Practicing Medieval Games and Other Challenges

A couple of photographs from the Medieval Games practice this weekend to break the long silence between blog entries.

Jack wasn't just packing that blue banner around like a flag.  That's a lance and we were tilting at the quintain with it.  He got pretty good at being blase when the lance tip would hit the arm of the quintain and make it spin around overhead in true horse-eating style.

MountainHorseGrrl and Phooka also demonstrated how to knock an arrow and fire as they loped past the archery target.  Phooka proved to be a steady partner even when the reins were dropped and riding just off the leg but he wasn't too sure about the sound the arrow made when the nock snapped onto the bow string.

In addition to mounted archery, lopping heads off and tilting at the quintain, there were some "horse obstacles" at the Graham Hill Showgrounds that were fun to coax our horses into navigating.  These included a set of stairs:

And even a teeter-totter:

Great Book for Green Horse Owners

I ran across the following book the other day:

Whisper This, by Smokie Brannaman

It's a quick read.  It's laugh-out-loud outrageous in its unvarnished honesty and what Smokie has to say is practical and valuable.  I'm thinking of investing in a stash of them for my tackroom to hand out to all the starry-eyed folks who seem to regularly wander by in search of an Equine Clue.

So if you're new to horses or seem to accumulate "frequent flyer miles" and wish you could do something about it, you should take what Smokie has to say to heart.  For the rest of us, if you like your truths delivered straight and with the "bark on", read it and laugh, appreciate and take home some nugget that you  had forgotten or never realized.

Smokie's website is: Smokie Brannaman's Horseman Services

More on Tight Serpentines

A couple of months ago, I talked about an exercise where you bent your horse in a series of tight serpentines, walking a snake trail:

Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman have a couple of different exercises they have had us go through to really focus and bring horse and rider together. One is to ride very tight serpentines at a walk, overbending in each direction so that they are more like s-shaped snaketrails rather than serpentines. When you start, one 's' might be 30 feet long but you slowly tighten it up so that by the time you get to the end of the arena, an 's' might be 4 or 5 feet long. If you can do this with a soft rein, asking less and less each time to get the same bend, by the time you hit the end of the arena, your horse will be listening very intently to you. The idea isn't to overdo the suppling but to progressively refine how subtly you are communicating and how carefully your horse is listening back to you.

 At the clinic in Chico last weekend, Buck emphasized how important it was to have your horse walking unified, having all four corners reaching equally, as you do the snaketrail exercise.  Here are a couple of sequence pictures showing my filly Emma and I doing our serpentines:

As you can see, we weren't quite reaching evenly in the last picture.  We still have some work to do.

Extreme Example of Working At Liberty

MountainHorseGrrl found this interesting video the other day:

   Advert for Nevzorov Haute Ecole

He sure didn't get all that working overnight. That took some effort and understanding :)

If you read his site or listen to his narrative, it quickly becomes apparent that his message is a load of extremist bunk designed to promote himself and his school by appealing to people whose hug-impulse is stronger than their intellect and self-esteem.

However, if you look at him like another Parelli (someone who has considerable ability with horses and chooses to use it to further their personal agenda but is a little bit disingenuous about it) then it's easy to step back and admire the things he is able to accomplish with his horses without buying the baggage along with the beauty.

Like Stacy Westfall's bridle-less wins in the NRHA reining competitions, he helps show what is really possible if as individuals we are willing to apply ourselves to understanding and working with our horses.

After all, the point isn't to ride your horse without a bridle. It's to ride your horse without NEEDING a bridle, whether there is one or not. 

The Gentle Horse

MountainHorseGrrl has produced a new video, explaining with examples the distinction between halter broke, rideable, green broke and gentle.  Her thesis is well founded and the difference between a horse that can tolerate humans and one that welcomes human interaction becomes very clear.

In Praise of Glop on Toast

If there was only one thing that I could cook, I would make it be Glop on Toast. It's tasty, filling, easy to make and there are variations of it to suit every occasion, even formal ones.

Bauern Toast 

On the easy end of the spectrum, there is Bauern Toast from Austria. Bauern is the German word for farmer, and I've read that Bauern Toast is a traditional farmer's meal. Personally, I find it a quick and tasty meal when I am in the middle of a good book and want to get back to my reading. MountainHorseGrrl likes it during our damp and chilly winters in the Santa Cruz mountains when her giddyup-and-go has gaddyup-and-went.

Several slices sharp Cheddar cheese 

To taste, grated Asiago cheese
Several slices heirloom tomato
Several slices of your favorite Artisan Bread
1-2 Tbsp unsalted butter

1. Butter the outsides of the slices of bread. (That is, the sides that will not be towards the cheese.) 
2. Assemble bread, both cheeses and tomato into a tomato-cheese sandwich with the buttered sides of the bread facing outward. A few minutes perusing Google will show you that there are many variations of Bauern toast that include lots of different ingredients so feel free to improvise as the feeling moves you. 
3. Heat a heavy skillet over medium heat and put the sandwiches into the pan, flipping them so that both sides become a nice golden brown. 
4. When sandwiches are nearly done, cover the pan with a pot lid for the last few minutes so that the steam will cause the cheese to melt all the way through. 

Serve. Remember, dribbling cheese and tomato juice on your book is SO attractive, so mind the escaping droplets as you enjoy. 

