I'm too tired to coherently put any thoughts down (as always I have lots regarding where this liberty work is going) but this was our latest session a couple of days ago. Yesterday spent with old friends passing through France means that I was too spaced to work with them today, caught up with field maintenance instead.

yet MORE mat work

clicker training mat work

I've been putting this off for a few days but I'm just going to have to get on and write it. It was not the time for the camcorder to die on me, so I can't even back up my words with video. It's quite likely that none of this will make any sense (probably not even to me) but I feel I need to record this progress as I'm quite excited about it.

A short while ago someone on the Enlightened Equitation forum was discussing mat work for expanding the clicker training work. Apparently it is something that Alexandra Kurland (one of the top CT trainers) has introduced to her British students and so I've been giving it a go with Chapiro this last week.
The work starts with getting your horse to approach a small mat (think car floor mat). The advice was to form a funnel of cones that arrive at the mat, this way your job is slightly easier (allegedly) in the beginning stages. Typically Chapiro thought the cones were target practice on the first run and took great pleasure in obliterating my funnel. It didn't take too long for him to work out mat = lots of treats and so he was pretty obliging.
OK I wrote that a couple of days ago, before I thought of doing a short video on my stills camera. So yesterday we worked in the yard (it was persisting down) and that in itself was a challenge, LOL, he doesn't usually get to snoop around the place at liberty so his attention wasn't great. Anyway, what follows is a short, goofy video but it gives an idea of where we are and how much we have to do (lots as always). More tomorrow on how this work will progress.