Stupid is as Stupid Does

[Alterration]

@Scribbler

We often think a certain bad handling or training experience caused a problem. But it’s just as likely that the problem predated the bad experience. Most farriers are not rough on the very well behaved horses. But take a horse that is already having some pain or balance issues and starts pulling away or leaning or fussing. These are the ones that a temper prone farrier having a bad day may well go overboard in the effort to get the job done. In other words, when I hear “had a bad experience” I leave open the possibility that the horse had prior issues.

Caveat to this. Two horses that I know, that ended up with farrier issues both gained those issues as young horses. Neither horse gave farriers a problem before Farrier x became the barn farrier. Farrier x claimed to be good with young horses (who can be wiggly and impatient) and were not. For both horses the offense was small (yanking away a foot when held “too long”) and the farrier’s response was to escalate. Both horses took about 2 years to fix the problem.

In these cases, there wasn’t a pain issue. Yes, it was a behavior issue, but young horses are rarely perfect for the farrier. Both horses were “perpetual motion machines” from an intensity perspective as is common for their breed. Intense, high energy, hot horses often come with baggage because people aren’t prepared to work with that level of intensity.

[Incantation]

@blue_heron

I’m already comfortable reading the signs that he is getting stressed. I’m essentially looking for someone to fill some holes in his training that I could with time but not sure I’m the best person for the job-- and don’t want to get hurt.

Warwick’s site has a 7 day free trial. Join it, watch the relationship videos, then decide if it is something you can handle on your own. The way he works, you teach your horse to dump his rabbits before he becomes over whelmed, and acts out.

[RedHorses]

My soon to be 13yr old was like this. He would get a little anxious and remain a little anxious for a while then suddenly have to leave the situation ASAP. Not every day and I really enjoyed him when he wasn’t anxious. It was frustrating and there were days I pretended I only had one horse (the other one ).

I got some improvement with various things but Warwick Schiller’s rabbit theory was the turning point. My horse is now capable of letting go of his anxiety rabbits very quickly. He rarely approaches his rabbit limit these days. He has learned to assess and decide by himself that he really is okay with whatever the rabbit is in that moment, and to let it go instead of carrying it around. All I do now is give him the time/space to think about it. Earlier in the process I did have to do some things to derail the “OMG! OMG! OMG! It’s going to EAT ME! OMG! OMG!” train of thought so that he could realize that he was okay.

It was not a quick fix, and sometimes he needs the train derailed again but he is so much more relaxed these days I can only imagine how much better his life is now.

[mvp]

Oh, yes: Been There, Done That. Owned that kind of horse and also made the mistake you did on that fateful day. Thought I was going to die, but got the T-shirt instead.

Not only can you fix it, with the help of a good horseman, but you can profit from learning how to do that.

Mounting is one of the most dangerous things we do with horses because we are unbalanced (and we are asking them to tolerate us making them unbalanced), and so we are physically vulnerable. And that will never change. So, IMO, you have to get the horse to buy in to being mounted. Read that again: This is one of those times that you must have your horse’s mind firmly with you and committed to doing as you ask.

Now add to this problem that we are asking a flight animal-- whose really doesn’t want to fall over and whose ancestors usually responded to psychological pressure by running away-- to stand still while we scare him by being quite unbalanced. IMO, this is the same problem as the horse who got some kind of PTSD from a farrier, or the one who can’t have his face washed or his ears clipped: The “right answer” for us is the “wrong answer” for him because it involves standing still and waiting while he’s scared. In case you don’t think that’s hard, remember the last time you were in the dentist’s chair, asked to open wide and consent to whatever pain might be coming, though you didn’t know when. I think it’s the same psychological task, and it takes some maturity and some learning.

I understand getting to the point with a horse where you say, “OK, I made some mistakes and I contributed to the problem, but Young Horse, it’s time for you to grow up enough to do me a favor once in a while and hold it together.” There’s nothing wrong with having expectations for a horse. But I think it’s wrong to send him off to someone else in the hopes that 1. That cowboy will install (in 30 days or even 90) the soft of mental maturity you want; and 2. That you don’t have to participate in learning how to also keep working on growing that.

