Teach Your Horse Long-Reining with Positive Reinforcement - Paperback

by Hertha James (Author)

Teaching long-reining has a variety of purposes. We may want to: - Keep small ponies and donkeys active and interested. - Develop a young horse's education about voice and rein signals for walk on, halt, back up, turn left and turn right before he is old enough to ride. - Prepare our horse, pony, donkey, mule for work in harness. - Have another horse activity we can do without riding. - Build a timid horse's confidence about moving out in front, as he must do when ridden. - Keep an older or retired horse supple with low-key activities. - Be able to send the horse out ahead of us over, between and through obstacles for non-ridden Horse Agility competitions. This book isolates the foundation skills needed for long-reining and arranges them into a Training Program. On completion of the program, long-reining falls into place smoothly as all the elements are brought together. If you do not yet use positive reinforcement in the form of equine clicker training, the book includes a full chapter on how to get started safely. The final chapter includes nineteen patterns to generalize and consolidate the long-reining skills of the handler and the horse. Over a hundred illustrations plus free links to more than twenty short YouTube video clips support the written text.

Author Biography

Hertha James grew up in Calgary just east of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada. Her lifelong passion for horses began at age six, when she was taken for a ride on a big black horse. Animals of all kinds have always been an important part of her work and leisure. Hertha's career with animals began with a zoology degree and includes working as a zookeeper in Calgary and Wellington, New Zealand, as well as handling wild and exotic species for a movie production company. Her animal experiences stood her in good stead when she changed careers to become a high school teacher of science and biology. Her classrooms always contained a menagerie ranging from axolotls to quail. Hertha's other passion, the creation of teaching and learning resources, grew from her experiences as a teacher. Teaching science to teenagers for 23 years honed her ability to structure information clearly. It taught her how to build new knowledge in small steps and integrate it with the information and beliefs already held by her students. Hertha applies the same successful strategy to teaching horses and their handlers. She shows that horse training goals can be reached when valid starting points are based on gentle experimentation followed by good planning to reach realistic goals.