Trailer Loading - Day 1

I was a bit rushed this evening so did not even open up the ramps for our initial session. I just took Ansel over to where the trailer is parked and started working on targeting a cone, first in hand, then in hand for longer periods, then placed it on a shelf and worked up to Ansel having to take a couple of steps to be able to reach the cone.

One problem I was having trying to use the cone for 'stationing' is that if I didn't click immediately, he started to mouth it, pick it up, etc. I played with fetching about 2-3 years ago but we never really perfected returning the object to my hand - and I was actually careful NOT to use cones because of all the reports of horses fetching them at inconvenient times. I borrowed a bigger cone for our next attempts (a road cone, not a little soccer play cone); I hope that will discourage playing with the target when I try to increase duration.

Published July 24, 2007