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Training:
- Unintentional
Trust-busting
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Trust-busting through Unintentional Threatening
An excerpt from Chapter 3, The Power of Positive Horse Training
I once sold a nice mare to a nice woman, and it was
a terrible match.
The mare, Billie, was a roan Appaloosa with some Thoroughbred in her
ancestry. I’d started her western, then switched to hunt seat as she’d
shown some talent in jumping. She was a sensitive, willing horse with a
snaffle mouth, steady on the trails and reliable in the show ring. I
thought I’d found her the perfect home with Marie, a knowledgeable
older woman who’d managed a boarding stable and trained western
pleasure horses several years earlier. Marie saw Billie at a local
show, fell in love with her, and felt the mare would fit perfectly into
her plans to do a little trail riding and breed a few mares.
After Billie passed the vet inspection, Marie arrived with a trailer
and a check. Her daughter hopped on Billie bareback, cantered her
around the ring and pronounced her “sweet,” so they took her home.
A week later, Marie called and said she was having problems with
Billie, and would I come help her figure the horse out. For some
reason, the mare had become “wild and unmanageable.”
When I watched her handling Billie, my heart sank. In only a few days,
Billie had changed from a willing, sensitive horse to a fearful,
unpredictable one—and it was all because of Marie’s body language. The
woman’s movements were overly energetic, jerky and unpredictable. Her
voice was loud, and even her pats and caresses were rough and quick.
She used the rubber curry too roughly and in the wrong places; she
yanked on the leadrope, abruptly dropped the mare’s feet after cleaning
them, and asked the horse to move over by shoving abruptly on her hip.
From Billie’s point of view, Marie was issuing a constant barrage of
threats that the horse couldn’t understand.
I gently suggested that Marie might want to slow down and move more
quietly around her new horse, but I don’t think she understood. Marie
confessed that she was nervous because Billie moved quickly and
unpredictably, and Billie was nervous because Marie was loud and moved
quickly, and therefore …
Nervous or not, Marie was determined to saddle up and ride. After she
climbed on, she spent a good five minutes shifting around to adjust
things: yanking the saddle sideways to center it, kicking her feet
around in the stirrups, flinging the ends of her reins up into the air
to untangle them from the saddle horn. Billie fidgeted and danced, so
Marie slapped the mare’s neck and shouted, “Whoa!” at which point poor
Billie shifted from general anxiety into a state of trembling high
alert, ready to bolt for any available escape route. I was ready to
join her—Marie’s fussing and fidgeting and poking and jerking made me
almost as nervous as the horse.
This had to be stopped before someone got hurt. I stepped next to
Billie and asked Marie to simply drop the reins, be quiet and sit
still. She found it nearly impossible at first—she confessed that she
didn’t trust the horse to stand still—but, to her credit, she complied.
The mare heaved a big sigh of relief and dropped her head into my arms.
I spent more almost two hours explaining to Marie how she was
communicating all the wrong things to Billie, and why neither one was
able to trust the other. I demonstrated how she could change her
movements into slower, gentler, more predictable actions that would
build trust instead of destroying it. Once Marie was able to understand
how frightening and confusing her movements were from Billie’s point of
view, she could begin to learn more effective methods of communication.
We scheduled a month of training and trust-building sessions for Marie
and Billie, focusing on groundwork and basic horse-human communication
skills.
Eventually, they were able to trust each other, and both could enjoy
their trail rides.
© 2005 The
Power
of Positive Horse Training by Sarah Blanchard. All rights
reserved.
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