Last year I didn’t write a lot about what I was doing with my own horses. Honestly, it was a tough year for us, and I felt like I didn’t want to dwell on how things were going. But, at the end of the year I thought it would be good to look back on what we did, both to see the difficulties we overcame and the fun things we did. I originally posted these images on my Facebook page. I couldn’t include everything, so I tried to pick pictures that I liked or that showed what we were doing. I did learn that it’s super easy to take pictures of horses on mats, so I tend to do a lot of that. This year (2022) I’ll have to come up with better ways of taking pictures so I can have more variety.
January and February
March and April
May and June
July and August
September and October
November and December
One of the reasons I put this together is that I wanted to show how taking time on the foundation behaviors gives you lots of options for how to use those behaviors to train additional behaviors. This year I used a lot of mats. The year before I did a lot with targeting. I haven’t decided what I will focus on this year, but I do find it fun to explore the many ways I can use one behavior or skill to teach new behaviors. It makes things more interesting and keeps us all motivated. If you’ve gotten in the habit of always teaching something the same way, you might want to consider exploring other options and see where it takes you.
Happy New Year.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: husbandry, mat work, mats, mounting block, straddle pole
equine clicker training 