Just signed up for a Liberty clinic with my Spanish Mustang mare. She’s super smart, loyal and willing and I think she would excel at liberty work, so I’m excited for the clinic, but I’m not feeling particularly confident about it because she can be really spooky under certain circumstances. At home, she’s very quiet, but as soon as we go off the property she thinks everything is trying to eat her. Does anyone have any advice?
My mare is spooky at home occasionally but is much worse away. Ulcer meds every time we showed helped her significantly.
6 Likes
You might get something different than what you originally planned out of this clinic but it sounds like you will have a great learning experience anyway if the clinician is the type that can help you teach your mare how to focus on the work and not be spooky.
The best advice I can give you is to go into this wanting to learn, and not worry about it if your horse is less than the most perfect horse there. That will allow you to relax (hopefully) and your horse will hopefully relax some too.
13 Likes
You could try to get there very early and let your horse have a nice long hand walk look around at all the exciting stuff. Check with the clinic host about that option.
9 Likes
As many field trips as possible between now and then. And if the clinic venue was close enough, I’d inquire about taking a field trip there before the main event.
Is she spooky about the physical new places? Or is it because it’s a busier environment than home? Can you gently introduce a little “chaos” (for lack of a better word) into her daily life? Tractors moving things, kids in a splash pool, crowds of people ringside while she schools?
9 Likes
I imagine both, although I haven’t really experienced too much chaos with her as she’s boarded at a small private ranch that’s very quiet. She took a couple of months to really settle in at this ranch after I brought her home and she was quite spooky for the first month. I unfortunately don’t have a trailer so I can’t really trailer off property but I’m going to take her for a few in-hand walks in the neighborhood and see about borrowing a trailer for one field trip between now and then. I will definitely reach out to the venue, that’s a great idea.
1 Like
Probably a silly question but is there some calming element to the ulcer meds or was it treating the actual ulcers that helped her?
1 Like
No calming element. Treating the actual ulcers. Spookiness, especially in stressful situations like shows and travel, is often an indicator of pain.
5 Likes
Ahh, didn’t realize those meds worked that quickly! I don’t really suspect Ulcers with her because she has no other symptoms, but she did have a relatively mild laminitis episode in February so it’s possible that influenced the spooky behavior earlier this year. She’s looking very sound at the moment but I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye!
I have a horse who used to be a total wildcard away from home.
Our outings became a lot less eventful when my mental game got better.
I used to worry, try to micromanage, prepare for the worst…
I had to retrain myself to be… different.
One thing that helped me a lot was coaching away from home with a trusted coach who knows me and my mare.
Can you book some lessons offsite before the clinic? That might be a good baby step. Bonus if the instructor can come to you first and get to know you and your horse before you add the element of a new location.
3 Likes
I do liberty work at home. My suggestion would be to not expect that you are going to be doing Cavallia level liberty work in the first hour. Good liberty work has a lot of overlap with good ground work horsemanship so you might need to just back up to baby steps but hopefully the clinician will be very helpful.
Liberty work falls apart fast if the horse is anxious distracted or hyped up. Even at home. You will need to factor in a big whoop around the arena with her tail in the air. It’s a process.
1 Like
My horse was super spooky, but away from home often there was so many novel things that he was good because “he didn’t know what to spook at first”.
I also found if I had been to the place myself, knew the place pretty well, it helped quite a bit too.
.
4 Likes
You might be surprised. Mine is so much better when we have something serious to focus on.
3 Likes
Yeah, kind of along these same lines…I notice that when my horse is being anxious and spooky, if someone comes up to me and starts talking to me and I shift my focus from obsessing over the horse’s every twitch and snort to chatting with the person…whattaya know? Horse calms down. I’ve seen this with my gelding in several different settings, whether he’s gotten blown up at home over something or is away from home and anxious.
And a trainer is always a good idea. They make you focus on getting on with the program and doing something instead of staying all up in your head about your horse’s anxiety.
11 Likes
Yup! It never used to be such a problem for me until this particular horse, who had a tendency to go from 0 to 60 in the blink of an eye. I started becoming very defensive because I never knew what she would do, especially in a new environment… but my defensiveness just escalated the problem.
I needed a coach who could see this. Riding with a trainer who couldn’t appreciate what was happening was not helpful (people who wanted me to micromanage more, people who would cut me down and make me feel like crud, people who didn’t acknowledge a big part of the problem was my fear, etc). But coaches who could keep my out of my head were invaluable.
Now I have mostly regained the ability to keep myself out of my own head, like I could when I was younger. But it was a surprisingly long road.
4 Likes
I feel this! I had no fear as a young adult but at 34 with two kids and PTSD from multiple crazy horses under my belt, I have a hard time sometimes lol. I’m definitely getting there though, I’ve made a ton of progress and gained a lot of confidence with my mare (enough to start her under saddle myself). When it comes to new things like this clinic though, I always find myself at square one again with my confidence.
4 Likes
This is very very true for my mare and I too actually! Really makes me think it’s just all a “me” problem and not her at all 
2 Likes
My WB was an anxious, spooky horse. So was my QH at times. I discovered that asking my QH to do something he knew how to do easily, but difficult enough that he had to shift the greater part of his attention to the doing of it really helped him. It was 6m circle figure 8s for him.
My WB needed it before I was riding him so I did walk, halt, back up, walk, halt, move hindquarters left or right (as directed), walk, halt, move forehand left or right (as directed), walk, halt, etc. I would run through the various options as quickly as he could smoothly manage (too fast added to his anxiety) doing 2-6 steps (responsive easy steps, not hard resistant steps).
The intention was to claim enough attention to move his body in a responsive, easy manner, while leaving enough attention on the world around him to allow him to realize that whatever it was really wasn’t that dangerous. The end result after doing this for a long time, was that the exercise and movement itself was calming to him and he could realize there wasn’t anything to be concerned about.
The TRT Method does something very similar, but with different moving the horse patterns. I have been using this on my lease horse and the almost three year old with great success. The recent arrival of sheep flock and noisy guardian dogs have been a good test and training opportunity.
4 Likes
Omg, funny story about a hunter round that started to go south, I insisted we were not having it which meant horsey jumped the standard… causing the judge, sitting on the other side of that standard, eyes to bug out and reasonably scare the crap out of her… for which I, of course, apologized as we landed over that fence, …at which point the crowd (and then I) started to giggle, after which the rest of our trip became reasonable and not scary.
Go figure.
2 Likes
Isn’t that funny? It’s like things get put into perspective and suddenly the horse being a bit of…well…of a horse…isn’t such a big deal.
Years ago I took my gelding to his first show, a multi-day affair that’s about a 30-minute drive from home. We always left the horse there to save him the hassle of hauling back and forth (not his favorite activity) and we’d go home to sleep and take care of the horses left behind.
The evening before the show, while we were still finishing up at the showgrounds, a bunch of bad storms started coming through. Long story short, we left the horse there with tornado warnings galore all around us and drove home in horrible conditions. We were nearly home when we crossed right through where a tornado had gone just moments before. Mobile homes ripped apart, power lines down across the road (that we drove over!), huge trees snapped. It was terrifying.
Got home, everything was fine, storms passed, went to bed. Next morning was gorgeous. And suddenly, riding my dude in his first show in the big indoor with lots of other horses seemed like small potatoes compared to the devastation we witnessed on the way back to the show and had survived the night before.
Showed with newfound courage and perspective and nearly every class we went in was huge and had to be split AND we WON nearly every class. Go figure.
6 Likes
