I've seemed to have completely missed your videos - what a super drooling gorgeous Irish Cob you have! So completely the opposite of the standard idea of that Cobs are slow, lazy and stiff - he's so flexible!
If I show these three videos to my sister (Irish Cobs are her favorite breed), she will melt right on the spot. Jason is super!
About the bucks - he's just like Sjors, quite opinionated!
I don't see anger, but instead a horse who's extremely willing to do things right (and earn food) - the opposite of the medal being that he's quite touchy and easily frustrated when he's not right or when he disagrees with your reactions. A wonderful teacher!
Sjors had exactly the same responses to the lightest touch with the whip - he wasn't afraid of it and I could stroke him everywhere with it if I didn't mean it as a cue, but as soon as the touch meant a cue, he responded with a snappy tailswish or a hop with the hindquarters. I learned exactly the same lesson as Natalie: if my cue/movement/tool isn't helping but instead hindering the pony in finding that correct movement, then I should stop using that cue/movement/tool and find another. So no whip, and when Sjors started to tailswish if I walked too straight towards him in the shoulder in, I moved more sideways myself as well with a more polite curve through my body and the tailswishing stopped.
About the sideways towards, he seems very keep on that and moves very agile when doing so, but he also seems to hurry a bit in it (probably again because he tries to do it so super eager) and that makes the movement a bit uncontrolled. As he's moving towards you and that could get you into trouble when you suddenly find a fence behind your back,
it might be wise to start to teach him that you're not really looking for fast moving sideways towards you, but instead for a more controlled and balanced movement, even a bit slower so that he can do it with the correct bend through his body: bending his tail and nose towards you and the ribcage out. That's when you get a real travers.
When focusing on the correct bend in the travers, I did so by asking the ponies to move towards me and then target my outstretched hand with their nose in that movement. As soon as they touched, click and reward. The next phase was that they did turn the head towards me, but also turned the shoulder towards me so that in fact they were walking straight towards me again.
That's when I used my other hand (tailside) to touch the ribcage at the place of the surcingle or the base of the neck right in front of the shoulders in order to ask them to keep those away from me (while the nose and tail moved towards me).
So in fact I need three hands for travers/sideways towards:
- When everything goes well, I'm simply walking sideways or backwards away from the pony with arms relaxed and he follows in travers
- when the neck is bent the wrong way with the head facing away from me and the direction of movement, I stretch out my hand closest to the head and ask the pony to touch that with the nose
- when the pony moves too fast towards me or pushes the shoulder in instead of keeping it out, I stretch out my hand closest to the tail and touch his neck base/ribcage with my fingers, also indicating the distance I want him to keep between him and me (an arms length
- when the hind quarters lag behind and the pony becomes too straight instead of going sideways, I stretch out my tail hand parallel to his spine towards the hindquarters and ask him to touch my hand with the hindquarters again, which means that they have to move in again even if they don't literally touch my hand.
Isn't dressage a wonderful puzzle?
And now I'm going to torture my sister with the videos of your Super Cob...
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