I can tell you how I have taught horses who were either sensitive, hot and defensive, or unreadable and buckers how to accept being mounted. And I mean these guys will sidle up to a mounting block, line up their stirrup with my toe (and I can mount them from either side) and wait there until I ask them to leave. But it would take some time to explain and even longer to get a horse to the mental spot where he’s ready to do this.

The short version is that I have to get his mind entirely focused on me and being ridden before I ask him to accept the training of being mounted. Ideally, I work on the mounting lesson at the end of the ride, not the beginning, because the ride has gotten him mentally focused. But if I have to do this at the beginning of the ride (of course I do), there will be some ground work or long-lining or obstacle stuff first.

The more you do this, and don’t get on until the horse is mentally with you, the less time it takes to produce that state of mind in him. So it’s not that you have to baby the horse along and have a huge pre-ride ritual for him. But you do have to hold him-- and yourself— to the standard that says you don’t expect to do something that scares the damn flight animal a lot until you have gotten him mentally ready to tolerate that.

And some other things!

1. His making a big deal of bolting off after getting the mounting wrong seems to be like just a whole lot of baby horse drama about feeling that he almost lost his balance. Meh, ignore that, but do train him to do better.

But you are kind of doing the same thing-- getting scared by something he did and looking for a big, dramatic escape from the problem. I get it, but this will work better for both of you, and for your career as a rider beyond this horse if you come back to the table and participate in teaching him better so that you don’t have to stay scared or give this learning opportunity away to someone else who already knows how to fix this horse training problem.

2. And shame one all the people who got a horse to know some good dressage moves under saddle but skipped the basic training that would help him stand still under pressure. Everyone has failed him a bit and made his life harder than it should be because this horse is surely going to be asked to sit in the proverbial dentist’s chair often for the rest of his life. Also, a horse who knows how to stay focused while still is great in the halt at X.

If I haven’t offended you yet or missed the point, I’d be happy to answer any questions you have.

[scislandsprite]

Yes sorry didn’t mean to imply that you’re not reading his signs. Just kind of wanted to mention that the method that we taught my horse helps her calm herself down in scary situations which prevents the occurrence of a spook etc.

[Posting_Trot]

MVP’s post is excellent.

One other “woo-woo” thing I’ll mention. Be aware of the kind of energy you approach the horse with. Don’t be apprehensive, don’t be constantly looking at how he’s looking at you (“is he giving me the side-eye?”), don’t be anticipating problems.

But also, don’t be thinking: “Geez, I’ve only got 30 minutes to ride! I’ve got to do x, y and z, and I just need this horse to do these three things and I’ll be done.” Too much focus on your anticipated goals, rather than being in the moment, can make the horse concerned and skittish.

[blue_heron]

I plan to have him tested for EPM and Lyme. Hes not an “ideal candidate” symptom wise but I’m not ruling it out.

[blue_heron]

You haven’t offended me but I think we’re getting off the original topic of conversation. This isn’t a young horse or a baby where off days are tolerated and I still have endless hope and patience that they’re going to turn it around. I’m not a stranger to babies or hot and sensitive horses (prefer them) and I’m comfortable doing a lot of the Warwick Schiller and Tristan Tucker esque groundwork. I’ve worked through sooo many issues with this horse including his previous issues with the mounting block. Where I really struggle with this horse is when to coddle him and when to say, “deal with your sh*t, you’re being unreasonable and unfair.” Bolting off while I’m trying to mount up simply can’t be allowed. It’s frankly just unacceptable.

And FWIW and the sake of discussion, I don’t think that ignoring the signs of him being antsy or giving me side eye is a solution at all. I think that is ignoring his attempts to communicate with me and the flip side of that is me coming to CoTH and saying “my horse does _____ with no warning!! I don’t understand why he’s doing this!”

