Month: April 2009

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Horse Pucky: Ninja Horsemanship

ninja

-cw

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Photos of Tire Pedestals Now Posted

If you’d like to see how I make my tire pedestals, I’ve added a few photos to my previous post, Tires and the Power of Choice. As far as the tire size, I really like 48 inches wide. It gives the horse plenty of room to negotiate and I think it adds to the stability. The only drawback is that tires that wide often have tall sides, which is why I bury them a few inches. Burying them also enhances the stability.

Should you decide to build your own, please build at your own risk. I don’t sell the tires or the plans. I only offer the photos as an example of what I’ve built and what has been working for me. Continue reading →

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Bilingual Horsemanship

I’ve been experimenting with training my horses with predominately positive reinforcement for almost five years. I use techniques commonly used in training animals such as marine mammals and birds of prey. These are the animals in which pressure based techniques would be a completely ineffective way to elicit a behavior.

The questions I have in my mind are:

  • Just because we can exclusively train horses with pressure based techniques, does it mean that we should?
  • What would it look like to train a horse using predominantly positive reinforcement?

What I’ve found is something very fascinating, at least to me. Continue reading →