Faith is a powerful thing. What we believe we can do or not do, and what is believed by those around us can greatly impact what we will ultimately accomplish in our lives. I know this is true for me and since studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I have learned it is also true for my horse Sonny. But recently I learned just how powerful it can be when my faith in someone else was combined with my faith in the principles taught by Parelli.
My belief in the power of faith began with a lesson from my parents. Even though I was a girl, growing up at a time when opportunities for girls were limited, my parents raised me to believe that I could do anything I wanted to do. They believed in me and expected that I would be successful. No matter what I told them I wanted to be; a veterinarian, a dolphin biologist, an Olympic swim coach, a geochemist, they told me I would be great at it.
The lesson was reinforced many times during my careers, first as a swim coach and science teacher and then as a manager for the DuPont Company. I never forgot the time a supervisor asked me with all sincerity one morning, “Well, what miracles are you going to perform today?” I would have moved mountains for that man and when I became a manager, I tried to believe in the people who worked for me as much as that man had believed in me. Because I held high expectations of my swimmers, my students and my employees at DuPont, they often performed better for me than they did for other people. I treated them as if they were capable of great things and because of that, often they were.
While I held high expectations for the people in my sphere of influence, before I began to study Parelli Natural Horsemanship, chauvinism keep me from according my horses the same respect. I loved my first horse, Max, but I didn’t think he was very smart. Fortunately for both of us he was very well trained and very athletic. Riding him was like driving a high performance sports car. Sonny came along 23 years later. He was bigger, more stubborn and, I thought at the time, kind of clumsy. If I didn’t walk him straight out of his stall, he would bump into the wall. He wasn’t particularly careful with his feet, stepping on me more times in the first month that I had him than Max did in the previous 23 years. Sonny was rock solid on the trails but riding him was like trying to muscle around a RV. I didn’t know anything about horsenality and didn’t understand his left brain introvert nature so I quickly came to the conclusion he was a nice horse but he wasn’t particularly athletic.
I would like to say that my expectations began to change as soon as I discovered Parelli but it would be almost 2 years I before I realized how much my lack of faith in Sonny was affecting our progress. I was in my first clinic with Carol Coppinger and we were playing with the circling game. Sonny was having trouble maintaining gait through the change of direction and Carol had come over to help us. I was fumbling my way through the exercise and making my usual excuses for Sonny. It was bad on so many levels.
“He has trouble with circles all the time,” I told Carol. “He’s so big and he just isn’t very athletic.”
“Can I try?” she asked, reaching for the lead line.
I handed her the line and retreated to the edge of the arena. Carol walked up to Sonny and stroked his neck. “You are a big fellow,” she said to him. Then she looked over at me. “I bet he’s way more athletic than you are giving him credit for.” With that, she backed him away from her and sent him off in a circle. Before long she had him changing direction at a trot without breaking gait. When she asked him to change at the canter he pivoted alertly and threw in a flying change. Clearly I had been underestimating his potential!
That clinic was a turning point in my relationship with Sonny and it also had impact on the way I approached The SummerWinds Stable horse rescue, where I worked with rescued horses. Where others saw problems, I saw potential. I expected the horses to respond positively to the Parelli method and they did. Working mostly on the ground with new horses coming into the sanctuary, I improved ground manners, solved catching problems and eased horses into a new way to relate to the humans in their lives.
It was an experience with a young girl at the rescue that helped me see the power of combining positive expectations with the Parelli principles. Besides rescuing horses, The SummerWinds runs programs for children and this spring was hosting a home school group for a series of beginner riding lessons. Being the horse specialist at the rescue, I seldom became involved with the children’s programs but that morning I was sitting in the barn while the instructors were having their meeting before the sixth and final week of the program. I overheard them discussing the difficultly they were having with one little girl who was very fearful. It sounded to me like they didn’t think she was capable of overcoming her fear and they didn’t know what else to try with her.
Without thinking, I spoke up. “Do you want me to give it a try?” I asked.
Everyone turned in my direction and I could read the skepticism on their faces. “Sure, if you want to” the head instructor replied. “Have at it.”
There were six little girls in the lesson and each one had her own instructor. My little girl was about 8 years old and I could see right away that she was nervous. Although she was big for her age, she was assigned to ride Holliday, a large red and white paint whose size must have been intimidating for her.
