OP, with respect what you say about her internal states-- respect (or not) and fear.
This baby horse honest-to-God doesn’t know that when she’s not in a formal training situation, she must be attentive to your requests and do her best to answer them, all the time. She’s just doing what she would like until she runs into a person who seems more dominant and tells her No. You can build a track record with her such that she remembers that you always show up as more “alpha” than she. And she should be handled by people who also do the same so that she figures that basic piece of horse-civilizing at this point in her life and keeps it for the rest of her life. Just remember that she doesn’t know this yet and you all are installing this bit of education now.
Think about the “fear” you mentioned as being on the other side of that fine line in a different way. Unlike respect, fear should be a very brief emotion that she feels AND there should always be a way that she can find to lessen her fear quickly. The other unfortunate thing about teaching that abiding “respect” or regard for us is that we usually have to be come “relevant” to the horse by putting pressure on him, and that usually creates a little bit of fear until he figures out that he can always find a “right answer,” lessen his confusion, escape the pressure and make his world peaceful again. If we could become “relevant” to horses just by being nice to them (feeding treats mentioned above) that would be great. But this doesn’t usually create the kind of high-stakes situation that causes the otherwise independent horse to focus on the problem Right Now.
And the trick to all this is being very clear in your signals and slow or “punctuated” enough that the horse has time to think and to answer them. If you do this well, then you get something better that mere “respect” from your horse; you get her looking up to you for guidance. That’s because, over and over, when psychological pressure has come, the right answer which lessens it has always, always, always been to look to you to figure out how to please you. This is the horse that wants to be trained and wants to be in a relationship with you because you provide clarity, reassurance and, eventually, even some sense of accomplishment in the horse doing her job for you.
To be concrete about it and using your example of putting her in the back of the stall. If you chased her back to the corner of the stall, you created a bit of fear-- you got “ferocious” and took over the space she was in. She lessened the pressure by moving as far away as she could, but then she was trapped by the walls.
The horrific horseman, keeps “chasing” her while she’s trapped there and cowering; he really does scare her. And the next time he walks by, if she jumps to the back of the stall, he calls that “respect.” After all, the horse’s desired behavior, the one he wanted, has lasted.
The good horseman stops the pressure when she’s in the corner.
The great horseman puts her in the corner (and facing you) using the least possible pressure and then releases it (stops chasing) when they see the horse already on her way there.
So to my way of thinking, the goal isn’t fear or respect but, first, a release of pressure for the horse and, later with repetition, the idea that you will create pressure that isn’t so extreme that the horse can’t think. And training with you will amount to a series of puzzles, all of which are solvable if the horse just applies herself to them.
I like to ask them to move, but with a horse I don’t know or a young one or scared one, I really want to have their eye and not the hind end. And I would do this mighty slowly in a stall where the horse could feel trapped and have to defend herself with a hoof. I kind of move like a cutting horse would, or the way you would using your rope to invite the head of the horse where you want it, and your arm or rope as something like a lunge whip or leg, moving that part of the horse away from you. So for me, I wouldn’t want to shoo this horse into the corner, per se. Rather, I’d want to politely move the horse around until she “guessed” and turned toward me (and chances are, her bum will be in that back corner opposite the door). That’s the magic button that makes me stop and I want her to know how to press it!
If you teach them that “turning toward me is a way to release pressure (even though I’m the one applying it… go figure!”) you’ll have a horse that is safe in a stall and easy to catch. This will be easiest to teach in a round pen. You can do it at the walk. It will be a tad harder in a square paddock, but safer than in a stall. Once you have them turning toward you, back around to their shoulder (albeit about 8 feet away), and see if you can get them to follow you with their eye or even walk toward you.
All this is what Monty Roberts called “joining up” and you can see now why you need that if you want to walk into a stall with a baby horse who is making a bid for the door and might run you over because no one ever told her not to. She doesn’t need to “join up” for the hell of it or every day, on general principle. Rather, she needs to join up in order to begin to learn to look at you and read you all.the.time as you’ll want when she is polite and safe for everyone on the ground. And if she is “joining up” with you, she’s not actually making a bid for the door anymore. Rather, she is coming to check in with you about what you want her to do. You just made yourself more relevant than the door.
And YMMV, but I would not feel good about someone telling me to duck under a stall guard to go into a stall with a semi-feral little (big) baby. Nosirreebob-- I want to be able to see that horse and all her pointy bits all the time as my body gets closer to hers in a confined space. And I’d like her to see me coming toward her so that she can tell me what she thinks about that, and we can have a collegial introduction to one another.
