Confidence building in Freya

Friday Oct 2 2009

In my last post I mentioned that after I had played with Poncho I played with Freya. We played with jumping and crossing the tarp..... or more like getting anywhere near the tarp ;) 

We started with some friendly game because she was a little worried. Nothing bad though. So after that we went to the jumps [barrels]. At first we just did some simple squeezes between me and the barrels, until she could confidently walk through the space. Pretty soon she was doing that well so I make the gap smaller... then smaller.... then smaller till she had to start thinking about jumping the barrels. After a couple minutes Freya jump the barrels! She wasn't 100% confident but it wasn't bad. Right after I disengaged her she started licking and chewing.

After we took a short rest we walked over to the tarp. Freya is really scared of that!! She has gotten better but she still jumps every time something hits the tarp. At first I was just asking her to go in between me and the tarp, that was going well but we weren't making a lot of progress. Freya would still jump sideways when my savvy string hit the tarp, even if it was just a little bit.

So I decided to try something a little different. I walked onto the tarp and started making a lot of noise. I was hitting it with the rope, jumping on it, etc etc. Every time Freya stopped and stood still I would stop and stand still. Then I would start up again, each time Freya got more and more confident with it making noise. It got to the point where I could hit it really hard with my carrot stick and string, jump on it, twirl the rope and have the end hitting it over and over, lots of stuff and Freya just stood there. I think that she wasn't afraid of the taro but the noise and once she realized that the noise wasn't anything to be worried about she was fine.

Then the next step was to see how she would deal with coming closer to the tarp. We took it one step at a time. Then I would start making noise again. She was fine! She then it got to the point where she was right beside the tarp and I could make some noise and she would just stand still. Then I asked her to take another step forward, this time she had to decided whether she would put her foot on it or not. She put like 1 inch of her on the tarp!! Success!! Before she wouldn't even smell it!! Then I asked for the other foot, she put that one on a little bit. So I gave her a rest. Then I asked her to take another step forward and she did!! She put her whole foot on the tarp!!!! Like Mr. Parelli says "Nose, Neck, maayyybe the feet"

We ended there. It was so much fun!! I love problem solving!!!

~K