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4 Week Study Group – Foundation Practical Lessons 1
February 1, 2021 - February 28, 2021
It is FREE for all CT Club members.
To get started, we’re going to look at how Hannah set up the first training session with the 3 Foundation Case Study Horses. We’ll also look at the first CT behaviour – Standing Together. Standing with you calm, politely and willingly is the first thing we teach at CT and is a great way to introduce the concepts to your horse, while establishing a really useful behaviour as we all need our horses to stand happily with us, whether in daily handling or training. Starting with this behaviour also further establishes relaxation and calmness as we begin to train with rewards.
The next behaviour we’ll teach is Walk Together. This begins liberty work as you ask your horse to stand still, or come with you when you ask. It also is a great exercise for refining leading and connection with your horse.
The behaviour this week is ‘Stay’. This is another really useful behaviour to teach horses as it builds on standing still, but this time enables you to walk around your horse, or even go a distance away from them. In future, this can build into liberty grooming, despooking exercises, trailer loading, standing tied and loads more. Another benefit of teaching ‘Stay’ at this stage is that it teaches your horse to be relaxed if you and the food move away from them (which many horses find hard at first), further establishes standing still as a strong behaviour and you have to work on refining your cues so that your horse knows when to ‘stay’ – all of this is great for your communication and connection.
The final behaviour we’ll teach here is targeting. This is another really useful and versatile behaviour that we use all the time to train everything from lining up at the mounting block to building trust to jumping. Again, your horse will have to refine his problem solving abilities as he figures out the behaviour, and you can practice your cue clarity and timing as you train it.