BTDT. And that’s true with horses who were naturally sensitive, or those who acquired some PTSD via someone hurting their ears. And I’m 5’1".
IMO, you first need to teach your tall boy to put his head down low, reliably and without any reference to his ears. I mean, he should put his nose by your knee if you ask, and allow you to pet his bridle path.
The reason to teach this is because 1. It is a posture of relaxation for them. The ear problem is also a mind/training problem, so you might as well install a button on your horse where you can influence his mind quickly via his body. 2. Because we (read: I) am short, chances are that when I’m doing something up by the ears and I kinda can’t reach anyway, if something goes wrong, I’ll inadvertently be rough up here. I don’t care who y’are, or how tall…all of us have had a horse, say, move his head suddenly and had us rake some strap over his ears… which makes him even more surprised and unhappy. So with your PTSD horse, you never want this to happen. And you want him to think that give you his head down low (and that means access to his ears), he will earn peace and safety.
Second, teach him that he can control how you touch his ears. That’s right, he’s in charge. What that means is that you teach him a pattern: When he is pulling away or putting his head up, you keep a hand (or towel or clippers or whatever) up by his ear. as close as you can get it. When he lowers his head or comes closer, you instantly take the offending object away. What you want him to learn is that he can push offending objects away from him.
I’d do this by standing on a tall mounting block in an open space with the horse in a rope halter. I would have already taught this horse to give to poll pressure and also that it’s his responsibility to keep a loop in the rope. You can do this with a less-broke horse, but it means that when he moves back, he’s going to go farther, you are going to have to jump off the mounting block and you will lose the hand-near-ear position you wanted. Don’t teach him that if he runs away from you he does, in fact, get you away from his ear. He already knows that; that’s your presenting problem.
You can do this on the ground if you are a tall man with a short quarter horse (which is why the NH gurus who have YouTube videos of teaching horses to accept clippers by their ears) make it look so easy and smooth. I wish I could find my favorite one fo you. It would make this pattern that lets the horse push the clippers away pattern very clear.
In any case, me on the mounting block, horse with a loop in the rope, or me on the ground with a horse whose ears are about level with his (tall) withers. I put my hand up there and do as much touching of the ear as I can without getting to the place where he’s moving it away from me. I don’t want to make him so tense that he’s moving up or backward and I’m trying to chase him. Rather, I want to put my hand in “the zone” of his ear that makes him worry, but not raise his head high or move his feet. When I’m there, I wait to see if he happens to exhale or lower his head. If he does, I remove my hand, exhale myself and praise him and then stand around for a minute. Then maybe I “open a new paragraph” by having him move over so that I can do that the other ear, or with that same ear again.
My point in standing on the mount block is to make it so that it’s physically easy for a shorty like me to put my offending hand near his ears in an accurate way. I don’t want to inadvertently move it away from his ears because he escaped me!
I’ll get my hand closer as he allows me with the same criteria in mind-- head where I can reach it and feet not leaving-- and again get him to make a move toward relaxation that gets me to change my behavior. Do that lots until he offers a lower head and allows you to touch him where you want, as much as you want.
If he stands there tense and unchanging, or he gently starts to leave and you don’t want to chase him, your recourse is the hand holding the lead rope. The hand messing with his ears stays relaxed and gentle-- it’s the offending thing he’s running from; it can’t get rougher. But the lead rope is you as his handler communicating with him. So here, I like to “suggest” to the (broke) horse that rather than leave, he obey the lead rope and stay put. In this case, when he moves his head to get away from my hand, or starts to, I let him run into the end of the slack in the rope and have the halter (not my hand with the ear) tell him to put his head back into the position that puts the slack back in the rope.
Right now, your horse knows one, pretty rational strategy: If he wants to protect his ears, he should raise his head, and if that doesn’t work, he should escape with his whole body. You want to teach him a different way of relieving his own mental pressure. Just desensitizing isn’t enough (though it’s part of it-- you need to help him see that he can have different, unexpectedly nice or acceptable experiences with his ears). But you also need to figure out a way to keep him in a place (still and head low enough that you can reach his ears), and mind in gear so that he actually can experience something different. But you are teaching him other things, too. First, he can control the situation. And later, you are teaching him that even if he never likes people touching his ears, he can accept it.
If this were my horse and he had had some legit ear trauma in the past (like he was earred down as a baby), I’d keep him very, very tuned up about lowering his head for clipping or the bridle. This is the kind of horse who can inadvertantly reinforce his PTSD if he finds himself with a new person who doesn’t know how to bridle a horse with finesse… they screw up… he raises his head… they crumple an ear… and now his worst suspicions are reconfirmed. If he is taught to lower his head for bridling, this scenario is less likely to happen.
If you spend some time with teaching the horse that he can give you his ears in order to make you stop touching them in a way that alarms him, the whole thing won’t take too long. And from there, you can being to start re-touching his ears in ways that are OK. The reality is that a horse does have to let us touch his ears; there’s no way for him to go around in this world with his ears never, ever, at all, ever being touched. So you need to get him to the spot where, when he’s been taught to lower his head, accept his handler’s requests and just tolerate stuff with his ears, he’s not afraid and ready to escape.
The good news is that if you do this bit of training well and then have good handlers slow down and reinforce it a bit as necessary, it really doesn’t take too long to solve the problem. And the problem does stay solved or solvable with a quick tune-up.
Good luck! I hope this helps.
