A Week With Kathy and Quick "Seek The Jump"

As I move forward in my jumping goals with Quick it becomes increasingly important that he seek the jump and choices to go over it. I choose to use Liberty as the savvy to focus on for this week in my jumping play sessions with Quick. At the start after looking at Quick’s Self-Assessment checklist I chose to have my week goal be jumping upright barrels at liberty, away from the round pen rail. The photo above is from Day 5 at about 15’ away while keeping my carrot stick in neutral. Below is a brief outline of our progress during the week to get here:

Day 1: For a warm-up before going to liberty, I asked Quick to jump the single barrel laying down (SBLD) from a walk at 12’, then the same at 22’ feet. Both distances he was able to ‘seek the barrel and jump with just a suggestion (phase 1). I then asked for the same at the trot. Once this was going well we moved into the round pen. I asked for him to jump 3 BLD set against the fence, and progressed to one barrel laying down against the rail.

Day 2: We warmed up with a liberty review from day 1. All went well, next we moved to 3 laying down barrels off the rail, no problem  So, on to 2 and then 1. We finished on 3 upright barrels against the rail via squeeze game.

Day 3: We started with 2 barrels against the rail and reviewed the day before. With everything going well we moved to 3 upright barrels about 3 feet off the rail. Once Quick was able to hunt this jump we finished our round pen session with a bucket of grain inside the round pen 

Day 4: We warmed up reviewing the previous days. When I moved to 3 upright barrels a few feet off the rail I played some stick to me with the barrels ‘in the way’ to be sure I was clear in my communication that the ‘jump’ was the solution to this puzzle, success with the upright barrels and stick-to-me. We finished with some grazing inside of the round pen.

Day 5: Again, we warmed up briefly reviewing the previous days. Things were going well, so I asked for a 3 upright barrels from 12’, then 15’ using squeeze game. Quick is such a great partner and loves to figure out puzzles! So, this was a fun week for us both.