Bauern Toast II

Another variant of Bauern Toast which I was first introduced to at our local Tyrolean restaurant, I have subsequently sampled while visiting in Bavaria (which was odd, since Bavaria is definitely not Austria. It was kind of like going to North Dakota and being served grits 'n' gravy. When I spotted Bauern Toast on the menu and had to try it, my Bavarian hosts had a laugh at my weirdness.) This version is a little more work than the previous one, but still only about fifteen minutes to make and a lot yummier:

4 slices thick-cut bacon

6 oz flat, sliced fresh mushrooms
1/2 diced yellow onion
1 Tbsp fresh or marinated garlic
1 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 Tbsp general-purpose flour
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
2-3 oz crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
2-4 slices your favorite artisan bread

1. Chop bacon into 1" chunks and turn out into a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. 
2. When the bacon is about half done cooking, add mushrooms and onion. Sauté. 
3. When the mushrooms and onions are beginning to turn translucent and are a minute or two from being done cooking, add garlic and salt and pepper to taste. 
4. When bacon is cooked but onions and mushrooms are not yet overcooked, turn heat down to low and push mixture to edges of skillet, clearing the center of the pan. 
5. In the center of the pan, make a roux. (To make roux, melt the tablespoon of butter in the pan and add the tablespoon of flour to it, stirring until flour has browned. The roux becomes the base of the cream sauce and will cause it to thicken nicely as you continue to stir the sauce over the low heat.) 
6. Add the half-cup of cream to the roux a little bit at a time, stirring continuously. 
7. Add gorgonzola crumbles, continuing to stir until the cheese melts into the sauce and the sauce begins to become thick and creamy. Add additional salt and pepper if required. 
8. Stir sauce into the rest of the ingredients that you had previously pushed to the edges of the pan. 

Serve hot over slices of your favorite artisan bread. 

Welsh Rarebit

Similar to Bauern Toast but even easier to make and a with a very different, somewhat more refined flavor, is Welsh Rarebit from our friends in the UK. It's spelled rarebit but pronounced rabbit, or as John Cleese would say, "It's spelled luxury yacht but it's pronounced throat-warbler mangrove." 

(Traditional... Welsh... No rabbits hurt during preparation.)

2 cups, grated Cheddar cheese
1/4 cup, grated Asiago cheese
2 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 Tbsp general purpose flour
1 cup your favorite beer
2-4 slices your favorite artisan bread 

1. In a heavy frying pan over medium-low heat, make a roux. 
2. As explained above, to make roux, melt the two tablespoons of butter in the pan and add the two tablespoons of flour to it, stirring until flour has browned. The roux becomes the base of the sauce and will cause it to thicken nicely as you continue to stir the sauce over the low heat. 
3. Add the beer to the roux, stirring continually so that it combines into a sauce. 
4. Add both Cheddar and Asiago cheese, a handful at a time, stirring continuously until it becomes a smooth sauce. Continue stirring and cooking until the sauce has reduced to the thickness you desire. 

Serve by pouring sauce over slices of your favorite artisan bread. 

Toast Skagen

Another incredibly simple variation of Glop on Toast that's easy to make but a little fancier and so rich tasting that it's best saved for special occasions like lunch with your Mother-in-Law, is Toast Skagen. I first encountered Toast Skagen last year when I was in Stockholm for a computer conference. 

As I wandered around old-town Stockholm looking at all the troll statues and knit sweaters for sale, I was struck by the preponderance of restaurants offering Italian and Mediterranean food. On the cheap end of the spectrum, there were a lot of places offering lasagne and spaghetti.  It made me wonder what the Swedish colloquialism for Spag Bol was.  Actually finding Scandinavian food in Stockholm turned into something of a personal quest. Persevering until I at last found something that seemed both traditional and local, I was surprised to see that a dish called Toast Skagen was as common on the menu as Meatballs in Lingonberry Sauce. 

Since I was already familiar with meatballs in Lingonberry sauce from being an IKEA shopper here in the States, I skipped over that and went right for the reindeer steak and the Toast Skagen. 

The reindeer steak was an interesting experience, perhaps best described as "what venison should taste like" but it was the Toast Skagen that was the real winner. It was so good that when I got back, I had to try making it for MountainHorseGrrl. 

It's not the cheapest dish to make. The ingredients are on the expensive side. However the taste is excellent and as I mentioned, it's incredibly rich tasting for how simple it is. The three-way contrast between the flavors of the shrimp, the dill and the butter is lovely. If you make it, don't skip the caviar (roe). It's the inexpensive kind and really adds to the flavor. 

2 cups peeled, cooked baby shrimp
1/2 juiced lemon
2 Tablespoons minced dill (fresh!)
2 Tablespoons minced red onion
1 Tablespoon per slice butter
1/4 - 1/2 cup mayonnaise
To taste: Bleak Roe (whitefish roe)
4 Pieces artisanal white bread 

1. In a medium-sized bowl combine shrimp, red onion, dill and lemon juice. Fold in enough mayonnaise to create a salad-like consistency. 
2. Add salt and pepper to taste. 
3. Melt butter in a heavy medium-sized skillet. 
4. Brown slices of bread in butter until both sides are evenly toasted. Use additional butter if necessary; the taste of the butter is a necessary complement to the dill. 
5. Blot the sautéed toast on a piece of paper towel to absorb excess butterfat. 
6. Place the toast on four plates and divide the shrimp mixture on top. 
7. Top each with a spoonful of roe. 

Serve with a light, crisp Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc. 

I know this dish feels fancy but resist the urge to refer to the meal as luncheon when you serve it. It's lunch. Really. Luncheon is what little old ladies in polyester pantsuits have while kibitzing and kvetching. Of course, if you are serving it to your mother-in-law, call it what you like…she'll probably be so astonished you can cook at all that you might escape the kvetching for an hour or so.

A couple of observations about "Natural Horsemanship"

It's fascinating that gentle and go slow are common themes in the various descriptions people have offered for what they think Natural Horsemanship is.

I think these two themes account for a large part of Natural Horsemanship's appeal to people who are ineffective with their horses.  Gentle and go slow validate for a timid person that their timidity is actually a "good way" and... unless they achieve some better understanding... encourages them to continue on their path of being ineffective and creating another "STOMP-A-SAURUS".