[mvp]

@blue_heron

He has little things. Picking his feet up and putting them down again on the cross ties, staring at me backward while I’m grooming him, being a little more enthusiastic with cookies than usual. The side eye is a big one. It sounds stupid but I’ve got him figured out pretty well. We have our routine but if we deviate from it all it’s a cause for a meltdown. And I don’t want to be that person that’s like “he looked at me wrong, cancel my lesson,” but I’m that person now.

My thought was that a colt-starter could help him work through some of those scenarios and deal with the rabbits himself rather than me just accommodating him all the time and then it being an issue when, inevitably, we need to deal with something and it becomes a huge Thing.

Ok, so after I wrote my post, I thought I might go back and read the 67 ones before it, LOL.

What I think you want-- and what I think any horseman is within his rights to want-- is a horse who is mentally flexible so that he’s not always leaning back on his PTSD about what happened in a similar situation a long time ago. Furthermore, we want them to think more or harder (or more carefully, or wait and listen for directions from us, rather than think less or check out. Last, I’d want them to learn that when they were with me and following directions, their world would be peaceful and understandable. That’s when you have a horse that “extrapolates” well and you can get him to do new things without blowing his mind, or he’s the same ride anywhere, once you give him the same ride.

You do seem to read him well. And, even from the stuff you say about him on the ground, there are things you can do to teach him to pay attention to you in order to find peace in the cross ties or when he’s grabbing for cookies in hand. See how your problem (and solution) start way before your have even put his tack on?

All the stuff-- moving his feet when tied (by both side of his head, no less!) and looking at you back there and grabbing a cookie rather than just taking it politely-- he is doing in ways that suggest to me that he’s worried but he’s trying his best to follow the rules because he knows he should and/or that will keep him safe. Fine. But if he follows the rules and no one actually addresses his worry, what’s he supposed to do with those bubbling emotions? I mean, sure, he follows the rules and gets through the day. But he never felt all the way better when he was with his people, so how will tomorrow be better for him? And some day, from his point of view, he won’t follow the rules and get in real trouble all because he was worried (and or a bit high and the bridle changed and you were in a hurry). He has no solution to being worried.

So know that I don’t think you are actually wrong to want him to learn to manage his own emotions. In fact, we’d be whack to swing a leg over an animal that doesn’t do that. I mean, I wouldn’t marry someone who told me, “Sorry, baby, but when I get mad, I have to kick you in the head and run off. It’s just my emotions.” so there’s no way I’m accepting that in a horse, either. It’s just not safe.

But! For some horses, it can take a whole lot of parenting to get there. That was the main reason in my above post that I was worried about your sending him off to be fixed. I don’t think horses can learn to manage their emotions in a 30-day boot-camp-esque situation. Furthermore, if you don’t learn to become the Center of Peace In The World as you handle and ride your horse, whatever the cowboy did to establish his credibility with your horse won’t transfer to you.

Helping a horse to become that great, ultra-rideable student is so, so, so rewarding! And it makes them really valuable. The good thing about getting into the horsemanship thing enough to actually consider teaching him to manage his emotions AND to experience you as the Center of Peace is that it’s effective, cheap, safe and can be done by putting almost no mileage on the horse’s body.

And I see another parallel for you guys: Right now, you think that you need someone who doesn’t have an emotional connection to this horse to intervene. I’d say the opposite will get you a better partner in the long run: Teach yourself to read his emotions and develop some tools for teaching him to manage those, and you won’t feel that your emotional connection to him is a drawback. But the best way to learn this is to really watch a good horseman work with a horse that you know as well as you know this one. It’s most effective to watch their “conversation” because you’ll notice subtleties about how each one responds that you can’t see in your horse or in yourself when you are doing some of the same activities.

[Brown_Derby]

Bryan Neubert will be giving two rare east coast clinics in October. One in Middleboro, MA, and the other in Limerick, ME. Bryan is IM not so humble opinion the greatest living “NH” trainer on earth (and he is probably the most humble man on earth!). It’s almost like he can look at a horse in a pasture and tell you when it will explode. He was mentored from childhood by the Dorrances (no Ray Hunt rough stuff) and mentored my good friend Lesley Neuman, an incredible mustang trainer. Please have a look at Bryan’s website for clinic info, and consider attending a Neubert horsemanship clinic.

