Two at a time

A post from facebook that was well received, so I'm reposting it here.  

I've been trying some new stuff with a couple horses I have in for training I thought I would share. They live together, and the owners have a really difficult time catching them when they are out in the pasture together. I did a little experiment, and realized that if I put them in separate pens, but still with multiple other horses and just over the fence from each other, so they could still feed off each other, within a day or two I could have them catching quite easily. But put them back together, and they would regress quite a bit, even as the rest of their work with me improved, and after they had been very easy to catch in with other horses. So I decided to try working them together, first in the round pen, at liberty. I spent time setting up a search, in which I was in the pen with the flag, with both of them loose, asking them to be on opposite sides of the pen and focused on me. This was fun, because it didn't take long before the appy mare (who is the more confident of the two and has had more work with me than the grey gelding) figured out exactly what I wanted, and was helping the gelding figure it out. Once they were confident with this, I spent time working each of them at liberty as if the other wasn't there, asking the one not being worked to hang out, stay attentive, and ignore the other horse, and ignore all of my movement while guiding the other horse. Then, I spent some time doing all of this again out in the bigger arena. I've seen HUGE improvements in their catching! The first couple days after this, I went in to the paddock with the flag, and set up a search, which only took them minutes to figure out (and they separated, and looked to me). I worked them at liberty in the paddock before catching, just the same as I'd done elsewhere. At this point, they are just plain easy to catch, and at the most I have to ask for their attention with a little cluck. I'm still revisiting working them together in the round pen from time to time, as the grey gelding can still get a flustered and I have seen a lot of benefit to his confidence, both in himself and being comfortable while I work the other horse, that not everything is about him, and in his ability to prioritize me over his mare friend. The softness that is coming into both of them during this work and other work has been great! Plus...it's just way less of a pain to catch them, which was really the point of the whole experiment.