A different context....

We started off last night’s session by working on Faith’s separation anxiety. I walked Tilly in and out of the yard, and each time we left, spent a few minutes doing some in- hand work out of sight in the field, before returning to the yard again. Even though we haven’t been working on this for very long, Faith is already showing signs of being much more settled. Last night’s session was the longest we have done yet, and Faith was not box walking, and despite the warm evening, for the first time showed absolutely no signs of sweating up at all. There were a few neighs, and she seems to have a telescopic neck that helps to improve her view from the stable, but other than that, she was pretty calm.

A few months ago, I was dallying with the idea of starting ‘matwork’ with Faith. However, fairly soon after the purchase of a small rubber doormat, I decided for various reasons that matwork wasn’t really for us, and said item has sat in the tack room, gathering dust ever since.

However, I have recently decided that it would be helpful to work on building Faith’s confidence with putting her feet on different things. So to that end, the mat has been dragged from obscurity, and we have been having a play with it on the yard.

In the first instance, in a fit of having completely unrealistic expectations, I put the mat on the floor, and asked Faith to target it. To be fair, she did get within about half an inch of it with her nose, and scooted past it a couple of times. Clearly though, it looked to her like a gaping chasm had just opened up in the yard, and given the fact that she will still baulk at the thought of stepping over a very shallow drainage ditch, I don’t quite know what I was thinking in trying to get her to step on a doormat. Cue much slapping of forehead!

So I picked it up, and held it, and we did some targetting with it. No problem, Faith likes this game. In fact the targetting reached an absolute frenzy when Tilly got involved over the stable door, and the two girls got quite competitive over targetting the mat!

So then I decided to get Faith to target it nearer and nearer the ground. This worked really well, until I let go of the mat, and that was just a step too far for her. So we went back a few steps, and targetted it with me holding it while it was on the floor, and left it at that. It just goes to show though, that it is not the object itself that is the problem, it is the context that the object is in that can often raise difficulties. Faith doesn’t have a problem with mats per se, she just doesn’t like “mats lying on the ground looking like a horse eating hole” which is perfectly understandable!

I think the fact that it is black doesn’t help, so I might invest in a hessian, or raffia one as well. Hmmmm.