I want to talk briefly about a technique that I see quite a lot from students and a few other professionals. It’s the use of pressure in a tugging or ‘on/off' fashion.
We all know that horses learn from the release of pressure. Pressure is applied to motivate a horse to search for a response and when the horse offers the response we want we remove the pressure as a reward to indicate he did the right thing.
A reader of my short story books (Old Men and Horses, and Changing the Tide) wrote to ask that I post about hindquarter disengagement and forehand yields since they are mentioned in the books several times without an explanation as to what they are or how to do them.
