. the African Grey) in reaching this higher level of cognition.
(Edit: After some further reading, looks like I was wrong about the general consensus -- or just a couple decades off! More recent studies suggest that dogs' ability to succeed in paradigms designed to study Stage 6 Object Permanence are more likely due to dogs using associative learning and spatial cues to solve these tasks instead of using mental representations to infer invisible displacement of objects)

It would be really interesting to see how the horses do on tasks that would shed some light on what level of object permanence horses have. Basic spatial memory tasks have shown that horses do seem to be able to search for hidden food, suggesting that they have at least Stage 4 object permanence (the individual is able to retrieve an object completely hidden from view). Before Stage 4, individuals would not be able to retain the information that an object exists in a particular location if it is completely out of view. This is what makes peek-a-boo so much fun to little kids, whose object permanence is not yet fully developed and it seems like Mommy is magically disappearing and reappearing right before his eyes!

Can't wait to really solidify our testing protocol and start collecting data on the animals. We should probably be able to run the tests on the horses, donkeys, mules, and maybe even Spot :) Should be fun!

Green Chile

Did you know that the Official State Question of New Mexico is "Red or Green?" in reference to red or green chile when ordering New Mexican food? (it's true!)

Heather left this morning, and since John had to drop her off at the airport in Albuquerque, he was basically out all day. He came back with a little surprise -- a giant box of green chiles! After dinner, John, Pat, and Abe processed all the chiles (peeling off the roasted skin and scraping out the seeds). I snuck a picture during the process :)

Here's the roasted green chile salsa we had for dinner too. I guess it's salsa...whatever it is, it was good - and hot!

We've also been revamping the data collection system implemented here so that each task the horses learn gets measured by every trainer with the same parameters. The first plow-through is done and we've started using the new system, but I can see many small updates in our near future. 

Today was much like every other day. Pat and I started working with the horses early so that we would be done earlier in the afternoon -- it worked, except for the little mishap where the ZEBRA got loose and was running around on the road. Oops. I still had some free time though, and I spent my couple free hours reading papers and getting inspired... Going to set up a little research project with the horses! I will probably share more on that when we actually know what we're doing.

Homegrown Watermelon

Pat's son and grandson arrived today. Her grandson is 6 years old and pretty darn cute -- I miss working with little kids! Spent like an hour before dinner time playing in the dirt with him... :)

In other news, Heather leaves tomorrow morning, so of course we had to try the watermelon! 

Right after we picked it...

Yum! Very tasty. I've never had homegrown orange watermelon before.

And some more garden/greenhouse pictures just because growing stuff is awesome...

 Corn growing in the garden...

Probably going to pick this swanlake melon soon.
The one we picked yesterday was already overly ripe.

Welcome Back Prancer

No post yesterday - we watched "The Horsemen" and it was way too late afterward to convince myself to write anything...

Amigo and Jericho went home yesterday. Here's the trailer leaving the yard:

Bye boys!

Heather went with John, and they said their new home is absolutely gorgeous. They're now living on lush green pastures in Pagosa Springs, CO.

Heather and John also picked up a returned adoption on their way home. The adopter said that the horse was too wild for him, and he didn't have time to work with it. I didn't know what to expect since I'd never met this horse before, but look who popped out of the trailer!

Meet Prancer, the yearling pony.

Prancer is only a yearling, and has the most interesting coloring... Anyone know what that's called?  He's mostly brown but he looks like he's been dipped in tar or something funny :)

Today, we let Timmy the foal out of his pen to play with Prancer. It was so cute to see the two little guys together. Timmy really wanted to play, but Prancer the little stallion pony was more interested in checking out all the other horses in the stalls.

Timmy meets Prancer the pony

Look who also got to come out to play yesterday. It's Elmo! He was doing so well that we decided he didn't need to be in a stall for training like the other wild horses, so he gets to live with Fremont. I think Fremont is a good influence on him, at least better than living with Barney and Morgan Freeman. Fremont really doesn't spook at anything, so Elmo's figuring out that he doesn't need to worry when people go by with wheelbarrows, open and close gates, etc.

