Things are really moving with Brody! In a sometimes baffling, inconsistent way, but I’m enjoying the progress and trying to recognize Brody’s ideas and efforts to help me understand how to improve our communication.

One exciting development is that Brody is really starting to think, instead of just react. Sometimes when I reward Brody by walking away, he’ll step on the rope (I generally use a 22’). He’s long past worrying when it happens, he just stops and looks at me. I tell Brody to step backwards, then I pick up the slack a bit and the problem is solved. The other day, though, instead of directing him to back up, I simply looked at him and waited. On his own, Brody decided to take a step back, moving his foot off the rope. Cool!

And I think I figured out why Brody stops during circles. He’s rather sensitive, so any change in rope position (as when I pass it from hand to hand when he’s behind me) can perceived as a cue. When Brody feels any change in pressure on the rope, he turns to face me—which is something we’ve been working on. I set about resolving the circle trouble by rotating with Brody’s shoulder for a few days. This allowed me to see that sometimes Brody gets the idea to come to me, which as my draw can be weak at times, I try to permit for a quick rub. Other times he’ll just slow or stop and I’ll correct him—these days with a big slow spank at the current location of his hindquarters, giving him plenty of time to move forward and get out of the way (thanks, Petra at Parelli!). After two days of this, I was able to remain stationary while he made four non-stop circles around me at a working walk.

And Brody’s body language during circles is beginning to improve. Instead of sticking his nose high and away from me, he’s lowering his head at least some of the time, and he pays much more attention to me with his inside ear and is bending his nose more to the inside.

Instead of forging ahead and trying to correct Brody when he doesn’t do what I trying to tell him to do, I’m trying to relax and examine his response -- sometimes it's a really nice surprise. Like yesterday, when I asked Brody to move away from me and around a cone, like we’ve done a hundred times before. Instead of heading away from me, Brody rotated his haunches so that he was facing me and then went around the cone by taking steps sideways, giving me two eyes the entire time. What a lovely idea!