Interestingly though, it isn't just Mary Milquetoast rationalizing to herself who uses those words in talking about Natural Horsemanship. Other people -- successful, competent practitioners who have made emotionally stable, well-schooled horses also find those words on the tip of their tongues when they describe what they do. I think the reason is not because those are the important concepts of Natural Horsemanship but rather the ways in which NH differs from the most common abuse scenarios we all see around us. Which is to say, the horse-beaters and face-haulers who pretend to practice dressage and the mouth-rippers and gut-spurrers who call what they do reining or team penning. Saying "NH is gentle and slow" immediately sets it apart from those kinds of behaviors.

Personally, I think that gentle and go slow are SYMPTOMS. Side-effects. Not core techniques. They are the natural result of following the essential principle that informs what NH is about. Namely:

Natural Horsemanship is HORSE TRAINING BASED ON AN ACUTE UNDERSTANDING OF HORSE PSYCHOLOGY and BIOMECHANICS.

If you're proceeding based on such an understanding, what you're after is teaching the horse to do what you want in a manner that is efficient, trauma-free and creates a reliable, willing partner. This doesn't mean you have to go slow. You don't have to be gentle. It's just that for most horses, and most people, going slow and gentle is most always the most effective approach.

However, I can cite example after example which clearly illustrate that the more acute your understanding and accurate your reading of a horse, the faster you can go and get a better result for both you and the horse. Since Buck Brannaman is my favorite exemplar, I'll use him. One of the things I've seen him do time after time is to take a green horse or a seriously screwed up older horse and in a matter of minutes help that horse get things straightened out and find a better way to behave. The change for the horse is SO radical that it does seem like magic to an outside observer. There is no magic though. Just accurate application of simple principles based on careful observation and acute understanding of how this particular horse's head is working. Buck figures out what's troubling that particular horse, finds which path of communication still means something to the horse, and uses that path to show the horse that there is a way for the horse to escape what's bothering him. He starts with any small successful communication he can have with the horse and builds it into something big and robust very quickly by observing honestly and responding accurately.

By this definition, Natural Horsemanship is just a convenient, popularized label for a practice of understanding and interaction that can occur in any tradition of horsemanship. All the other aspects are just style, trappings, marketing or personality cult.

There is a style that is intrinsic to well-practiced Natural Horsemanship. It isn't ONLY found there; other disciplines, when well-practiced feature it too. However it's most often seen in NH because NH tends to attract the sort of people who favor this particular style. By contrast, in other disciplines it may take a very long time to master the "trappings" of the discipline sufficiently to get to the point where it's possible to practice this same style effectively.

This style I'm talking about is the approach one takes when teaching a horse to do something. There are a lot of basic ways to approach teaching. Many people start from a point of view that says "Well, this is just how my horse is." Beginning from this point of view, they often have a terrible time trying to effect change. We see this a lot in new horse people and Mary Milquetoasts. We see a lot of these people out there with carrot sticks and progress strings getting nothing done and falling off their horses every time the horses spook at a plastic bag blowing by.

There's also the style of "I don't much care what your idea WAS, your idea now MUST BE THIS". We see a lot of these folks in dressage. It's a control-freak point of view and appeals to lots of folks whose lives are otherwise out of control. It fits nicely with all the spiff "Dominant" clothing and riding bats and such that are prominent in the dressage community. These folks want to control something absolutely and they've nominated their horse as the controllee regardless of what the horse has to say about it. These folks often get the job done and get their horse to do what they want, but they wind up with a horse that's stiff and hard and insecure and shutdown and not much of a partner. A horse who spooks at nothing and dumps them when they're outside the dressage ring. This isn't unique to Dressage. We also see this type in western competitive riding and the legions of messed-up, psychotic team penning horses and breakaway roping horses bear witness to the damage that can be wrought by a "Yee Haw, Git it DONE, DAMMIT" mentality.

But the "better way" style I'm really talking about... The style you see sometimes in the very best dressage riders and the quiet old cowboys and often in Natural Horsemanship, is a style where you first figure out where your horse is at, then you figure out where you want your horse to be and then you align yourself with your horse and lead your horse to the new way of thinking one step at a time, allowing each step to be the horse's own idea.

Tom and Bill wrote about this, and Ray talks about it as "First you let the horse's idea become yours, then you let your idea become the horse's."

This is really a Taoist point of view. To paraphrase Lao-tse: To change the course of a river, you don't block the flood. It would only overwhelm you. Instead you align yourself with it and move with the flow and then it only takes a small effort to nudge it sideways until eventually it flows in a new streambed.

Doing this isn't easy and depending on how much of a change is required, may take considerable time. It also doesn't take nearly the forcefulness that simply opposing the flow does. Hence, the reputation of NH for slow and gentle.

However, rivers do have a pace to them... sometimes quite rapid. Changing their course does take effort. So if you don't bring determination, willingness to move quickly and a certain forcefulness to the project you will wind up being swept away by the flood just like those Mary Milquetoasts with their carrot sticks we've all seen and you will wind up being squashed by your STOMP-A-SAURUS instead of effecting concrete change in him.

So when you work with your horse, you need to bring it. When you say something, you need to mean it. However, the idea is to use only as much force as is necessary and to always give the horse a way out to avoid the force completely.

The way Ray Hunt and Bonnie Stoehn phrase it is: "When you want your horse to do something... or to stop doing something... you start by asking half as "loud" as the minimum you think is necessary and then you don't stop turning up the volume until you get the result you want. This always gives them the opportunity to surprise you by being better than you think but makes sure you never teach them that it's okay to ignore you because you don't stop until you get the desired result."

Buck's variation on this is "You ALWAYS start by offering him a good deal and then you turn up the heat until he takes it."

As an illustrative example (uh oh, ANOTHER Buck story :p)... A few years ago at the colt starting clinic where I started Captain Jack, a woman brought a beautiful agouti dun stallion to "restart". This woman's feel was so bad that she would beat this stallion in his blind spot with a stud chain when she wanted him to back up. She admitted she could only ride him when he was drugged.

