Put your left hoof in, put your left hoof out....

Put your left hoof in and shake it all about! ;-)

Well, not quite! I should explain.

Last Saturday, my friend Sian Min of Cardinal Points Farm came by for an initial SATs session with Sport. What's SATs, you ask? A more detailed explanation can be found on the Synalia website, but basically it's the idea of naming things (objects, body parts, etc.) and then using a voice command to get the horse to move a body part, touch something etc. (remember the kids hide and seek type game Hot and Cold? "you're getting warmer" or "you're getting colder" Sorta like that...) The horse then gets verbal praise and a treat (treat use decreases after time) when he completes the task/ request. It's proven to be helpful with horses like Sport who are somewhat unconfident, by helping him become more aware of his body and of "scary" objects (tarps, cones, etc.).

So Sian Min started by teaching him "NOSE" and a few other body parts ("face" is used for his forehead, then there's "chin", "left ear", "right ear" etc.) and objects. All in all pretty cool as he started to understand that when she said "TOUCH GLOVES", he'd end up touching the gloves with his nose! Neat!

She taught him the name for another another object and started having him pick between the two objects. "Sport... TOUCH HAT" while holding in front of him a baseball cap in one hand and the gloves in the other (one object on each side of his nose) . If he got it wrong, there was no verbal praise or treat, instead "No that's gloves" with the objects being put behind her back and then re-presented with the same command.

Hmmm... so I touch my nose to your fingers when asked and I get a treat? Score!

I have been using the same SATs techniques this week to reinforce the names of the objects and body parts already learned, as well as started teaching him new body parts. He's doing pretty well, but still alittle fuzzy about "face", "chin" and both ears.

However, he learned his front feet/ legs quite quickly... To illustrate, on Wednesday I taught him "LEFT FOOT" by saying the name and then tapping his left leg (I use "foot" to mean the foot and leg) with a whip, giving verbal encouragement for even the smallest effort (i.e. shifting his weight from his left to get prepared to move his left leg), until he understood to lift or step back with his left leg. That first time asking for "left foot" went something like this:

Me: "Sport... LEFT FOOT." Then tap, tap, tap, tap, tAp, tAp, TAp, TAp, TAP, TAP (tapping to infinity it seemed! He seemed very unfazed by the firm tapping...)


Sport: "Mom, uh, why are you tapping my leg? It's getting annoying. Sigh."...

Me: "LEFT FOOT." Tap, tap, tap...

...until he moved his left leg even slightly. This all took probably less than 30 seconds in total. Then a verbal "eXcellent" with face rubbing and treat.

The second time, there was less tapping (in quantity and pressure) needed before he complied, and the tapping decreased as we progressed (about 6 times total).  That was it for the day.

Yesterday, we reviewed a couple objects and "left foot", then worked on learning "right foot". Huge difference in the speed of learning from the day before! :-) Once he learned the difference between his right and his left foot/leg, getting him to lift his right leg took much less effort on my part than had teaching him left leg the day before.

At first, it was "RIGHT FOOT", a few small taps on his right leg, but he at first lifted his left leg. "No, that's left foot. Show me RIGHT FOOT" with a few small taps, then he shifted his weight and just barely raised his right heel off the ground, so I responded "X", rub, treat! By the end of the session, I was *very* tickled when I asked for "right foot" and he lifted his right leg pretty high (similar to "striking out" but much slower and deliberate, and in no way threatening me) and slowly pawed the air. AWESOME!! It was toooo cute! Big "X", lots of rubbing and lots of treats! Done for the day! Pretty smart horse, huh? :-)

As an aside: It was also interesting to see how on the first day of naming "left foot", he'd take a step backwards versus lifting it. On the second day, it was lifting the foot only (either one) instead of taking a step back... which is fine by me since it keeps the "BACK" command separate from "foot".


And thought I'd include a cute pic of my old man *really* enjoying some soaked alfalfa cubes! Cutie pie!

What do you mean there's alfalfa on my forehead?