Holliday originally had been purchased by the rescue’s director as a Christmas present for her daughter. When Holliday arrived at the rescue, he didn’t pass his vet check because of a problem with his eyes. Rather than sending him back to his former owner, who hadn’t even recognized the problem with his eyes, the rescue shipped him up to the New Bolton Center for surgery to correct the eye problem. Although the director felt he wasn’t suitable for her daughter to show, she felt he was a nice horse so the rescue kept him as a lesson horse. He was a big boy with a quiet disposition, ideal for someone with confidence problems.
After the horses had been tacked up, I introduced myself to my student for the day, helped her onto Holliday’s back and started to lead her around the arena. Walking beside her, holding Holliday’s lead line, I could see that despite her apprehension, she was embarrassed to be the only student who was not riding independently. My years of experience coaching swimming and teaching told me that this was a child who really needed someone to believe in her.
I led Holliday back to the center of the arena, asked him to stop and then stepping back to his side looked up at the child on his back. “Did you know that there are only four things you need to be able to do to ride a horse by yourself” I asked her.
She looked down at me, eyes wide, face solemn, and shook her head.
“Yep” I said. “All you need to be able to do is to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?”
Again she shook her head and then added in an anxious voice. “You won’t let go of him, will you?”
“Nope, I got him” I said. “Now, let’s work on getting Holliday to go forward. Here’s what I want you to do. First I want you to squeeze him with your legs. Don’t kick him, just squeeze. If he doesn’t move then I want you to cluck to him like a chicken.” When I put my tongue against the top of my mouth and made the clucking sound she gave me a tiny smile. “Can you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t think so” she said.
“How about making a kissing sound?” I asked. “Like this.” When I puckered up my lips in an exaggerated kiss she laughed.
“Like this?” she asked and then she smooched.
“Yep, just like that and if he doesn’t move then, I want you to take the reins and just swing them back and forth on his shoulders until he moves.” I demonstrated with the reins and then let her try it. After a few swings she seemed to have the hang of it. “OK, here we go.”
Holding on to the very end of the lead line, I waited for her to begin. I had never done this with Holliday before but I had confidence it would work and I needed it to work for the sake of this little girl. She sat up straight and pushed her legs into Holliday’s sides, then she smooched to him loudly. Holliday stepped forward. I was careful not to move until Holliday took a step, then I walked along side for a few steps. I looked up at the little girl on his back. There was just the slightest smile on her face. I stopped Holliday and let her try asking him to go several times. Each time Holliday moved forward on her smooch.
“OK” I said to her as we walked along the rail, “now you have to learn how to stop him.” I looked right at her and asked, “Who do you think is stronger, you or Holliday?”
“Holliday is stronger” she answered.
“So, can you stop him by pulling back on both reins if he doesn’t want to stop?” I asked. When she shook her head I said. “So here is what you do when you want him to stop. You just lift up one rein and hold it until he stops.”
“Like this?” she asked, lifting her right hand up and pulling the rein to her chest.
“Keep your arm straight,” I said. Just lift it straight up like this. With that, I used my hand to straighten her elbow and lift her arm straight up in the air. Holliday took two steps and stopped. Silently I thanked this quiet horse for being such a quick study.
We tried starting and stopping until she seemed to have the hang of it and then I taught her to turn by holding her arm straight out to the side using a direct rein. She turned Holliday left and right. Finally I showed her how to back him up. We were 30 minutes into a one hour lesson and she had the basics.
“OK,” I said, “now I am going to unhook the lead line so you can do this by yourself.” A look of panic began to creep into her eyes. Before she could protest, I said. “I’m going to walk here right next to you, just like I was when I was leading. I know you can do this by yourself but I’ll stay right here just in case. So ask Holliday to walk forward.”
I smiled at her and nodded my encouragement. She took a big breath, kissed to him loudly and he stepped forward. I walked right along with her, encouraging all the way. At my direction she had Holliday walk forward, stop and turn. Then she backed him up. I moved a little further away from Holliday’s side and asked her to do it again. Then I asked her to walk Holliday around one of the barrels and over a pole on the ground. Each time she did something new, I moved a little further away from her and the horse. Finally I was standing about 10 feet away.