In short, she had taught him to be an outlaw, and he demonstrated it by trying to put his shod forefeet through her head a number of times in the first ten minutes of class. Buck finally took the stallion off her hands and told her to go sit on the fence and contemplate the fact that this horse's behavior was her fault while he worked with the stud for a bit.

I won't go into a blow-by-blow but it took twenty minutes to get things straightened out. At the end of it, the horse wasn't "fixed" but he was on a better path that would lead him to success IF a better owner were to handle him. The process didn't look very slow or gentle though.  The first five minutes of that twenty were awfully... western. It was still a paradise of calm and gentleness compared to what that Stallion was used to though.

What Buck did was incredibly simple and was done purely with a rope halter and a treeline leadrope with a leather popper on the end. No tiedowns, no chains, no bats, no fancy or cruel gear. No drugs or gimmicks.  And he did it from the ground, in a manner that kept himself safe as long as his timing was good and his attention was on what he was doing.

He started by asking the stallion to move out in a circle around him. He did this by opening out his arms and providing slack in the leadrope in the direction he wanted the stallion to go in, and waving the tail end of the leadrope a little toward the stallion's rear end to provide a tiny amount of encouraging pressure. The stallion answered by trying to rear and paw his head off. Just as those front feet came off the ground, the tail end of that leadrope spun and came down on the stallion's nose as hard as Buck could crack him.

Then Buck opened out again and again asked him to go, offering a little pressure on the hind. Up went the stallion and down came the tail of the lead rope smack on his nose. The third time, the stallion only half-reared and Buck only had to yank downward on the lead with good timing and the stallion decided rearing wasn't the answer.

Then the stallion decided that kicking might work, so when Buck opened up the lead again and asked him to move out, he spun his hind end around to bring his guns to bear. Buck just yanked hard and sideways to disengage the stallion's hind end. (I mean HARD, but still not the same kind of hard as if you were to hit him in the hind, trying to accomplish the same thing.) The stallion had no choice but to disengage because if he resisted the sideways pull he'd cross himself up and fall. So as he disengaged, Buck gave him a momentary slack in the leadrope... rewarding him for disengaging as he had been asked to... and then opened the lead out, asking the stallion to move out the other way. The stallion of course tried to line up to kick again and Buck disengaged him again, and then slacked the line to reward him again for following his request even if the stallion was only following it accidentally.

After about ten or fifteen of these, the stallion finally took one step forward when the next opening was offered and Buck IMMEDIATELY took the pressure off and let the stallion chew for a couple of seconds.

It went on from there for another fifteen minutes but it was just successively refined versions of more of the same and by the end of it, the stallion would put his head down for him, let him pet on him, would walk, trot out, change gait and direction, back up, and do it all softly.

so..

Was this soft and gentle? Compared to what the stallion experienced at home, ABSOLUTELY. Compared to what a well-trained horse would experience? No. There was considerable force applied. Buck was *tired* after.

Was this abuse? Not a bit!

The key thing and the entire secret to success was that the *right* force was applied at the *right* time and the stallion ALWAYS had a good deal that he could take to avoid the force all together. What Buck did was not force him to submit or punish him for rebelling but show him that the right thing was easy and the wrong thing was hard and that there was an intelligence that could communicate in a meaningful way on the other end of the leadrope so it was worth the stallion's self-interest to pay attention and go along and if he did so, he would be on easy street.

It's also worth noting that there was none of this "I'm going to lunge him at a canter for a hundred circles to teach him not to..." nonsense. Each step of the lesson was direct, simple cause-and-effect that built one on the other to help the stallion learn what he could do to keep himself on easy street and out of trouble.

Fast, Fake Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

The Brits refer to it colloquially as Spag Bol and the BBC has declared it the most popular dish in the UK, much to the chagrin of my expat friends with more refined palates. The French call it Spaghetti Bolognese. I'm told that the good people of Bologna, Italy don't even eat it, preferring to serve their Ragu Bolognese over lasagna noodles or bread. As a kid, it was always p'sketti or just sketti and I didn't even mind the version that came in a can--though I was too young to appreciate the stewed tomatoes in the homemade sauces my mother would make.

As an adult who has spent much of his life around spectacular cooks of one ilk or another, I find that spaghetti-oh's just don't cut it anymore. I've come to appreciate proper sauces built from love, patience and fresh ingredients, simmered for hours until they combine with a subtlety and strength of flavor that can't be beat.

Unfortunately, getting home from work at nine at night doesn't leave much time for simmering and nurturing a flavorful ragu and in this day and age, even the world-class cooks I know have day jobs, so it's not like I can bribe them into making it for me. 

However, here's a reasonable compromise. It doesn't have the depth or homogeneity of flavor of a real ragu, but the flavor is good, it can be made in about fifteen minutes, and goes great over a couple of slices of your favorite artisan bread. It won't embarrass a glass of Russo or a nice Shiraz served with it and you'll feel like you had a real dinner rather than a college dorm special.

Fast, Fake Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

1/2 lb Italian Sausage
1/2 diced Yellow Onion
1/2 diced Red Bell Pepper
1/2 diced Green Bell Pepper
2 ounces sliced Mushrooms
1 Jar Commercial Spaghetti Sauce (Newman's Own Sockarooni)
1 tablespoon Fresh or Marinated Garlic
Pinch, to taste: Oregano, Basil, Parsley

1. Turn out Italian sausage in a large, heavy skillet over medium heat. Break up with a spatula into small chunks as it browns for about 5 minutes. 
2. Add onion, peppers, mushrooms. 
3. Sauté mixture until sausage is fully cooked and onions and mushrooms are translucent. 
4. About two or three minutes before sausage is done, add garlic and spices and stir in. Sometimes we add a bit of pepper sauce as well for punch. (Our current favorite is Chalula Chili-Garlic pepper sauce.) 
5. When sausage is fully cooked, add full jar of commercial spaghetti sauce and stir, allowing to simmer for five minutes or as long as you have patience for. It won't be the same as a properly slow-simmered homebuilt sauce that has cooked overnight but what do you want for fifteen or twenty minutes' effort? If I can't find organic prepared spaghetti sauce to work with, I like to use Newman's Own because it doesn't contain any sweeteners or food industry chemicals. It's just tomato sauce and spices. 

