Groundwork with Lila (6 of 6)

Trainer Sara Licht spends some "friendly touching Hang-out time" with Lila, in this last of 6 videos where Lila had worked on various groundwork exercises and an intro to longeing. This helped Lila to enjoy her experience with Sara, as well as gave her a mental breather from the new material in the lesson.
Watch where Sara's eyes are when she rubs Lila all over with the bunched up longe rope. Sara knows where her hand is so she doesn't need to watch that. She's keeping an eye on Lila's attention and mood, to have a head's up if Lila may be saying "I'm going to kick you." Some people watch the object instead of the horse and miss this message. Sara wants to stay tuned as well to see if Lila is relaxing or holding tension, so she can reward for relaxation.

You can see how Lila's instinct when hearing distractions outside the arena is to push her body weight into Sara, tipping her shoulder in and wanting to lean on her. The groundwork drill (videos 2 and 3, and other videos in my library) provides practice and a way to say "move your shoulder away from me" - an important message so that a nervous horse doesn't decide to flatten you when scared. Also, the language of that exercise builds the horse's opinion of you. No horse would run over or even bump into the lead horse to get away from a tiger or something scary. We want to establish ourselves as someone who you must go around, not push through.

After this, Lila went out for a brief time on the longe again. Lila was soon able to trot in a complete circle on the longe without rushing and breaking into the canter. Unfortunately the camera's memory card was full at that point!

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• Lila
• Sara
• Licht
• trainer
• horse
• training
• groundwork