Developing new skills

One of the more innovative ways we learnt how to be around horses was to do a lot of pretend games where one of us would act as the horse. As embarrassing as it sounds initially, it’s very effective in giving you a clear idea as to why what you have been doing might not have worked. If you think that many times humans don’t make sense to other humans it’s little wonder humans rarely make sense to horses!

It was also quite a fun way to learn about our fellow classmates in an unconventional way. We were, after all, a very diverse group just looking at origins: Indian, French, American (US), Swiss, Brazilian, German, Austrian, Australian and Finland as well as ages: 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Now imagine us leading each other in the arena, pretending that the other is a horse. Funny indeed. 

Once we’d practised a few times on each other we were let lose to try with actual horses. One exercise involved getting the horse to do an obstacle course without touching him. The obstacles included a jump, a box and circles drawn in the ground in which we had to get the horse to stop, a slalom between cones and a wide blue plastic sheet that acted as a make-believe river. 

Now, I don’t know if getting the horse to navigate all these without touching him (and of course he doesn’t have any bridal or halter on) sounds easy, but it certainly isn't and we looked absolutely ridiculous jumping and running around to get him to move the way we wanted him to. In the end we managed, with a lot of laughs and sweat. 

 we do look funny gesticulating around

 got him in the box

 good ol' sancho making a run for it

 trying the slalom

 trying to get him over the jump

 getting him over the jump!

 through the cones

and over the river