Today I feel I reached a milestone with Dillinger. When I first got him home, I started out with round pen training him and he did well. He was yielding his hindquarters, reversing direction to the inside and just responding well in general. However, I still couldn't touch him very much. He was very jumpy about being touched. I had petted him on the nose and face, but couldn't make much more progress. I had never encountered a problem like this before, but I knew there had to be some way to get him used to being touched. I had spent literally hours and days working with him and I was starting to get a little frustrated when I turned to the internet and read a little about bamboo training.
From what I read on bamboo training, the trainer first introduces the horse to being touched by getting it used to being touched with a long piece of bamboo. Of course, I didn't happen to have any bamboo lying around! lol So instead, I fashioned my own using a very long lunging whip. The key to this training method is just being very slow and let the horse realize that you are just going to rub or scratch him with the stick. As soon as he was able to stand being touched with it, I backed off and took the pressure off of him. Within 15 minutes, I was able to rub his neck and back with it and after about half an hour to an hour later, I was able to touch him myself. From there on, the training went really quickly and I was able to pet him all over on his left side (I have quickly learned that is his "good" side). I really liked this training technique because it kept me out of harms way (for the most part! lol) while he was learning and beginning to understand that I wasn't going to hurt him and that being touched wasn't a bad thing.
The next day, I started with his right side (or his more sensitive side) and was able to rub him all over with my "bamboo" stick. I was also able to brush his left side, which he really liked. So far, I have progressed to being able to brush him pretty much everywhere on both sides and I reached my milestone or goal for today when I was able to remove his tag with his number on it without him minding at all!!!!! I was very, very excited to do that! So excited, in fact, that I promptly took a picture with the tag, which I will post soon! lol
I will admit that I was initally very upset with myself about all the time I "wasted" before I tried the bamboo training, but as my sister, Tory, reminded me it wasn't wasted time if the horse or me learned something and I think we both did. I know I learned a lot!!! I am excited to move on and hopefully get him desensitized to different objects in the next couple days. Stay tuned for more updates!
~Leah and Dillinger
