The Education of Toti
the aisle. This warranted a lesson in tying. I placed him in the aisle and tied him with an old “grippy” lead line woven through a couple of bars of the stall grid. When a horse pulls on this kind of lead line, it slides slowly without offering a full resis- tance (a little bit like the “Aussie Ring”). This is firm enough to teach the horse not to pull, but it prevents accidents because the sliding of the rope offers a progressive restriction. It gives the horse the time to think and stop himself, instead of pulling back violently by a defensive reflex against poll pressure. Next I moved Toti around with gentle indications of the lunge whip. At first, he went to the end of the lead line (three feet), felt the resistance and stopped. After a few passes left and right, he figured out the exact length of the rope and stopped a few inches before he made full contact with the pressure.
This short training session has many practical applica- tions: it is the first step toward “lightness to the hand.” When we are going to lunge the horse, he needs to accept being pushed forward with progressive degrees of energy with- out leaning on the line once he reaches the end of it. It is the principle of the “fixed hand” that doesn’t pull but doesn’t give either. The horse goes forward from the energy created by the whip in the direction the line allows, but without fight- ing it or leaning on it. When he will be ridden, he will have to understand and accept the hand in exactly the same way. When lunging was invented in the fifteenth century, prob-
ably in Italy, it was done around a strong wooden post, so the horse learned very quickly to respect it. It is important to lunge both from a fixed position (the horse yields to a “fixed hand”) and in movement (the horse learns to follow the “giving hand”). In both cases, he seeks and respects the “point of contact” regardless of the direction we send him to. Horses prefer predictable situations—they are the only events they can learn from and develop anticipatory think- ing. If a horse is tied to a post and tries to get away from it, his movement will create an increasing pressure that will progress from one ounce to 100 pounds until he has to stop. The one-ounce pressure announces the 100-pound pressure. If the horse rewards himself by an early release (and is reas- sured and reinforced in his action by a voice reward), he will do it progressively sooner because he anticipates both the increased pressure he wants to avoid and the release/reward he wants to obtain. This is the very principle of the “release of the aids” and their constant diminution due to the horse’s increasing understanding. In our next installment of Toti’s training journal, we will
progress to more serious lunging, saddling and riding, but the basics of good behavior based on collaboration are now installed and the “school of the aids” has already been started.
Top: At the trot, JP has him spiraling in with inside bend on a loose lunge line. Middle: Toti stretches down with the low hand to the right at the trot. Bottom: JP has Toti canter in a round frame, engaged and head down, on a loose lunge line.
30 July/August 2015
About JP: JP Giacomini’s career spans 50 years, during which he has trained close to 20 Grand Prix horses and worked on thousands of remedial horses of every imaginable breed, both in Europe and in the U.S. He first started colts under the direct supervision of Nuno Oliveira and later at the National Portuguese Stud of Alter Real, where he spent four years. He has produced inter- national winners in all three disciplines and invented a unique training method called “Endotapping,” which is a develop- ment of the classical dressage methods he learned in his youth. Besides his client’s horses, JP also focuses on training the Iberian Sport Horses he breeds at his and his wife Shelley’s Baroque Farms USA in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. JP employs his indispen- sible assistant trainer Cedar Potts, his barn manager Kim Taylor, who has ridden dressage and jumping and practices myofas- cial work, along with working students coming from the U.S., Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. JP can be reached at
jpgiacomini@gmail.com or at
www.jpgiacomini.com.
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