“Can you take ask Holliday to go down to that barrel,” I said as I pointed at a barrel on the other side of the ring. “Then go around the barrel and bring Holliday back to me?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know,” she answered.
“Well, with as good as you have been doing, I’m sure you can do this” I said. “How about you give it a try?”
“OK,” she said and she smooched to Holliday. He ambled off in the direction of the barrel. When he got there, she pushed him into a big right hand turn with her direct rein and walked him back to me.
“Now can you walk him over there to the fence?” I pointed in the other direction and off she went. By the time we had done this several times, she was clearly riding with more confidence.
“Would you like to try a trot?” I asked.
She looked a little doubtful.
“You’re doing so well, I think you’re ready” I said to her. “You can put one hand down here on the saddle and push. That will help you stay put. I’ll stay right next to you and we will only do a few steps at a time. We’ll count together, one, two, three, four and then stop.”
Planting her hand on the saddle, she nodded her OK. I chirped to Holliday and trotted forward. He jogged next to me and we both counted out loud to four. When Holliday stopped I looked up to see how she was doing. She was smiling.
“How about six steps this time?” I asked. She nodded again. We jogged off a second time and when we stopped she was giggling.
When I glanced at my watch I realized that the hour was up. “So,” I asked, “how was your lesson today?” But I didn’t really need an answer because her smile told me everything I needed to know. As we left the ring, we walked Holliday past the picnic table where the mothers had been sitting to watch the riding lesson. One mother turned to me and silently mouthed ‘thank you’. There were tears in her eyes.
The hour I spent with this young girl was a demonstration both of the power of positive expectations and the power of Parelli. Years of coaching and teaching children had given me the confidence to work positively with this child I had just met, while years of studying Parelli gave me the confident that Holliday would respond positively and without fear to the signals he was being given.
Despite her lack of success in previous lessons, I was able to go into this lesson with the expectation that on this day, with this horse, this child could learn the four simple things she needed to do to independently ride a horse at a walk. My belief in her gave her the confidence she needed to learn how to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. Her success at doing this while I was walking beside her gave her the confidence to try it alone. Her confidence grew every time Holliday responded correctly to her signals.
There is nothing more powerful than belief. Pat Parelli tells us to ‘expect a lot, accept a little, and reward often’. Each time we do this with ourselves and our horses, we build a stronger relationship and further our journey toward becoming a true horseman. When we do this with the people around us, we give them the gift of recognizing and realizing their true potential.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
What I Learned at Fast Track
It’s been almost a year since I returned from the Fast Track program at Parelli’s Florida Campus last November and I have been thinking this week about something head instructor John Barr told the class on our first day. He said that we would learn a lot during our four weeks at the program but we might not realize all of what we had learned until well after we returned home. So after reflecting this week on my experiences both in Florida and here in Delaware since I returned home, I’m going to try and summarize what I learned at Fast Track.
Probably the most important lesson I learned while in Florida was that I had been confusing ‘calm’ with ‘relaxed’. My horse Sonny is an easy going guy and there isn’t much that gets him excited, so I thought that most of the time, he was pretty relaxed. When I got to Florida and watched all of the instructors and many of the other students work with their horses, I began to notice how often the horse would blow and how infrequently Sonny blew, especially when I was riding. I began to ask questions about the signs of relaxation in introverted horses and to watch Sonny really closely when I was working with him. It was then that I began to realize how very subtle the signs were that could tell me the difference between Sonny just being calm and being truly relaxed. His head might be an inch or two lower in carriage, his breathing might slow ever so slightly, his lick and chew would become a little less secretive, his mouth might relax slightly, his gait might become slightly more rhythmic. The signs were very subtle and only if I was paying close attention could I see the signs for what they were. Once began paying close attention, I discovered that often I wasn’t giving him enough time with a particular exercise to become truly relaxed.
When I returned from Florida, I gave Sonny a week off and then I did an experiment aimed at getting true relaxation. I decided I was going to go into the arena, and using the pattern of ‘follow the rail’, see just how low I would have to stay on that pattern to get Sonny to relax enough to blow. I put Sonny on the rail and began to walk. We walked for 30 minutes before he blew. During that entire time, he walked calmly around the arena. He wasn’t upset but it took him a very long time to give that sign of relaxation. Clearly there was something going on here and that brings me to the second lesson I learned at Fast Track.
