On Saturday morning when I went to feed I discovered that overnight some time Pebbles had managed to get her halter over one ear. Oops! For obvious reasons this wasn't ideal. I wanted that halter on her until I could comfortably touch her and I didn't want it to rub her or get in her eye. I made a few attempts while she was eating to see if I could touch her face through the fence. My hope was to just pull it back over her ear and be done with it. Pebbles made it clear that she was not having it by regressing to ear pinning and nasty mare face. I took that as a need to form a new plan. Suddenly the sense of urgency to be able to touch her went up. It was to wet to really use the round pen but I needed to establish some kind of working relationship. I decide that after every meal I would do a 10-15 minute session in her stall using the flag stick.
I wish I had videoed these sessions from the start as her progress was very quick and quite interesting. I started out just holding the flag stick near her and she reacted by moving away or turning her head to avoid it. Whenever she would even remotely move towards the flag I would praise her and pull it away. I did it on both sides of her and from the front. After the first session she was consistently looking at the flag when I would lift it up and no longer moving away. The trick to this was to always make sure that as soon as she reached for the flag I took it away leaving her curious and not apprehensive. The next day we worked on it again and this time I let her touch it before I pulled it away. She was now reaching out to find the flag on both sides and in front. I added asking her to back up a few steps with a voice command because she had started pushing forward as she got more comfortable touching the flag. It is really interesting how close she wants to be to me without being touched. She will literally get within inches. I ended the morning session by offering her my hand in the same way I had offered the flag and when she touched me herself we were done.
At the evening feed I was happy to see that she had retained everything from the morning. We went through the same start and then quickly moved to me touching her chin with the flag. As that went well I touched her neck on both sides and her chest. She quickly decided that this "stick" was pretty good at getting her itchy spots and I used that in my favor to move the flag up by her ears, under her mane, and eventually on her sides and front legs. The flag makes a bit of a crinkle sound so at first she got tense but even when she was a bit uncomfortable she didn't move away. I also used the stick to gently pull at her halter and see if she would respond to that pressure. It was tremendous progress in my opinion for only being with us for 5 days. When I let her out of her stall she actually walked right up to Taylor and touched her.
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