​I made this video to enter the Connection Training November 2018 Challenge to teach your horse to Stay.
Why Stay? Horses can get stuck wanting to keep their noses with you and with the treat. Stay teaches early on that it’s ok for you to work in different positions.
It’s also a really useful exercise in teaching your horse patience and is the foundation of many of other exercises such as standing tied, being groomed and standing quietly in the horse box or trailer.
I’m looking for my horses to understand Stay, or stand still, while I move around them or walk away.
As always, working with these two horses requires different approaches for each. What is amazing to me is that Shiraz frequently offers to do things that she has observed Jalila doing. For example, I never taught Shiraz about the orange road cone target. I worked with her on a mat. (The double stay was sort of a fluke but I had it on film so I added it in.)

Jalila turned 6 in June of 2018. She transformed from a rehab project to a beautiful, functional horse. I have been sluggish with my posts but I do have documentation to share and now that there’s snow on the ground, I’m more inclined to sit at my computer. From here on, I’ll also be documenting my work with Shiraz, another Drinkers of the Wind (DWA) Arabian mare who lives with to keep Jalila company. They are frenemies. Jalila regularly reports that Shiraz is being a “B”! Better that than living alone.
My posts won’t be in progressive order. I’ll eventually get caught up. One of my biggest discoveries was the Connection Training team in England, Hannah Weston and Rachel Bedingfield. I signed on to learn more about reward-based training and have been inspired to document monthly training challenges.
Here are two videos from the Halloween Theme Despooking Challenge