I am back home for three weeks now over Easter and here are some photos I took of Trooper this afternoon. As usual he was with Joe in the field, Joe was doing his best poses for the camera whilst Trooper was being grumpy and eating as much grass as possible! For those of you that don't know Joe is Trooper's best friend and they are always together in the field. They are both old and stay away from the other horses messing about!
Joe
As usual Joe was standing like a very well behaved horse while Trooper was stuffing his face with grass!
I will have to send this one to his owner! Shame Trooper's bum is in the way!
This is one of Trooper's worst habits, he bites the lead rope when we bring him in from the field. I have tried everything to make him stop! I tried leading him without a lead rope for months and he would still try and bite where it should be. As soon as I put it back on he would bite it again!
One of the only nice photos of Trooper!
And to finish it off, here's Pixie, the oldest cat in the world (or so I like to think!)
The Whitaker family are from Yorkshire and are very well known in show jumping. At Horse Of The Year Show there seems to be at least one Whitaker in every jumping class! Ellen Whitaker is only 25 years old and is one of our countries leading show jumpers. She always gets a massive cheer when she comes into the arena and is definitely a favourite amongst all the little girls that love horses.She has recently gotten engaged to Henry Cavill who is an American actor due to play Superman in a film.
Some of her past achievements include winning the 2010 Hickstead Speed Derby, winning the 2009 HOYS show jumper of the year Grand Prix and show jumper of the show, winning the HOYS speed stakes in 2006, 2008 and 2009 and winning the 2009 HOYS Puissance. Ellen currently has a number of good horses including Locarno, Kanselier and Ladina B.
Coming from the Whitaker family she has ridden horses from a young age. At the age of 15 she was placed third in the Hickstead Derby and later was disqualified for not yet having reached the minimum age of 16 to enter the competition!
She unfortunately missed out on a place in team GB in the Beijing Olympics due to her horse Locarno having an infection in his leg. She also seems unlikely to have a place in London 2012.
I was thinking about what to do a post on and ended up on Twitter, I then decided I could write a post about who I like to follow on Twitter as I think a lot of bloggers also use the website.
@kyequine; Kentucky Equine Research provides links to lots of new information on equine nutrition.
@Joules_Clothing; The clothing brand has information about sales and competitions they are running.
@horseblogs; Although it doesn't say, I think this is the Twitter account for the "Behind The Bit" blog. It links to their posts along with other news.
@DonkeySanctuary; As many of you may know I love the Donkey Sanctuary and their Twitter account is also one of my favourites. It often links to their "Donkey Cam" and keeps me up to date with their news.
@TeamSPILLERS; The feed company Spillers gives lots of news and information about feeding your horse.
@HorseCharity; World Horse Welfare tweets lots of news, information and photos about their charity.
Hope you enjoy exploring them, let me know if you recommend any others!
I have had a day of behaviour lectures and practicals today and I really enjoyed it. I have always enjoyed behaviour so I was looking forward to it anyway but our lecturer was really good and we got to have a go at clicker training this afternoon.
The clicker training we were doing was more of a fun ground-work exercise to do with the horse. I am not sure how useful it would be when you are riding the horse to train it as it is relating it back to food.
What is clicker training?
The video below gives an introduction into clicker training!
The clicker is used as it can be used to mark the exact point of time when the horse performs a behaviour rather just giving them a treat a few seconds after. They are still given treats after they perform the behaviour, the clicker is used to mark the exact time of the behaviour and it becomes a reward as they associate the clicker with a treat.
Clicker training may be useful for helping horses load on to trailers as you can click at the exact moment they move a leg forwards so they know this is the correct behaviour.
What we did in our practical
We started off by getting into pairs with other people in my class, my partner then had to go to the other side of the arena. The lecturer told us we had to get them to perform a behaviour without speaking to them and using the clicker to get them to do it. It was a bit like playing the "hotter and colder" game where you tell people if they are getting closer to the right answer. We then had to get them to pick up a cone, put it on the side of the jump and put their hand on it whilst lifting their right leg! This was very difficult to do without speaking but was a really good practise. It made me think that a lot of the differences between teaching us and horses is due to the fact we can speak and they can't.
We then went to get the horses. We had a few different things to play with in the arena such as little cones, sand castle buckets, and big exercise balls. The horse my partner and I had was called Gordon and he was around 16.2 hh and was very alert and playful! He acted like a big pony! We quickly realised that Gordon had done clicker training before as every time my partner clicked the clicker he would look at her for a treat. One thing that surprised me is that the horses remembered the clicker training even though they hadn't done it for around a year!
We started off by getting him to touch the cone with his nose, every time we did it we clicked the clicker and he received a treat. We then paired this with the command "touch". Sometimes he would get a bit carried away and lift the cone in his mouth and shake his head around (he didn't get a click and a reward for this).
Then we decided to teach him two different commands with the cones and he had to differentiate between the two. The first command was "touch", and the second was "pick" in which he had to pick up the cone. After a few times we realised he was pawing the ground a lot and he may have been taught the command "kick" in the past. We then changed the name of the command to "lift" and this seemed to work much better. Some of the other people in the class using the exercise balls were using the commands "touch" and "kick" so he may have done this in the past.
Gordon learnt this quite quickly. We had a line of cones and once he performed the behaviour we would move onto the next cone and start again. Towards the end we were staring to pair the verbal commands with visual signals. We started holding one hand up as the signal to touch the cone and he was just starting to do this at the end of the session.
The session lasted around 30-45 mins before the lecturer said we should stop or we would start losing their attention. We are going to have another go at this next week and try swapping horses. Because Gordon was quite lively at first he was just starting to calm down a bit towards the end and was reacting better to the signals.
Have any of you tried clicker training? I want to go home and try it on Trooper now! It was a really fun exercise to do with your horse and helped me to realise how clever horses are!
This Sunday's GB Rider Profile will be on Oliver Townend. In 2009 he won both Badminton and Burghley Horse Trials on Flint Curtis. The FEI rankings currently put him at 4th in Great Britain and 6th in the world.
Oliver is from Yorkshire and used to be based near the Whitaker family. He has ridden since a young age and has been very successful since his early teens, competing at Horse Of The Year Show and riding for GB on the pony Eventing team in the European Championships.
He had a bad fall a few years ago during a competition in which he was knocked unconscious. He was wearing one of the inflatable body protectors and says he may not have still been alive it wasn't for this body protector.
He currently has a number of horses he is riding including ODT Sonas Rovatio and Imperial Master. I am unsure which horse he would want to ride at the Olympics.
Oliver is also involved in social networking and has a Facebook page and a Twitter page where he keeps people up to date with what he is doing. He has also won and been runner up in the Equestrian Social Media Awards in the past.
Below is a video of an interview with him (although he is being very naughty and riding without a hat on at the beginning!).
This link is for another video of an interview about the Olympics and how he is starting his training. He said he is an outsider at the moment as many of his horses are young but he still hopes to make it onto the Olympic team. Click here! I hope he gets onto the Great Britain team as he is seen as one of the iconic British Eventers.