For a quick dinner, serve over slices of homemade or organic artisanal bread topped with a little grated asiago, pecorino romano or cheddar cheese. If you have the time and must have your Spag Bol, serve over spaghetti noodles.

Fix it Up and Wait

In a discussion some time ago, a fellow horseman and medieval enthusiast wrote:

"If any of my horses is not expecting a leg cue and I bump them with my leg, odds are there will be no response to the first one. The problem arises, and problem is actually too strong a word as it is not that hard to adjust for.. the problem arises when I am doing something where a leg cue or shift in balance IS an expected part of the activity."

There are two very interesting things revealed by this comment, both of which I think can be affected significantly by training. Over the last couple of years, my trainer has actively worked with me at trying to improve these particular issues.

I think they are root causes of lots of problems people have with their horses in non-rote performance situations. (calf branding, cutting, mounted combat, polo, cross-country, team penning and sorting, etc as opposed to rote situations like reining or dressage test patterns, barrel racing, gymkhana, etc.)

"If any of my horses is not expecting a leg cue and I bump them with my leg, odds are there will be no response to the first one. "

If your horse isn't listening, he absolutely won't "hear" you even if you're "loud" with your cues... or if he does, he'll be surprised and act startled rather than responsive. But you can teach your horse to be "always listening". You can also lead your horse into a "listening mood" if he's not paying attention on a given day.

Horses wind up not listening for several reasons, among them:

• if other stuff going on is more interesting than you are 
• if they think they already know what you're going to do 
• if they think that all you ever say to them is meaningless noise. 
• if your cues are always "big" 
• if they are unconfident and are looking for support from somewhere other than you 

If you consistently recognize these situations when they occur and gently correct them, your horse will learn that the most interesting and important things going on are coming from you and he should be all over your slightest hint because what you have to say is important, meaningful and relevant.

If your horse is mostly good about listening to you but sometimes just "isn't into it" or "isn't paying attention" you can lead them into it by putting them through some warmup exercises that help focus their attention. For example, Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman have a couple of different exercises they have had us go through to really focus and bring horse and rider together. One is to ride very tight serpentines at a walk, overbending in each direction so that they are more like s-shaped snaketrails rather than serpentines. When you start, one 's' might be 30 feet long but you slowly tighten it up so that by the time you get to the end of the arena, an 's' might be 4 or 5 feet long. If you can do this with a soft rein, asking less and less each time to get the same bend, by the time you hit the end of the arena, your horse will be listening very intently to you. The idea isn't to overdo the suppling but to progressively refine how subtly you are communicating and how carefully your horse is listening back to you.

Similarly, you can do a rockinghorse exercise where you ride ten steps then back ten steps, then ride nine and back nine and so forth until you are going one step forward and one step back. Do this once or twice, focusing on getting lighter and lighter on the rein with each request and your horse will be listening intently by the time you reach one.

At one point, Jack and I were struggling a little with how easily he would accept the snaffle when I was bridling him. When I asked my trainer for help in refining my technique in getting him to accept the bit, Bonnie first had me work him for about ten minutes on just a leadrope, asking him to "cut the pie" around me: from standing facing me, I'd ask him to partially circle and then stand in another position and I'd be very particular, not satisfied until his feet were in *exactly* the position I had desired. We worked our way through various time positions on the "clock". After about ten minutes of this his attention was focused on moving his feet very precisely and listening closely to what I wanted. Then we went back to bridling and immediately were able to work through eight or ten repetitions of putting on and taking off the bridle in a smooth manner because he was listening and going with me instead of against me.

"The problem arises when I am doing something where a leg cue or shift in balance IS an expected part of the activity. "

One of our trainer's "hobby horses" is in getting horses to not just do what you ask of them, but to get their brain working with you, actively trying to figure out what you want and what the best answer to the problems in front of them is. She consciously tries to frame her lessons in terms of setting up a problem for the horse to solve and then waiting as the horse works out the answer rather than providing the answer for him or "pushing" him through it. "Fix it up and wait" is the mantra. She only steps in when the horse isn't going to be able to make it or when it would help to raise the energy level a little so that the horse can be successful.

Not only does it keep things more interesting for the horse and help reinforce the idea that it's important to pay attention and listen closely so he doesn't miss anything, but it also teaches the horse that what's going on is a conversation and he's a thinking part of it, not just the recipient of a stream of orders. There are lots of hip terms for what's going on... "Willing Partners", etc. But the bottom line is that reasoning is a habit in all animals as is complacency and dullness. And if they have the reasoning habit, they are an awful lot better at figuring out what you really want, even when you're presenting mixed cues.

There are lots of ways to get this going, too.

Some of the simplest ones involve getting your horse to shift its weight. If you want your horse to learn to move it's foot at a certain time, you could take the approach of cuing him, then putting pressure on him until he does it. Or, instead... you could put your horse almost-but-not-quite off-balance and then ask for the cue and wait. The horse knows you want something and it will start trying to figure out what, trying different things. Since it's off-balance, the first thing it might try would be shifting its foot to regain balance, giving what you want so you can reward not only the correct action but the process of figuring it out as well.

Another good, simple one is to take your lead rope and wrap it around your horse's butt so your horse is "wound up" in it. Then step back and put a small amount of pressure on the leadrope and wait. Eventually your horse will figure it out and "unwind" himself, following the feel of the rope around in a circle until he faces you again. This exercise can be used to get a lot of other good things going too, but it's definitely a good example of using "fix it up and wait" to encourage your horse to puzzle out what you want him to do.

