SharonZ wrote:
I need to transition this from pressure ask to something else, but I haven't figured that out yet. I am up for suggestions.
If you want to replace the pressure for the turns on the frontquarters, you can do that by asking her to target your hand with her hip. First you touch her hip with your flat hand and reward Merry for this so that she learns that the touch is what gets her the rewards. Then her own activity comes into play: you can move your hand some millimeters away from her hip and hold it there until she touches it or gives the slightest try of moving towards it. After some time you can increase the distance and she will turn her hindquarters towards you when you hold out your hand (and maybe give a certain voice signal).
Personally I prefer using body language for those movements right from the beginning, but unfortunately I haven´t found a way to ask the hindquarters to come towards me by only using bodylanguage (instead of targeting) yet, which works for all or at least several horses. With the turns on the hindquarters that is easy and also my way of asking for sideways towards me by only using body language is understandable for many horses, but with the turn on the frontquarters (moving the hindquarters towards me) I am still doing something wrong apparently. It only works once the horse has learned to move his hindquarters towards me in another way.
What I actually wanted to say: using your body for those turns can also be helpful, either right from the start and as the main cue or added to another cue like using a target. If you try it, watch your hips, it´s amazing what a fine-tuned communication you can achieve with hip movements.
But even if you decide to keep the pressure cues, maybe instead of pushing harder and harder you can just touch her hindquarters and wait for her to move them away, and then reward her very much for that. With my Pia it was totally impossible to get her to move away from me in the beginning. She is a Shetland, so maybe if I had pushed as hard as I could I would have had a chance to move her a few centimeters, but with reasonalble lightness it was just not possible - in a pressure way. But once she had realized that moving away from me pays off because she is getting rewarded for this (and it´s never uncomfortable because I don´t insist or push harder), she started moving away from me on a cue as light as laying a finger on her hair or not touching her at all but just moving my hands towards her. Actually she who had hated to move out of my space then pushed herself in front of me whenever she could, just to have an opportunity to move away again and get rewarded.
Oh, and Merry is soooo cute!