Where’s the Brake’s on This Rig Anyway?

[mstacy]

One of the challenges with my young team of Devons is keeping them on a straigth line. They’ve been training in the yoke for a few weeks now. The nigh calf tends to walk a good bit faster than her yoke mate. That’s partly why I chose to put her on the nigh side (rightly or wrongly … but it seemed logical to me). The calf on the off side walks slow but listens more attentively.

I use “walk” and “whoa” complemented by a tap on the rump or forehead to start and stop. Early on both calves had a tendency to speed up going down hill (halter training as singles). I started using “sloooooooooow” to maintain control, with some success. And whenever they actually got ahead of me I just stopped them with a hard “whoa”. My reasoning was that “sloooooow” sounded enough like “whoa” to be recognizable, but different enough to express the difference between decelerating and making a full stop. My hunch is that I’ll be in trouble if I condition them to believe that sometimes “whoa” means slow down and other times it means “STOP!!!” and stand still.

My question (sorry for that long-winded introduction) is whether any of you use unique commands for “speed up” and “slow down” instead of your normal start/stop commands. The relevance of this became immediately obvious the first time I yoked these animals together and said “walk”. We make BEAUTIFUL “gee” turns and a pretty fair “haw” but resemble a drunken sailor when going from point A to B.

Any tips on controlling speed would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Matt Stacy
W. Topsham, VT

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