Sometimes a horse just isn't willing to figure things out. ("Doesn't have much try".) You often see this in horses that have been used as schooling horses for low-level dressage or have been "overtrained". You may never again recover the life in these horses they once had but you can often get some improvement by instead of waiting for the horse to successfully do what you asked, you instead reward any slightest try. For example, when you ask a dull horse to step the forehand to the left, maybe all you get is a skin twitch on his neck. Rewarding that lavishly even though it wasn't what you wanted and trying again might earn you a flick of the left ear on the next ask, and you can slowly build from there. You aren't just getting the horse to do what you want, you're teaching him that trying is worth something and that not all answers are easy but that figuring it out is worth the effort.

By the same token, our trainer will sometimes reward "the wrong thing" when the horse does it because the horse went through a thinking process to figure it out. She's not rewarding the wrong action, she's first validating the thinking process and then on subsequent attempts getting more and more particular that it end in the *right* action. The result is the horse is more likely to try next time and is more likely to get it right because it's finding value in thinking about what it's doing instead of just reacting.

The Definition of a Soft-Mouthed Horse

My friend Cees (that's Case for all you non-Dutch speakers out there) was asking me recently for the URL of a video I showed him a couple years ago.  It was Stacy Westfall's winning 2003 NRHA Futurity Freestyle ride on Can Can Lena, riding with no bridle.  When I dug it out, I noticed that she's got videos up for a couple of her other notable rides as well: one from 2005 and her 2006 championship ride.

Now, you purists and naysayers can go on all you want about how her horses don't plant their hind properly when they spin and how they're not the straightest and how anyone can "pattern" a horse and how she's a bit of a showboat herself...

...but you can't deny that a horse won't perform like that for you...  With you... unless you really work at getting them to be okay with what's going on.  At the end of the day, when you're riding without a bridle or working a horse at liberty, the horse is going along with the agenda because you've convinced it that it really wants to, not because it has no choice.

I think Stacy shows off some admirable horsemanship in a way that makes it clear to even non-equestrians that understanding your horse and working with him can accomplish far more than any application of draw reins, gag bits or riding bats ever could.  As she shows in the 2006 video by standing on her horse's back and then working it at liberty in front of hundreds of screaming people, there's more going on than just patterning her horse.  Besides... you have to love a smartass whose horse follows her across the ring at liberty and lowers his head for her to put the bridle on only so she can lead it out of the ring after winning a reining championship without it.

I find her videos inspirational.  They are also helpful when trying to explain the difference between how I want my horses to be and "the usual".  All I have to do is point to the video and invite someone to imagine being able to ride their horse like that and they usually get it.

Here are the links:

• Stacy Westfall and Can Can Lena, 2003 NRHA Futurity
• Stacy's 2005 NRHA Futurity Ride
• Stacy and Roxy, 2006 Championship Ride

And here's where to find Stacy on the web:

• Westfall Horsemanship

Mounted Combat and Precision Horsemanship

Not too long ago, a couple of friends and I were discussing one of our more energetic and curious pastimes: medieval mounted sword combat. They were opining that everything one learns in ground-based martial arts regarding how to swing a sword has to be changed for mounted combat because the torso and hip movement unavoidably confuses the horse and he winds up shouldering-in or spinning or something when you least want him to.

I haven't been doing the whack from horseback that long--Jack and I have been working on it off-and-on for about two years now and just authorized SCA heavy mounted combat in Sacramento last summer. However it's been enough that I think we have a comfort level with most of it. (Except the charging down strange horses part. We're still working on that.  I have a greater appreciation for the aplomb of polo ponies now.)

I don't even notice any issues with inadvertent cuing while trying to integrate effective swordwork with riding almost entirely from my seat... and as a lifelong fighter, I'm not sure I know how to not "uncork from the hip"--Even when swinging "light". Control and precision comes from the hip, not the arm and shoulder, so the swing is always a whole-body effort even when contact is zero.

My explanation for why this is a nonissue when riding is pretty simple: Jack can tell the difference between when I'm asking for something and when I'm not. We've done this often enough together, and done related things like roping, jousting, fidgiting, etc. that he's learned to distinguish movements that are cues from movements that are "noise".

This isn't magic. A common example of this level of discrimination in other aspects of horsemanship: Asking your horse to back up from the ground by just closing your hand around his halter lead under his chin versus asking him to lower his head for bridling by a very similar motion but with a different feel. Horses very quickly learn to distinguish between these.

If you're not sure you believe this, ask yourself the following question: "How does your horse know, if you approach his butt from the side, when he's supposed to stand quietly and let you futz with his back girth and when he's supposed to be already swinging his hindquarters away from you and getting out of your way?" In the case of our horses, they can tell because there is a different feel in the way we approach and even though a tiny distinction, it's more than they need to be able to figure out what's going on.

Cheese and Onion: A Classic British Sandwich

I've eaten enough meals in the UK now that I feel I can state with certainty that the old adage regarding the horror of British cooking is right on the money.

A British expatriate friend of mine insists that the reason for this is that whenever a particularly lovely dish was invented, it quickly became illegal. At my blank look, he pointed out that historically, the phrase "poached salmon" had an entirely different connotation than it does today.

So it was with visions of Robin Hood and the King's deer running through my head that I stopped into Tesco's the last time I was cooling my heels waiting for a train connection in London. I hurriedly grabbed what I thought was an egg salad sandwich only to discover that it was in fact cheese and onions, a combination I'd never heard of. It turned out to be quite nice and I've been making them for myself and MountainHorseGrrl ever since.

