Piaffe at Liberty: Flowers for Speedy

Exactly a month ago I posted our first piaffe attempts, so it was time for an update. Of course it's not perfect yet, but I'm really proud of him: for the first time we did four steps in a row (at the end of the video), so he really deserved those flowers! :)

MUSIC: 'Good night sweet possums' from the movie Ice Age 2, The Meltdown

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• art
• of
• natural
• dressage
• liberty
• haute
• ecole
• collection
• piaffe
• passage
• horse
• pony
• paard
• verzameling
• dressuur
• in
• vrijheid
• clicker
• trick
• training
• inspirational

[NaturalDressage]

We started the piaffe in the classical way, through the schaukel: walk-back-walk transitions. Two steps forwards, three steps back etc until Speedy realised that he could be active without immediately going for forwards energy. Then we turned these transitions in its own gait by mimicry in walk: I would cue for halt while starting to walk more collected myself, and rewarded immediately when Speedy started to think about it- maybe even copy, and now we're finetuning the cues and movement.

[Gydjulind]

Marixxen2 asked: "How did you begin?"

That's what I would like to know too :-).

[NaturalDressage]

@Gydjulind: I tried to write my answer within the length that YouTube dictates, but of course I should have referred you to our three whole pages on training the piaffe at liberty on the ArtofNaturalDressage forum, the piaffe topic in the groundwork section,

[PollyGrohlFF]

Lovely!

[riolein1991]

Good job! Very nice!

[Marixxen2]

wow, it looked really nice! pure and strong etc, though, as you wrote, not perfect - yet. How did you begin?