Brought to you by Fibre Fresh. Hi, I'm Jodie Hartstone, Grand Prix dressage rider and proponent of academic horse training. In today's episode we're going to talk about the stop response.
There's four responses we need to train in horses. The go, the stop, the turn and the yield. The stop response is about negative reinforcement.
removing rain pressure for the correct response. And there's several things the horse needs to know about the rains and how they function to decelerate his legs. The first thing he needs to know is about slowing down from rain pressure, he needs to know stepping back and stopping from rain pressure. He also needs to know how to shorten his stride and do downward transitions.
These are all forms of decelerating the legs. It's really important that when we use the reins to decelerate the horse, we do not use our leg at the same time. Legs are for accelerations and the reins are there for decelerations. And a horse cannot listen to two signals at once.
I'm going to demonstrate now the various uses of the stop response. So watch closely as my reins do different things as though I want different responses from the horse. The first thing I can ask for, is that the horse stops from rein pressure.
So I'm going to pressure his mouth, and the moment he stops all four legs, I can give his reward the release of pressure. I also want him to be able to step back if I pressure his mouth from halt. And even I can do the same exercise from walk into two steps of reverse. This helps make him light and obedient to the rein signal. Another thing the horse needs to know is how to shorten his stride from rain pressure.
So here I give a woo-give, woo-give, woo-give until the horse walks with very small steps. And in the same way I can slow his stride with a long woo of the rein, but not enough to make him halt. Remember, with all forms of negative reinforcement, pressure motivates, but it's the release of pressure that trains.
When your horse can do all four of these things from the rein pressure, he'll be light and obedient in the mouth. I'm Jodie Hartstone. Thanks for watching this episode of Equine TV. We'll catch you again soon. Brought to you by Fibre Fresh.