Beautiful Elmo is going to turn into a great horse

 Since we've been letting the horses out into the yard the past couple days to "mow the lawn" the ponies have discovered that they can creep underneath the fence and head up the hill and pretend to be wild again... Here's Lefty yesterday on his own little adventure. Today, he took Roany, Sugarfoot, and Blitzen with him. Luckily they all came home without too much fuss, but we'll need to fix the fence so they can't get out anymore.

Lefty hanging out on the wrong side of the fence... 

Pat and John's son and grandson are coming to visit tomorrow and will be staying for a couple days. Heather's last day is tomorrow and she leaves Tuesday morning. I'm definitely going to miss her. The word is that a lady from Switzerland is coming in a little over a week. Apparently she used to be a jockey, so hopefully she has some cool stories to tell!

Bye Amigo and Jericho!

Tomorrow Amigo and Jericho are heading up to their new home. They're going to do great! Today, we spent the last day introducing them to potentially scary every-day things they might encounter. It was really quite interesting to see the differences in how they reacted...

Amigo says: "Tarps are scary!!"

Jericho doesn't understand what all the fuss is about...there's food there!

We ended up playing a different game with Amigo, having him follow a handler that was holding the tarp rolled up smaller, then gradually make the tarp bigger and have it dragging on the ground while he followed to "visit" the other people in the pen and get food from them.

Wishing Amigo and Jericho the best of luck in their new home. Luckily the two horses get along really well and like to play together, so they will have each other when they leave tomorrow. Hopefully Jericho's more grounded presence will help to keep Amigo calm(er).

Pat's Back!

Pat got back from her conference this evening. Sounded like it was a really neat experience, and she met and talked to a lot of people. Now if only I was more outgoing/didn't freak out talking to strangers and I maybe would have had a similar experience at the SPARCS conference earlier this summer. Oh well...

Now that Pat's back, we're going to try something a little different with Greta. We're going to set up her training sessions so she doesn't have so much time to think about getting scared. Pat called it the "Click 'n Stick" method, where you mark the "happy face" and then offer an opportunity to earn a reward (such as presenting the guider ball so that the horse can touch it and get rewarded). Hopefully this helps Greta improve more quickly. She was already starting to make a break through today -- our last session of the day, her ears were mostly up or out to the side rather than pinned back. It's progress, no matter how modest.

Took Amigo around the yard today with me in the saddle and Heather leading. It started out OK and then everything kind of crumbled from there. Heather had accidentally been standing on a red ant hill, so suddenly she had red ants biting her foot. I slid off Amigo and held him while she ran to save herself from stinging bites. We then tried to walk Amigo through the yard with his gear on but no rider, but when we got to the front yard we were ambushed by swarms of mosquitoes. Got out of there quick... Poor Amigo. We'll have to do some restorative work in the next couple days to make sure this less than ideal session didn't mess him up too much.

On a happier note, little Bambi the super tame wild pony is now happily sticking her head into a halter and wearing it while eating hay from Heather's hand. Bambi's so cute...she's always so excited to see us and makes happy nickering noises when we're walking up.

Christmas Came Early!

John headed to town today to run errands and stop by the post office. I had him send a package and I knew my mama had sent me some stuff as well. Turns out John came back with a bunch of goodies in the mail!

Thanks Mommy! Yay sour gummy worms and cookies and nuts :D
And I am now armed with a ton of mosquito/insect repellent...hope they work!

Gifts from Sasha!! So excited for delicious coffee tomorrow morning...and MORE coookies! And chocolate!! <3

So..basically we're going to be gorging on sweets for a couple days -- or hopefully longer. No promises though haha.

In terms of actual horse training...

Heather rode Jericho in the yard today -- I was on Cracker the hinny for social support so it would be less scary for Mr. Jerry. Jericho's gone on trail rides out into nature before, but it's been a while so we're taking it slow. I rode Amigo in the round pen again today. He did better and was more calm overall. It did help that I remembered to review cues from the ground today before I got on :)

Heather and I also did ground driving with Hammer in the yard today. He did absolutely fantastic! I was holding the lead rope just in case, but Hammer was completely focused on listening to Heather's verbal cues and guidance from the driving lines and I could stand back by his belly just loosely holding the lead rope. He only needed help from me once when Chester the mule came running up...but that wasn't poor Hammer's fault!