Here they are (sans Brixton Pickle):

Cheese and Onion Sandwich

1 bunch green onions
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
Pinch of mustard seed
Mayonnaise (to taste)
White bread
Several baby dill pickles

Chop the onions, including the green tops. Grate cheese coarsely into a mixing bowl. Add onions and mustard seed. (That's mustard SEED, not powdered mustard. It adds a little zing.) Add enough mayonnaise to make into a sandwich spread, stirring with a fork. As you stir, break the grated cheese strips up with the tines of the fork but don't turn it totally into mush. Leave some chunkiness to it. Feel free to play with the proportions of the ingredients until you get a consistency and flavor balance that you like. I typically do it by the "looks good, tastes good" method.

Spread on white bread. I use either potato or buttermilk bread because I just can't stomach the spongy horror that serves for a true British sandwich. If you want to be really authentic though, look for WonderBread or SaraLee or the equivalent. Finally, slice a couple of baby dill pickles and lay them on top of the cheese and onion spread before closing up your sandwich.

For the full experience, slice in half and and pile them on a plate. Serve with a cup of milky Earl Grey tea while enjoying old reruns of Good Neighbors or To The Manor Born.

The flavor is enough different by American standards to make for a nice little adventure but the texture is similar to chicken salad or egg salad and the contrast between the cheese and the onions is interesting.

Happier Than a Puppy with Two Peters

"Natural Horsemanship" has a touchy-feely reputation to it.  Granola and Raiki Healing and Equine Phrenology and all that nonsense.  Riding with folks who come from the hardcore vaquero tradition which spawned the NH movement however is a bit different.  It is a thoughtful and kind approach for the horses but can be a little rough on the riders.

The following were heard mostly in clinics or lessons.  For the "in crowd", you can amuse yourself guessing which teacher each of the quotes is from...

Student: How do I keep my horse from pawing?
Teacher: Teach him to paw with the other foot.

Student: (riding with their reins tangled up around their head)
Teacher: With that much slack, you're busier than a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest.

Student: (riding slowly and timidly)
Teacher: Ride that thing!  Ride it like you stole it!

Student:  (riding with their halter under their bridle)
Teacher:  You forget to take your pajamas off this morning too?  That's how a sheep farmer rides.

Student: (looking bored and avoiding assigned task)
Teacher: Don't worry.  In the next exercise You'll be busier than a cat burying crap.

Student: (allowing their horse to stick its nose in their pocket)
Teacher:  That's your horse, not a teddybear.  You want to snuggle?  Buy a puppy.  A puppy won't kill you when it jumps in your lap.

Student: (riding with their reins tight on the horse's mouth for the nth time)
Teacher: Well, I know this is a journey for each of us and we each come from a different starting point and we have to ride from where we are, and we're all trying our best to surmount the challenges in front of us.  However, you goddamn son-of-a-*, what kind of a slack-brained pig farmer are you?  You yank on that horse's mouth again and I'll damn well help him buck you off!

Student: (protesting being upbraided for having their reins tight and yanking on their horse's mouth)
Teacher: I'm not your mother.  I'm your horse's lawyer and if you don't quit HAULING ON HIS MOUTH he's going to own your house!

Student:   How do I keep him from laying down?
Teacher: Don't let him.

Student: This is my fifth clinic with you.  Any thoughts?
Teacher: Well you don't terrify me anymore.

How to Hold a Leadrope

When you're in the saddle, your critical interface to the horse lies in your seat, your legs and your hands on the reins.  How you sit and how you hold the reins matter a lot.  They affect how well you can communicate with your horse.  While there are a lot of ways to sit and to hold the reins, each way has a right and a wrong about it and if you were to look at all the various right ways you'd find they have a lot in common.  They're all trying to get the job done; to minimize problems and maximize opportunities for communication and success.

Following the same reasoning, when you're on the ground, your critical interface to your horse is the lead rope in your hand and the way you position and move your body.  A lead rope is not just for dragging your horse from his stall for saddling.  It's a tool that can let you talk to and work with your horse almost as subtly as when you are in the saddle.  It makes me crazy how many people -- even ones who take their horsemanship very seriously --  don't know the best way (or any decent way) to hold a lead rope and are not very effective at relating to their horse on the ground.

Bill Dorrance once said something like "The best way to learn about horses is to get a piece of rope with a horse on one end and you on the other and see what you can get done."

So I'm going to show you how to hold a lead rope the way I was shown.  It's the right way and it has a lot of advantages but it's not the only right way.  It is, however, the best way I know.  If you hold and use a lead rope this way, then there's a lot of effective things you can learn to do with your horse on the ground that will make you and your horse better with each other because you will both understand clearly what's being said between you.

Let's start with the observation that, when properly used, a lead rope is a double-ended tool.  With it, you can apply tension and pressure to your horse in order to communicate your intentions.  One end is attached to the horse.  This end lets you apply tension (taking slack and bumping) and pressure (pushing feel, which when done inexpertly can look like rope-wiggling).  The other end should have a leather popper on it and is also good for applying pressure (swinging the popper) and tension (opening up), though by using different techniques.

A second useful observation is that each of these techniques needs to be done with varying degrees of strength.  Sure, your goal is to be able to do them so subtly that an onlooker would not even be able to see your hand or body move.  However, a green colt with his mind set on his own agenda could also require you to exert your full body weight in a millisecond to swing his hindquarters away from you and keep yourself safe. It's important to hold your rope in a way that makes it possible to do any of these things at any time with any necessary degree of effort.  If you have to set up or switch or fumble around, you'll miss the opportunity to communicate clearly with your horse and you might even get hurt.