[mvp]

@blue_heron

Please let me know what your behaviourist comes back with. He is super when he is confident (expressive, forward, brave) but unpredictable and not fun at all when he is not. Agree he is not the type you can throw things at to get him used to it, as he’s fine, and he’s still fine, and he’s still fine, and then out of “nowhere” he explodes completely. He’s come a long way with reporting that he is nervous before it all comes out at once.

Yanno, be careful with that “out of ‘nowhere’ he explodes.” It probably isn’t out of nowhere, of course, but out of somewhere that you can’t read.

And I’m not clairevoyant with horses, so I’m not dissing your horse-deciphering abilities. Also, the most frightening kind of horse to me is the one who has been “tortured” a bit so that he sublimates his emotions and worry so that I can’t read them. Someone tried to give me a horse like this once— he was fabulously bred, had a great hind end, but he had bucked off some pros (by bucking big and purportedly without warning). I didn’t take him because, for the time I had spent with him, I didn’t think I could read him well enough to take this possibility out of his future.

But I’d have three thoughts about “subterrainian” emotions in a horse

1. The more you teach this horse that you will help him find peace, the more he’ll relax enough to show you what he’s feeling. Again, I want a horse to be “honest” about what he’s feeling so I can help him and stay safe on him. If I’m one more threat to be managed, my riding him doesn’t have anything to offer him. And, sooner or later, when the chips are down, he’ll run away from me, too, because I’m just as hard and unhelpful for him as the rest of the world.

2. When he tells you he’s worried (and you have tools for helping him with that), make that your next training topic. He already knows all the dressage stuff someone installed in him. You aren’t losing anything or wasting time. Again, the more often you address this, the faster you’ll be able to chill him out so that, some day, you don’t have to hold his hand when you guys are doing hard stuff, rather he’ll just have the ability to focus on you and the job.

3. A cowboy told me once that the money-shot is not desensitizing them and it’s certainly not about eliminating fearful stuff (I’m talking to all you DQs who blame the spectator with the kid in the stroller for your horse’s spook in the ring). Rather the valuable lesson you are teaching is how to get a horse to bring his own adrenaline back down. So you want to put pressure on him, give him a clear set of directions to follow, complete with earn-able praise and rest, so that he experiences a release of pressure when he attends carefully to your direction. It’s the practice with that de-escalation that makes horses secure, not the removal of pressure or even thinking that if you just keep hurling the chaos of the world at him, he’ll figure out how to bring down his own adrenaline. Most of them will, unless we are just bad at reading them or sadistic (and you do see some of this sometimes). But it takes longer than it does with a very smart horseman who is clear about what he’s trying to manipulate in the horse, or, to put it another way, what he’s trying to get the horse to experience.

[blue_heron]

Yeah, we are saying the same thing. I think I will continue doing what I have been doing regarding rabbit training and call that day last week what it was— me being less than genius.

[OverandOnward]

@mvp

Yanno, be careful with that “out of ‘nowhere’ he explodes.” It probably isn’t out of nowhere, of course, but out of somewhere that you can’t read.

All of my riding life I was very good at reading horses and being situationally aware of the things that horses are aware of, and thereby minimizing spooks and veers, etc.

Until one horse came along that I could not read. He became my horse, and when his mind was together he was great, but giant ‘unpredictable’ spooks were a big part of riding him.

I had no idea when the spook was coming. More than one BN clinician said “you have to know it’s coming” to avoid stops at obstacles. But I didn’t, nothing clued me in that he was loosing it at that spot coming up right there.

Until I figured it out - it had nothing to do with the environment. This horse had periodic brain farts, and anything would serve as a spot to air them out. Probably had more adrenaline than he needed (although he wasn’t the stereotypical jiggy type). Today’s spook point for every trip around or across the ring might be a white jump standard just like all the others, for instance. An instructor would say “don’t go near that standard any more this lesson to avoid the spook” and now I knew enough to say “it’s not the standard, if I re-route, he will pick another spot to spook at”. Because that’s exactly what he did - he had to spook to let off some excess adrenaline.

