IIf a horse doesn’t let you catch him it doesn’t mean he doesn’t trust you. It just means he doesn’t want to get caught and go to work.
My old pony became hard to catch on retirement pasture. If you could get your hand on her mane she would submit and do everything you wanted. Avoiding being caught was her only line of resistance.
My sister’s horse would come galloping up to you in pasture because he was confident he wasn’t going to go to work if he didn’t want to. Once you mounted he would spin around and once jumped a ditch back into pasture. He had lots of resistance and didn’t need to avoid being caught.
Both these horses had been good kids horses ridden every day when we kept them.stabled but lost their manners when we went to college and let them live semi retired on pasture.
My current horse lets me catch her easily, is a doll on the ground now, but still tries to mutiny a bit under saddle.
They have different lines of resistance.
After all these years I am increasingly unclear what it really means for a horse to love you or trust you.
IME horses tend to either trust all.humans generally and to feel safe in the situations we introduce them to, or they don’t.
If they build trust with one owner it tends to be transferable. And if they have a bad experience with something they will be reactive to that situation with everyone. Is why you don’t let idiots trailer your horse for you, for Instance.
If the horse “only trusts one person” I expect that is the only person in the horse’s world with decent horse skills
Now there may be the odd wild abused mustang who genuinely only bonds with one person. But I think that is rather rare. Most horses extrapolate from the good care of their owner to expect the same of the rest of the world.
This doesn’t mean they always do exactly what you want. But it means that when they don’t, it isn’t because they don’t trust you. It’s because they prefer to do something else and think they can assert themselves.
So indeed they may trust and love you too much, but not respect you. For instance my current horse’s preference for a trail ride would be to spend the whole hour with her face in a hedge grazing. My preference is to go forward at a brisk trot. My preference wins out because I am a human with long range goals and she is just a horse but also because I have decent riding skills. For other riders she has been known to march back to the barn. Not bolt exactly just march, if you can imagine bolting at a fast walk. Not that she doesn’t trust them. She just knows they can’t stop her.
So “trust” is only part of the picture. And when you are dealing with a wise old pony who is perfectly calm and relaxed in work, it isn’t an issue of trust above all else. It’s that he prefers to be left alone.
Now if he was spooking and bolting and obviously afraid yes, there is a question of trust.
Many of the western horse manship trainers got their experience and insights from dealing either with true feral horses (mustangs) or range bred young stock that was effectively almost feral. That’s why they put such emphasis on join up and trust and round pen.
Most of us outside ranch country don’t ever encounter such horses. Either they are well broke by the time we meet them, or they have been handled as babies aand halter broke at 3 days old.
When a tame good citizen horse develops bad habits it generally isn’t because of lack of basic trust.
Another possibility is that even the amount of work OPs old pony does caused him physical or mental stress. How does a deaf horse react to stimuli? Does he find it stress ful that he doesn’t always know what’s happening? Or perhaps his back hurts or he hated having children constantly on or off?
