Autumn Newsletter 2011

Christmas Dinner

Friday 9th Dec
The Dartbridge Inn
Buckfastleigh
Devon
TQ11 0JR
01364 642214

7pm (7.30pm food is served)

Invitation only to those on my Newsletter distribution list. This will be a gathering of my clients and those of you who have attended my clinics, talks or demonstrations. Come along and join me for a festive meal and meet like minded riders. An evening to chat about your horse over dinner!

Please call me ASAP to choose from the festive menu and reserve your place with a deposit of £5. Ideally please confirm within the next seven days after receiving this email.

I look forward to seeing you there.

£14.45 Adult 2 courses

£16.45 Adult 3 courses

To book your meal call Anna : 077431 60149

 Dartmouth Clinics 2011
(Please click on the photos to enlarge)

Many thanks to Jenny and Ian for hosting my Clinics this year at their facility in Dartmouth. We all enjoyed great weather, delicious lunches cooked by Ian and a lovely group of riders and spectators.

From left to right, the photos above show riders in a group focusing on specific tasks while being aware of a young pony who was building confidence at passing other horses. Bollards and buckets were placed in the arena to give riders focus points to manoeuvre around. We spent some time building a youngster's confidence about umbrellas. Chasing a bicycle was a great way to help this pony and rider enjoy a purposeful canter, it caused the rider and pony to look up and have a reason to canter. Following and passing a motorbike also helped a lot of the horses to feel more confident in traffic. In the afternoon discussions were held and visual examples without a horse involved proved to give people an opportunity to learn even more.

I look forward to our 2012 Clinics in Dartmouth.

Harry Whitney Horsemanship Articles

“How many times does a horse have to figure out how to get the feed bin open for him to work at it for the rest of his life?”

"Horses are gamblers,” Harry said. “By that, I mean, a gambler thrives on an intermittent reward. If something is really high on a horse’s list of options in his life, then it’s a huge reward when that comes through. So, if we miss one time out of sixty and fifty-nine more times he tries it in hopes it comes through that one time ... ” Harry chuckled as he finished saying this. “And we feel like we are not making any progress. We have done it FIFTY-NINE TIMES and he still does not seem to have it, but he is hoping for that ONE we missed!”

Harry goes on to say that there are two aspects of this part of a horse’s nature. “The more important it is to a horse, whatever IT is, the more he holds on to that. So, he can have experiences that are not important to him --- it might take a 1,000 of those before he might see a pattern to it. Then, he begins to realise there is an importance to it. BUT, if it is really important in his life, then it takes very few repetitions".

Harry posed the question: “How many times does a horse have to figure out how to get the feed bin open for him to work at it for the rest of his life? “ He continues, “That is important to him! But, the other things that are important to him are the things that are life threatening. There are the positives (really, really positive activities as far as the horse is concerned) and then the really negative ones. And both ends of that scale are the important things. In between is a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t have that much importance. So, we do it time after time after time and we say he will never get it. But let him find by bolting out of the arena and getting with his buddies one time ... see how long you work on keeping it from happening! Because that was important to him! We get frustrated thinking we are failures because a horse can learn something in one experience and we gotta give him a thousand to get what we want. But the things we want are not important to him. He just puts them out of his mind. That has no importance, no relevance to his life.”

By Harry Whitney