My second important insight from Fast Track was that there was a lot of brace going on when I was riding Sonny. Clearly some of the brace was Sonny but I started to recognize in Florida just how much brace I had in my riding. Often this came when I wasn’t feeling particularly confident. I would brace in the stirrups and then Sonny would brace in response. Another situation that often caused brace would be when Sonny would have a stiff and bouncy trot. Sonny was capable of a nice jog trot but often, as a result of a lack of rhythm and relaxation, his trot would get very large and hard to ride. That would cause me to brace in my stirrups which in turn caused his trot to stiffen further. It was a vicious circle.
This brings me to my third insight from Florida, that despite my best attempts at shimming, my saddle, a saddle in which I was very comfortable, was causing problems for Sonny. When I got home, I bought a new saddle. The change had an immediate, positive impact on Sonny. The first day I rode in the new saddle, Sonny blew within five minutes of me mounting. The second day he blew in less than two minutes. The third day he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. Sonny’s gaits also changed almost immediately. His head lowered. His stride became long, smoother and at the trot, much easier to ride. Because of the change in his trot, I found I braced much less which also had a positive impact on our fluidity. Of course this change resulted in some other issues but I have worked through most of them. (See the post “Fear of Flying”)
The fourth insight I had at Fast Track, and this one has probably been as important to our progress as the ‘calm vs. relaxed’ realization, is that I developed a whole new understanding of the meaning of ‘neutral’. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the concept of ‘neutral’ when playing the seven games on the ground but I had very little understanding of what ‘neutral’ meant when I was riding. I realized while I was in Florida just how much I was fiddling with the reins when I was riding. My hands were in almost constant motion. They didn’t make big movements. I didn’t jerk on Sonny’s mouth or make exaggerated corrections but I was playing with the reins all of the time when I was riding. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Sonny. He must have thought I was nagging at him all the time. No wonder he didn’t move as well as I wanted off my leg and seat, he must have been consumed by the micromanaging I was doing with my hands. Poor boy!
When I came home from Fast Track I made a concerted effort to plant my hand on his withers when I was riding and just leave it there until I needed to make an actual correction. By letting Sonny make mistakes rather than prevent him for making them, I took a leap forward in creating a better connection between Sonny and my seat. Who would have known that the finger bones are connected to the seat bones?
Fast Track is a very individual experience. There were 45 students in my Fast Track class and we were all over the board in terms of our skills and our relationship with our horses. I went to Florida worried that I would be the oldest, least experienced, least physical fit and least skilled person there but I learned that I wasn’t; a fact that was a great relief to me. I put a lot of pressure on myself while I was in Florida and to a certain extent, that pressure tested my mental, emotional and physical fitness.
Physically I did better than I expected I would. I have really bad knees. One of my knees has been bone on bone since I was 22 years old (I was 62 when I arrived in Florida). I seldom work more than three or four hours a day with horses. In Florida we were going from 7 AM to 7 PM and often we rode for three or four hours in the afternoon. Sonny’s pen was a long way from anything and I walked more than I have since I was in college. The first week was agony and I hurt all over. I went back to my rented apartment each evening and took enough Advil to stop a truck. I didn’t sleep well and I can’t remember ever being so tired but I soldiered on and by the second week, I felt better. Eventually my knees did get the better of me and I didn’t ride for part of the fourth week but I was thrilled with how well I kept up with the pace.
Emotionally, I didn’t do as well as I had expected. For 28 years I worked for EI duPont de Nemours, a major chemical company. Much of that time I held high pressure management jobs. I figured spending a month with my horse in Florida among supportive, like-minded people would be a snap but it was harder than I imagined. I found that I often felt quite emotional, particularly when being exposed to something new. At least part of the emotion was due to being so tired all the time. I had a good friend who once said that “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and certainly the lack of sleep didn’t help. But I also think that I set high standards for myself and trying to live to those personal expectations created a mental and emotional stress that I hadn’t anticipated.
