March 24 2010
This afternoon I played with Prince. I took him out to the front yard to start off with and we played out there for a while. There were a couple things that I noticed about Prince (1) His ears seemed always to be back and (2) when I asked him to do something his head seemed to be higher and (3) he wasn't licking and chewing. So I noted those three things and continued on. I figured that it could have just been because we were in a different place. We did some Figure eights, circles, transitions, change of directions, yo-yo's, sideways, and some other stuff. Prince did everything well but something wasn't right. So I decided to go up to the riding ring and play up there to see if I could figure out what was wrong. Once we were up there I decided to play around and see why Prince's ears were always back. I thought of a couple reasons and the first thing I tried was was he being dominate/ was be bored. So we did lots of different things. I got really creative with our circles and transitions (we did a Question box type game on the ground, which was really fun!) but that didn't seem to help. Prince got a little bit more interested of a look on his face but still his ears were 90% of the time back, which for Prince isn't normal. The next thing was confidence, was he unconfident? So I slowed everything right down and just did some basic stuff, then it hit me, the last time we played I had found an effective phase four in our driving game and it was possible that Prince lost confidence because of that. That seemed to be the most probable answer so I played with that. After every time I asked Prince to do something I wanted for him to lick and chew... the first time it was a long time but each time he took less and less time before he licked and chewed. That was interesting because Prince normally licks and chews right after we finish something. There was a couple times I had to get to a higher phase but I made sure I wasn't nagging and Prince responded and seemed to be more confident. Hmmm... how interesting.
As I was standing there I was thinking over the first part of our play time and I came to the conclusion that at the beginning of our play time I was to ready to correct and I wasn't trusting enough that Prince would respond so he lost confidence. Interesting! After I let Prince go he stayed with me and didn't leave so we played at Liberty for a bit... with the corral gate open! It was cool! We did some Stick to me, Touch it, Sideways and lots of other stuff! One of the things we did was straddling a single barrel. Prince did it from a stand still... twice! It was so cool! Prince was so connected with me the whole time! So even though the beginning of our play time started off different I am really thankful that God helped me switch it around and we had an amazing ending! :)
Naturally,
~Keri
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