So that was a whole other training path to go down with this horse. He was releasing excess energy and adrenaline from his considerable over-supply, not reacting to the environment. The more I learned about the real cause, the more the horse and I were able to work together to give him more productive ways to ease the strain for him other than spooking. Everything from diet to work schedule to warm-up routine. Then there were periods of months with no spooks. If the spooks came back, it was due to a longer break in the work routine, or some identifiable cause that was more about his internal body workings than it was about environmental spook points.

That post brought back that memory – the horse who wasn’t reacting to something external to himself, but to something internal going on in his inner workings.

@mvp

Rather the valuable lesson you are teaching is how to get a horse to bring his own adrenaline back down.

@mvp

It’s the practice with that de-escalation that makes horses secure, not the removal of pressure or even thinking that if you just keep hurling the chaos of the world at him, he’ll figure out how to bring down his own adrenaline.

Truest things ever.

We will never eliminate all of the triggers. It is not a matter of removing all of the silly things that make horses spook. And some horses will always have more triggers than others.

In my experience, the more they practice what to do immediately after the big bogey scare, the less they spook, and/or the milder is the spook. It becomes less of a mental disruption to the rider, as well as the horse.

As they become more confident in their reaction, they become more secure in their sense of themselves and their immediate environment. Security is at the tippy-top of the horsey needs hierarchy. That is what produces horses that can think and focus through the distractions.

[I treasure videos of Grand Prix dressage horses spooking at the flowers decorating the letters. It makes me feel so much better somehow. ]

[BatCoach]

I had a similar experience but it was a washrack and a rouge, slightly deflated mylar balloon that had floated in from some kid’s birthday party (the joys of urban boarding).

For the next 4 days that horse was VERY spooked & suspicious of that washrack since the attack of “eye level slowly moving shiny thing”.

[eightpondfarm]

@Scribbler

It’s harder to know logistically how to do this with a farrier who is on a schedule. If you trimmed your own you could do a little each day.

i have an old rasp and an old pair of nippers that my farrier gave me to ‘practice’ my mustangs on with the tools of the trade. I pair that with R+ and as my guys are gradually becoming domesticated, they are having verrry positive experiences with hoof work. Two of them are now standing quite well for the farrier already, and a couple more approaching being ‘real’ horses.

[chancellor2]

I have used Sarah Sheehy for such things and I really liked her.

[Event_Horse]

@blue_heron

He is on Mag5000.

Again, from personal experience, I had tried different magnesium supplements and the only one that made a difference was Magrestore. They also have a product called Focus Equine. If you talk to them, they will advise if you need one or the other or both. They have a 100% satisfaction guarantee, so there’s nothing to lose. And if your horse does do well on it, it’s relatively inexpensive as supplements go.

[blue_heron]

Well, Lyme titer came back completely negative-- which is good, but no new leads. He hasn’t “bounced back” like the time before. No silliness on the longe except a little spook (I haven’t tried to get back on him) but turned up a little back sore and not carrying himself as well as he had been. Vet commented that he should have more topline for the work he is doing, which I agree but trainer(s) are happy with the quality of the work. He has a little bilateral though worse on one side toe drag behind that I can’t get rid of-- so what’s next? Could be neuro but not debilitating.

So what is next? A step down in current work? Promising that I’m never buying another horse with emotional baggage again? A talk with his previous owner?

[findthedistance]

I have read the whole thread but forgive me if I have missed this piece of info. Have you tested for PSSM? Mild toe dragging, little back sore, little lacking topline, sometimes losing it… just started to ring a bell for me.

[leheath]

Is there any chance he has kissing spine? Mounting block issues were one of my boy’s most obvious signs along with anxiety, back soreness, not building topline as expected, uncharacteristic spooking, and bilateral asymmetry in his work.