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The Awareness Of The Use Of Positioning -
The Story Behind It
While teaching one of my two-day llama behavior and training clinics at Glenn and Cyndy Baker's Critter Creek Ranch in Port Townsend, WA quite a few Decembers ago, I clearly discovered the profound use of positioning. Though positioning had always been there, I had no specific awareness of it. It was a discovery - a newfound awareness - that would greatly clarify and simplify training and herd management no matter your preferred method or technique. We were working on catching and haltering and I was puzzled. How was it that one participant could maneuver the llama easily about the pen in any direction and others simply could not do it? This puzzling "phenomena" was a common occurrence at every single clinic I had ever attended, assisted with or taught. What was one participant doing differently than the other? There had to be something I was missing. What was it? Was it their particular demeanor? Was it a particular llama? Though those things obviously came into play within the total picture, they were only a part of the whole. It was a great puzzle to me and I finally stopped the clinic asking participants for any observations or thoughts. We had a great discussion but the answer wasn't immediately clear to any of us. I was absolutely intent to discover the reason. A great deal of clinic time was passing so I decided to take a vote of the participants as to whether we should continue to solve this puzzle or go on to the next area of leading exercises. The vote was unanimous - solve this mystery! Everyone wanted to know how to control the action in the catch pen and those who could already control it were most curious to understand why. We spent most of an entire day in and out of the catch pen with a number of different animals and participants... same person, different animals... same animal, different people. We observed and discussed and replayed again and again.
A Day Of Discovery
We soon discovered many subtle positioning quirks such as differences in the depth of personal space for individual llamas as well as for each participant, how the size of both the person and the llama played a role and the importance of paying attention to balance. The direction we faced in relationship to the llama often had a profound impact on the success of directional movement. We discovered our mental and emotional stance was part of the overall equation.
Positioning Ourselves - The Most Profound Discovery
The most profound overall discovery, however, was where to position oneself to make certain things occur in the catch pen without exception in nearly every instance. Though I did not realize the immense scope of our work at the time, specific attention to the art of positioning was a key element for optimum success for all training and herd management. It would profoundly enhance my ability to teach by immediately providing participants with a much more clear and visible understanding of human/llama interaction. The success of positioning is immediate. Our ability to apply any training method/technique or herd management skill comes much more easily and quickly if we first position ourselves for success.
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