I was helped by something that head instructor John Barr told us. He said that each of us was on his or her own journey and that we each were “exactly where we were supposed to be” on that journey. Accepting that idea helped me deal with the emotional stress and also allowed me to give myself permission to stop riding during the last week when my knees really began to hurt. Without that permission, I might have tried to push through and keep riding, only to find that I had damaged my knees beyond repair.
Spending the month in Florida at the Parelli Center was about the best present I ever gave myself. Sonny and I came home with a better relationship and I came home with a greatly enhanced understanding of the principles and the tools that embody Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I also came home with a better understanding of what I need to do to keep growing as a horseman and the determination to continue on this journey so I can help accomplish the mission of making the world a better place for people and horses.
Probably the most important lesson I learned while in Florida was that I had been confusing ‘calm’ with ‘relaxed’. My horse Sonny is an easy going guy and there isn’t much that gets him excited, so I thought that most of the time, he was pretty relaxed. When I got to Florida and watched all of the instructors and many of the other students work with their horses, I began to notice how often the horse would blow and how infrequently Sonny blew, especially when I was riding. I began to ask questions about the signs of relaxation in introverted horses and to watch Sonny really closely when I was working with him. It was then that I began to realize how very subtle the signs were that could tell me the difference between Sonny just being calm and being truly relaxed. His head might be an inch or two lower in carriage, his breathing might slow ever so slightly, his lick and chew would become a little less secretive, his mouth might relax slightly, his gait might become slightly more rhythmic. The signs were very subtle and only if I was paying close attention could I see the signs for what they were. Once began paying close attention, I discovered that often I wasn’t giving him enough time with a particular exercise to become truly relaxed.
When I returned from Florida, I gave Sonny a week off and then I did an experiment aimed at getting true relaxation. I decided I was going to go into the arena, and using the pattern of ‘follow the rail’, see just how low I would have to stay on that pattern to get Sonny to relax enough to blow. I put Sonny on the rail and began to walk. We walked for 30 minutes before he blew. During that entire time, he walked calmly around the arena. He wasn’t upset but it took him a very long time to give that sign of relaxation. Clearly there was something going on here and that brings me to the second lesson I learned at Fast Track.
My second important insight from Fast Track was that there was a lot of brace going on when I was riding Sonny. Clearly some of the brace was Sonny but I started to recognize in Florida just how much brace I had in my riding. Often this came when I wasn’t feeling particularly confident. I would brace in the stirrups and then Sonny would brace in response. Another situation that often caused brace would be when Sonny would have a stiff and bouncy trot. Sonny was capable of a nice jog trot but often, as a result of a lack of rhythm and relaxation, his trot would get very large and hard to ride. That would cause me to brace in my stirrups which in turn caused his trot to stiffen further. It was a vicious circle.
This brings me to my third insight from Florida, that despite my best attempts at shimming, my saddle, a saddle in which I was very comfortable, was causing problems for Sonny. When I got home, I bought a new saddle. The change had an immediate, positive impact on Sonny. The first day I rode in the new saddle, Sonny blew within five minutes of me mounting. The second day he blew in less than two minutes. The third day he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. Sonny’s gaits also changed almost immediately. His head lowered. His stride became long, smoother and at the trot, much easier to ride. Because of the change in his trot, I found I braced much less which also had a positive impact on our fluidity. Of course this change resulted in some other issues but I have worked through most of them. (See the post “Fear of Flying”)
The fourth insight I had at Fast Track, and this one has probably been as important to our progress as the ‘calm vs. relaxed’ realization, is that I developed a whole new understanding of the meaning of ‘neutral’. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the concept of ‘neutral’ when playing the seven games on the ground but I had very little understanding of what ‘neutral’ meant when I was riding. I realized while I was in Florida just how much I was fiddling with the reins when I was riding. My hands were in almost constant motion. They didn’t make big movements. I didn’t jerk on Sonny’s mouth or make exaggerated corrections but I was playing with the reins all of the time when I was riding. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Sonny. He must have thought I was nagging at him all the time. No wonder he didn’t move as well as I wanted off my leg and seat, he must have been consumed by the micromanaging I was doing with my hands. Poor boy!