Which brings us to a third useful observation:  Getting dragged is the second most common form of equestrian injury next to falling out of the saddle.  So it would be wise to not loop the lead rope around your wrist or over your shoulder or around your waist or any other equivalent thing.  This is not just an issue with horses.  Sailors, tree-trimmers and machine-shop workers are also familiar with this problem.  Many years ago, a friend of mine who was an SCA knight died because he had the excess slack of his belt (which he was not wearing) tossed over his shoulders to keep it out of the way while he buffed the metal buckle on his electric buffing wheel.  The wheel caught the buckle and wound the belt around the arbor, yanking him forward and breaking his neck instantly.  I think of him every time someone leads their horse past me with the slack end of the lead rope thrown around their neck or over their shoulder and I pray that nobody slams a car door, starts a tractor or loses a plastic bag in the wind until that horse gets safely back in its stall.

With these thoughts in mind, the right way to hold a lead rope is simply this:

Notice that the thumbs are toward each other and the bottom of each fist is toward the two respective business ends of the rope, rather like the way you would hold a quarterstaff or a kayak paddle.  This is important.  Holding the rope with the business ends exiting from the bottom of your fists rather than the top provides vastly more mechanical advantage while simultaneously allowing you more control.  If you don't believe me, get your kayak paddle out and play with it for a while.

If your rope is too long and you must take care of your excess slack, carry the slack in a coil like so:

Handle it like you would the coils of your lass rope or riata.  You can transfer the coil to whichever hand is currently not operating its business-end of the lead rope.  You can also drop the coil completely when you need to give more slack to your horse.

That's it.  If it seems easy, that's because it is.

But doing it right makes a huge difference and sets you up to be safe and to be able to do a lot of advanced things in the way of communicating with and handling your horse.

Horse Training

Recently, someone asked me "What do YOU define as training?  Are lessons and training the same thing or different things to you?"  Since my answer is sort of conventional for the cantankerous, vaquero-tradition-inspired crowd, I thought I'd share it here...

•  Every time you reach for your horse for any reason, you're doing it "with quality" which means offering a good feel and expecting a clean response and coaching/teaching/supporting/working with your horse until you get what you asked for.

There is no separate "teaching" activity any more than as humans we have a discrete "learning" activity.  It's continuous and you have little choice about it since you can't exactly tell your horse to pay no attention to your actions when you don't happen to be in training mode at the moment.  Your horse is going to learn from everything you do whether you like it or not.

Parents whose children have cheerfully  burbled some overheard cussword inappropriately in front of strangers know the truth of this.

• "Lessons" are when someone else teaches you something about how to work with your horse.

• "Horse Training" is what people call it when they get money for something they do related to horses, whether it does the horse any good or not.  "Trainers" are the people who get the money for what they do.  The "Horse" is the target of the exercise... and sometimes the beneficiary.

Quick Bourbon Beans

I've always loved baked beans.  I blame it on my mother, not on my fondness for things western.  She essayed home-baked beans on brown bread a couple of times, using one of those cool beehive-shaped ceramic bean pots with delicious results. I can still recall the taste today.

More often though, it was canned beans to go along with bratwurst or hotdogs for a quick supper on a busy weekend night.  Since opening a can was easy, preparing the beans was often delegated to one of us kids to "teach us how to cook". As we dumped them in the pan or microwave bowl, she encouraged us to experiment with ways to make out-of-the can beans taste better.

While my brother's experiments tended along the lines of improving the ballistics of the spoon-launched projectiles he would direct my way when I antagonized him behind Mom's back, my efforts focussed around what ketchup and dijon or stone-ground mustard could do.

Recently I've been making beans as something quick and comforting on a cold wet night in the Santa Cruz mountains after getting home late from work Yet Again.  Here's my latest (and best) variation.

Quick Bourbon Beans  (Prep time: about 10 minutes)

4 strips thick-cut bacon
1/2 onion
Dash of Worchestershire sauce
2 tbsp bourbon
1 can Bush's ORIGINAL baked beans

Slice the bacon into 1" chunks.  Dice onion.  Throw the sliced bacon chunks into a large saute pan (skillet, spyder, frying pan, hubcap or what-have you) and let them heat, frying in their own fat on medium heat for about five minutes or until you judge them about halfway done.  The fat should be translucent and the meat browning but not crisp.  Add the diced onion and continue to saute until the onions are soft and translucent and the bacon looks nearly done.

Add dash of Worchestershire sauce and 2 tbsp bourbon to the pan and stir for a moment.

Now, I'm a Booker Noe man myself.  However you won't catch me putting Booker into baked beans, or into coffee or visiting ignoramuses for that matter, no matter how fancy I'm feeling.  That's showing off and doesn't impress much except your wallet.  Bulleit makes a nice, moderately priced frontier bourbon whose rougher, sharper flavor actually works better for cooking than the smooth subtlety of Booker.  I've used various amounts, from 2 to 4 tbsp, but I find that for my taste, 2 tbsp is plenty.

For the pyromaniacal among us, try the following experiment:  use more like 6 tbsp of bourbon and let it stay on the flame for a few extra seconds until it starts to evaporate, then tilt the pan and slide it halfway off the burner so that the vapors spill across the open flame.  You'll get a gratifying whoosh as the alcohol, heated past its flashpoint, goes off in a roil of flame.  If you're careful, you might even still have your eyebrows afterwards.  If not, you'll get to re-experience the adolescent delight of riding in a bright red firetruck and hanging out with the firemen.

Now stir in the beans, straight from the can and turn the heat down to low, letting it simmer for five minutes or so.  Add pepper to taste.

Starting Things Off

In the spirit of starting things off, here's a picture of myself with my filly Emma in the colt starting class at Buck Branaman's clinic in Chico last spring.

If you don't know who Buck Brannaman is, well...  I guess you're either in for a treat or an annoyance depending on how you look at things like itinerant experts and unabashed hero-worship.  His name comes up a lot when I talk about horses.  What little I know came by way of him... and Ray Hunt....  Peter Cambell... and the indefatigable Bonnie Stoehn.

Welcome to Cowboy Coffee.

Pour yourself a cup and settle a spell.  Don't mind me, I'm just going to chat a bit about things I enjoy: art, adventure, good food and better horses.