A lesson in being "as light a possible but a firm as necessary "

July 22 2009

Well today I got a good lesson in being as light a possible but a firm as necessary. I was supposed to play with Twosox but I ended up playing with Knightly because my mom was having trouble with sideways so I said that I could play with him and see what was up.

Soooooo.......

Knightly did really well for the first bit. We did some stick to me, zone 4 driving, circles etc then we went over to the fence to do sideways. As I suspected Knightly put his head over the fence and wasn't going sideways. So we played with that. Then for some reason or other we got onto fixing his yo-yo game. He would back out about 20ft then stop and not go any farther. HMMMM HOW INTERESTING!!!! Then when you got a phase 4 he would just put his head up and totally ignore you. So I decided to use my carrot stick as a phase 4 instead. Knightly respected that better. We ended up spending a lot of time playing with that. After it had gotten a little bit better and Knightly was backing farther and being respectful we went back to sideways.

It was a lot better then before. But Knightly wasn't really going sideways. As we were going down the fence I noticed that Knightly wasn't really crossing his front legs. Hmmmm.... interesting!! So we went and got our Driving game and Porcupine game on the forequarters really good and I made sure that Knightly was really crossing his legs over and moving right around instead of half doing it and half walking off. After we fixed that Sideways went a lot better!!!

I made sure that Knightly was moving his forequarters over then when he was doing that his hind quarters automatically went over and we got sideways!!! I was really pleased!!! Going to the left was harder for Knightly but in the end he was going sideways both ways and all at a phase two or less!!!!

I really learned a good lesson in "as light a possible but a firm as necessary" I had to be firm one minute and light the next. It was really interesting!!

~K