Getting Ready for a Parade

QUESTION: What do you suggest for getting ponies ready for a parade? Our little one is pretty bold, I’d still like to get him ready. Also he walks up onto our back porch pretty well and into the feed shed and garage, any pointers in getting them ready for inside visits? THANKS M

ANSWER: Groundwork and more groundwork ... Exposing him to everything and anything that you can think of that he might encounter in a parade ... Stollers, carriages, balloons, flags, horns, bull horns, pops, bangs, dogs, vehicles of all sorts making all sorts of noises (think backfires), music, drums, tambourines, big huge blowups like gigantic pool toy blowups, cans being kicked and bags of cans being dragged, dragging tarps, walking over boards or through "noodle pits" (pool noodles scattered in a "box" laid out on the ground), pom-poms being waved about, balloons bursting, kids running around (especially on all 4's) ... Flower containers, trash flying around, whatever you can possible imagine. I use LOTS of positive reinforcement (clicker training specifically) teaching the ponies to "target" a scary object. I'd also teach the ponies to "self calm" ... That is to put their heads down to the ground when feeling anxious or threatened.

If you have means to get the ponies out and about, take them everywhere you can including horse shows, fairs, parades, in town and around neighborhoods ... Just exposing them to as many different situations as you can think of. But do you're +R first and most importantly, the self-calming and the targeting.

Even before the self-calming and targeting, though, you want to be sure your ponies trust you implicitly as their leader. The first week's Q&A discussed this. Please review it.

Hope this helps. It's a pretty general answer but applies to ALL horse training/teaching! The first is to establish YOURSELF as leader; Second to teach the animal to self-calm; Third to target object; Fourth to expand the situations.