Yippie!
I've watched the Parelli Pattern dvd's! Thank god it's Christmas indeed.
There are four Pattern Packages, starting with On-line (groundwork with halter and rope), Liberty (groundwork at liberty) and of course I only needed those, as Freestyle and Finesse are about riding and we don't do that so much with the ponies.
What I liked about both dvd's is that you finally see Pat himself at work again - in all the old Parelli packages all you saw was Linda Parelli and Parelli students, and now it only was Pat with several horses. What also missed, was the endless sessions of talking heads
and instead everything was horses, horses, horses. And balls, cones, drums, tarps, trailers, bridges and all kinds of groundwork obstacles.
It was great to see the variation those obstacles bring into training and Pat really has some nice ideas for them. I especially like the fact that just because you have three drums, doesn't mean that you should just pole-bend around them. He uses them for every exercise you can imagine, and that really is nice to see as it's bound to give you inspiration. At least it did to me, even when we already were very obstacley lately.
I also liked how he handled situations where the horse didn't understand what he asked. For example when a mare doesn't want to go between two big tractor tires. He tries several things to show her what she should do (going sideways towards, backwards and other stuff I can't remember now) and just by puzzling like that, in the end the mare goes through it and not because she otherwise gets beaten or something like that. And as soon as the horse gets the exercise, he will go and do something else. Which I think is great, but it also confuses me because I thought that the whole idea about Patterns is that you repeat the same thing several times after another untill the horse really gets it? They did try to explain what patterns were and how you can have patterns inside patterns inside patterns, but it only made my confusion bigger, because if a pattern is not repeating an exercise several times after another, then isn't a pattern just the same as 'doing an exercise'? Maybe it's more clear to others, but I didn't understand. However, whatever you call it, it's great to see so many possible variations with groundwork stuff, and I did start thinking what materials we can add to our training sessions!
I thought it was very interesting to hear Pat mention the problem that most horses (and the horse he had in the roundpen at that moment) will circle and lunge with the head to the outside instead of bent correctly to the inside. My problem with all his circling and round-pen stuff was that all his horses 100% of the time were counterbent, with the head facing out and the hindquarters actually more towards the middle of the arena than the frontquarters. When he started working in the long lines, exactly the same. I thought it was good that he told people that you should notice that problem, but he doesn't have a cure for it himself either, and in the groundwork doesn't pay attention to it. That really can't be good for the horses body.
What was great about the video, was that you see Pat himself working with horses with all his patience and feel, not the students who all mean very well, but who use a lot of pressure (and get taught to use that pressure) to get the horses to do the stuff. And contrary to what many Parelli-opponents say, I didn't see any robot-horses either. However, what really did upset, me was how worried all the horses (maybe except the black stallion) looked. Both at liberty and on-line the horses had a tight mouth and 'worried ears', in that the ear towards the trainer, or both ears would be faced horizontally to the side. Of course that will be described as paying attention, but in real life I have only seen worried horses do that. The only times the horses relaxed, was when Pat told them to come towards him and then started to stroke them in order to say the work was over. Then suddenly the mouth relaxed, licking & chewing started and the ears went in a normal, vertical position again.
During the exercises themselves the horses don't look tense if you ignore the face, but every new cue is met with a raised head an hollowed back, showing that there is a physical and emotional tension all the time, which is only let go during the breaks.
That said, it is good to see Pat himself at work, if only because it shows that this emotional problem with pressure isn't just something that is only caused by clumsy students,
but that it also shows in the best trainers - even when only very subtle. Next to that, the ideas for groundwork with obstacles are good - but I do wonder if it really is worth all the money, as most of the ideas really are on this forum too and the dvd isn't for learning to work with obstacles. It isn't a step-plan you can follow to teach your horse not to be scared of and then work with the ball. All the dvd shows is a horse who's not scared of the ball and who has already learned to push it around, and then then does just that in front of the camera. The 'how to teach all this to my horse in heavens name' questions are only answered in the Level packages (or Success series) - and of course in your own head, if you use some imagination.