I hope you know I am quoting the OP. I just suck at multi quotes.
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Yes, I know that. I know you have a pretty common sense view of training and horse behavior.
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Well I wouldn’t go that far 
I everyone raising their hand?
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Buck Davidson got kicked in the face by a grown horse getting loaded on a trailer for the zillionth time in his life.
If only Buck were more experienced and knowledgeable about horsemanship.
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Clearly Buck needs some lessons with a natural horsemanship trainer!!
(To be clear: I have nothing against certain NH trainers, in fact I use Warwick and TT methods in my own daily life)
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I did a clinic with John Lyons in 1989 ish?
Did a 4 day clinic with Ray Hunt in 2002 ish? We ended up having lunch with the ranch owner, Ray, and his wife at a local Cafe.
Studied Buck Brannamon and Jon Ensign and Martin Black’s approach.
I should be able to wrap a horse in hot wire then ask him to move his feet in such a way as to dress himself. I’m not quite there yet.
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To stop all future involuntary reactions a horse has when touching electrical wire, level 2 of the magikal natural horsemanship is needed.
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What I do not understand is the feedbin being put on a hot wire at all.
I can tell you that I found myself standing back a good foot away from Mum’s fences when I was there and she didn’t even have electric fencing.
To me putting a feedbin on an hotwire is unfathomable and cruel.
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I’ve clinic’d with Brannaman, studied Hunt, Black, Neubert, TT, Schiller and back in the day Anderson & Parelli (before it really went off the rails). What I don’t understand is that every single one of those people would tell you that your horse shouldn’t move unless specifically asked to move, and that holding a blanket, waving a blanket, or wobbling a blanket should not qualify as that request. All of those folks have a component of desensitization built in whereby using the same tools the horse learns to either move or not based on your intent. Yes with body language but that’s often exaggerated to teach idiot owners how to be clearer with theirs.
And regardless, it was an incident that could have occurred to anyone because no matter how well trained a horse is, sometimes they make mistakes too, because they are sentient beings with their own ideas about things.
My incredibly well broke gelding stepped on my foot one day just…because we were both klutzy at the same time while I was grooming him and we both stepped into the same physical space.
And my other gelding though he had lowered his head for halter removal, heard something, lifted his head just a little as the halter was coming off, which kind of thwacked him in the cheek/eye, which made him swing his head toward me, which punched me in the stomach. He was very aware of where I was (too close, apparently) but still he flinched from something and that caused him to run into me.
We can debate all day about the hot wire (I dunno, I lived with a lot of hot wire growing up so maybe I am less sensitive to it than others) but there is this inescapable fact that horses do stupid things all the time. I’ve been doing this for 35+ years, have a boatload of training, and yet I still do stupid sh*t periodically and think “welp, shouldn’t have done that” when working with the horses.
The fact that this thread continues when it wasn’t really even worth the original email is mind-boggling. Clearly we are all stuck inside and sick of winter!
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I’ve been stepped on so much by a mature horse that I had to yell for someone to come fetch him and finish bringing him in so that I could sit on the ground and gingerly remove my shoe to see if my big toe was still attached. It was, but my toenail has never been the same. He was coming through the gate and somehow wound up stepping and pivoting with all of his weight on my poor little foot that was in nothing but a weak gardening clog. At first, I couldn’t even holler for help…I couldn’t breathe. Whew.
Clearly he didn’t understand our relationship.
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Yes, and if only that horse had been trained by super majikal NH methods. Obvs Buck doesn’t know how to train a horse. You know, since he got hurt by one. Maybe he just didn’t approach the horse at the correct oblique angle.
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My gelding stepped on my foot and broke the crossties when I tried to clean his sheath. Clearly he felt differently about our relationship than I did!
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Feronia is almost 26 and I’ve had her for 16 years. She’s been at 6 different barns and at every one she is beloved for her good manners. Several kids learned how to lead a horse using her. And… she’s stepped on me, kicked me by accident, knocked me over, clocked her head into mine when she was trying to bite at a fly, jammed my hand into the trailer door when backing out… I could go on. Because she’s a horse, and even the bestest horses do stupid shit.
This thread has reminded me, however, to not go into a narrowish gap between her and the electric fence, but to ask her to rotate herself so she’s perpendicular to it. And back up a couple of steps. The fence is off most of the time, but I just treat it like it’s on all the time. (Still blanketing her without tying her, though. Although… when she was having such anxiety about being zapped by static when having her blanket taken off, I’d tie her in her stall and put some hay in her food bucket. And used Bluey’s trick of hanging onto her tail while brushing her.)
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quietann, hanging on to the tail while brushing stops static?? This is the most useful thing I’ve read so far! My old timer sends his thanks to you and Bluey .
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It won’t stop it 100% but it does reduce it. Hanging onto the mane, pulling it away from the neck, can help with static when grooming the front of a horse. It’s probably more effective if the horse has a long mane like Feronia’s.
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This is called spatial awareness. Yes, young horses have to be taught some spatial awareness when it comes to being led, handled, in the human environment amidst a host of external stimuli and distractions. I am sure your horse’s spatial awareness is significantly better than it was at one point in time. But it’s not perfect. None of us are, really, or I’d never bump into anyone or anything. Without a video of the incident, I don’t think anyone can assume the handler driving the horse into the wire is any more likely than the horse making a mistake about his space in potentially the span of millimeters during this event. If someone has a very poor approach to my horses, they just leave before the person gets to them. So that makes me lean a little bit more towards accident than human error in this case. But either way, the odds were not 0 that this event would occur with anyone due to the proximity of your horse to the hot wire during blanketing. Which was only a recent change, not a years long streak of no incidents. But at the end of the day, hopefully your relationship with the barn is on better terms, and they’ve changed the feeding location to help mitigate similar events from happening in the future. Which is all good.
What is troubling or puzzling on this thread is your continued hyper fixation on this girl and that the barn had her do the work. These days, it’s a luxury to have highly experienced barn workers doing these daily tasks, unfortunately. And if you would like to continue to have a good relationship with this barn, maybe take a pause and consider your options for acting professionally to handle whatever future event may happen there that is a bit scary/not safe, because horses are suicidal and the work is hard and thankless. Or, if this is deal breaker territory, then the answer is to leave.
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It was not on hot wire. But it was close enough to zap the horse mid meal. Not cool.
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I disagree. He’s been blanketed his whole life.
Are you aware of the training progression of horses? Do you know the definition of “athletic”?
So weird that you think a person who is trained in 5 minutes can blanket all horses safely. I’m so happy to disagree with you here.
