Linda Tellington-Jones demos at Equine Affaire, Columbus, Ohio. I went to all 4 of her 1.5 hour demos. Thursday was very cold and windy which made the learning environment less than desirable especially the evening demo. What did I take away from the seminars? A lot. I wanted to record what I remember. As an overview, there was enough repetition of some of the basics that made me able to actually remember a number of things. Since I had her new Ultimate Horse Behavior and Training Book as a reference, I didn't want to be busy taking notes and miss the techniques. I've been reading her work for years. Her book 'Getting in TTouch-Understand and Influence Your Horse's Personality', was one of the first books I bought when I got my first horse. The book, especially the TTeam exercises in the book helped to turn around my relationship with a well trained, but rather difficult horse. He is a very special and unique horse with whom I am glad I am able to have a relationship. He is now pretty much retired, but I love having him around.
Anyways back to the demos. I love how she would open the demos with a comment that many trainers talk about having the horse respect us, but that it is equally if not more important for us to respect the horse and respect that each horse is an individual with individual idiosyncrasies. She talked about how a horse cannot learn when he is afraid and the four responses that a horse has to fear are flight, fight, faint or fidget. When we get after a horse for fidgeting he is probably already afraid. Are you making him more afraid when you get after him? She talked about building partnerships with your horse versus master/servant. I finally was able to understand the significance of the wand and using it to help the horse make connections with their body parts and with the ground. She talked a lot about patience and breaking things down into smaller steps and going back a step or two if the horse gets scared. Pushing them through an exercise doesn't teach them anything because horses don't learn when they are scared. She talked about using food to help the horse calm down and learn. The fight or flight response is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. Eating and digesting is part of the parasympathetic system. If you can get a horse to take a few bites before he gets too worked up, it will take down the excitement/fear level. Success with many small steps does a lot more for the horse's confidence than pushing him through a single exercise that leaves him anxious. She would seem to go back a step, feeling that the horse was anxious when I didn't even see the horse as being upset. She and the other riders always had helmets and the only upset horse we saw was one that came in that way. He was so sensitive to her touch that she was concerned that there was something physically wrong with him. This horse was an eventer who had recently become difficult, throwing his rider. She apologized to the crowd for being boring at times because what she needed to do for the horse was not necessarily all that interesting to watch for some people. I however found it fascinating and reassuring that she made the horse and the relationship with the horse more important than 'the show'. She also talked about how important our intent is when working with the horses. She rode one horse bridleless, using a neckring and a balance rein. I wish I would have had time to write more of this sooner, as I know I have forgotten some things during the past week. I did see the first Leslie Desmond demo and liked her a lot too. I feel that she and Linda Tellington-Jones were of the same mindset of respect for the horse, using positive thoughts and intent. I was also reminded that you have to have positive images in your mind. You have to think and visualize what you want the horse to do. The horse sees this and understands this better. It will also have your requests make sense to the horse and correlate to what you are asking for. Reminds me a lot about what the book/DVD 'The Secret' is trying to get across. I believe Linda mentioned some of the same experiments that were in 'The Secret'. Hope this makes sense. I wanted to get this down as best I could without getting too obsessed about writing a good report. Anna
