I worked with Jackson for about 45 minutes.
I started out by lunging him. I worked a lot
on endo tapping him at the trot. Due to the
excellent advice that I received, I stopped
focusing on the front end and turned my
attention to the hind quarters. I would tap
his belly in time with his outside hind leg.
The goal was to get him to step really far
under his body with outside hind leg. I
would tap his belly just before the leg
lifted.
When he traveled to the left, he would often
reach pretty far with the outside hind, even
if he swung it to the outside. But going to
the right, he had a hard time stepping very
far at all. JP talks about this being due to
the fact that a horse’s left kidney (?) is
bigger than it’s right kidney, making it
harder for the horse to step farther with
the left hind.
Then we did some liberty work. Jackson
seemed to want bow a lot, so I decided to
shape him to stay in the bow until I told
him “okay.” This worked well. I could see
him watching me for the signal to get up,
even though I was about 10 feet away! When
he got up before I told him to, I would just
walk back up to him and ask him to bow. The
neat thing was, that I did all of this
without having to touch him! That is so
cool.
