Despooking Exercises with a Tarp (for Horses)
Like 2 Dislike 0 Published on 2 Feb 2017
Hey, Shawna here!
Anxiety and fear is the root of many unwanted behaviours in our horses. Despooking exercises help to desensitize your horse to new situations, objects and experiences so that they learn to interpret those things as good and interesting, rather than something fearful or scary.
With our despooking exercises, we focus on building boldness and confidence in our horses in the face of the new or unexpected. And we don’t just want our horses to tolerate it, we want them to actually enjoy it. This is what happens when you use positive reinforcement in the despooking process.
The key, really, is to focus on your horse’s emotions. By breaking it down into small steps so that you’re starting where your horse is fairly confident, you can reward him for facing his fears in tiny increments. As he finds that this is rewarding and fun, his fear will begin to turn to curisoity. In time, this will generalize to most new situations as you have now changed your horse’s emotions and assoications with novel objects and experiences - he will start to expect it to have a positive outcome, as opposed to a scary one.
These despooking exercises really will change your horse’s whole outlook on all areas of his life and training as you work together to stay connected, calm and curious in the face of the unexpected.
I give loads more detail in this video and you can see me working with horse Mint and going through some despooking exercises with the tarp. Some of these are more advanced and not to be done with a novice horse - always remember to start where your horse is! But you can see Mint is totally relaxed even as I go a little crazy... I’m glad at least one of us is sensible..!
For more info, please click here:
https://connectiontraining.com/de-spooking-exercises-tarp/
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