When I came home from Fast Track I made a concerted effort to plant my hand on his withers when I was riding and just leave it there until I needed to make an actual correction. By letting Sonny make mistakes rather than prevent him for making them, I took a leap forward in creating a better connection between Sonny and my seat. Who would have known that the finger bones are connected to the seat bones?
Fast Track is a very individual experience. There were 45 students in my Fast Track class and we were all over the board in terms of our skills and our relationship with our horses. I went to Florida worried that I would be the oldest, least experienced, least physical fit and least skilled person there but I learned that I wasn’t; a fact that was a great relief to me. I put a lot of pressure on myself while I was in Florida and to a certain extent, that pressure tested my mental, emotional and physical fitness.
Physically I did better than I expected I would. I have really bad knees. One of my knees has been bone on bone since I was 22 years old (I was 62 when I arrived in Florida). I seldom work more than three or four hours a day with horses. In Florida we were going from 7 AM to 7 PM and often we rode for three or four hours in the afternoon. Sonny’s pen was a long way from anything and I walked more than I have since I was in college. The first week was agony and I hurt all over. I went back to my rented apartment each evening and took enough Advil to stop a truck. I didn’t sleep well and I can’t remember ever being so tired but I soldiered on and by the second week, I felt better. Eventually my knees did get the better of me and I didn’t ride for part of the fourth week but I was thrilled with how well I kept up with the pace.
Emotionally, I didn’t do as well as I had expected. For 28 years I worked for EI duPont de Nemours, a major chemical company. Much of that time I held high pressure management jobs. I figured spending a month with my horse in Florida among supportive, like-minded people would be a snap but it was harder than I imagined. I found that I often felt quite emotional, particularly when being exposed to something new. At least part of the emotion was due to being so tired all the time. I had a good friend who once said that “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and certainly the lack of sleep didn’t help. But I also think that I set high standards for myself and trying to live to those personal expectations created a mental and emotional stress that I hadn’t anticipated.
I was helped by something that head instructor John Barr told us. He said that each of us was on his or her own journey and that we each were “exactly where we were supposed to be” on that journey. Accepting that idea helped me deal with the emotional stress and also allowed me to give myself permission to stop riding during the last week when my knees really began to hurt. Without that permission, I might have tried to push through and keep riding, only to find that I had damaged my knees beyond repair.
Spending the month in Florida at the Parelli Center was about the best present I ever gave myself. Sonny and I came home with a better relationship and I came home with a greatly enhanced understanding of the principles and the tools that embody Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I also came home with a better understanding of what I need to do to keep growing as a horseman and the determination to continue on this journey so I can help accomplish the mission of making the world a better place for people and horses.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Fear of Flying
I’ve spent the last year trying to overcome a fear of flying. I’m not talking about the kind of flying that charges you extra when your luggage weighs too much, although I must admit I don’t find that kind of flying much fun anymore. I’m talking about the kind of flying that finds you galloping through a pasture or up a hill with wind whipping your horse’s mane into your face and every muscle in your body alive with the feel of connection between you and your horse. This is the story of how I developed that fear and how Two Star Parelli Instructor Jane Bartsch is helping me conquer it.
I wasn’t always afraid of flying. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to take my first horse Max for long rides through the 6000 acres of Maryland’s Fair Hill resource area, galloping up every hill I could find, jumping logs along the way. But I learned to ride as an adult and I never really developed the sense of balance that seems to come so naturally to people who learned to ride as children. Besides that, I’m a bit of a buttoned up type of person who has never thrived on that feeling of being right at the edge of control.
After taking riding lessons for about 3 years, I bought my first horse, Max. I was 30 years old and he was almost 10, but he had been professionally trained and was the kind of horse people refer to as a “school master”. Max had wonderful, smooth gaits and if I could even approximate the correct aid, he would do whatever I asked. This gave me great confidence when I was riding and I wasn’t even afraid to hop on him bareback with only a halter and lead line and ride him though a pasture full of horses back to the barn.
Max lived to be almost 33 years old and during that time I seldom rode any other horse. In his last few years, I didn’t ride often and when I did, we mostly took long walks in the fields around the farm. He was bothered by navicular changes as he got older but when I put the saddle on him, he walked away from the barn with his head up and his ears pricked, looking forward to the adventure at hand.
I was devastated when Max died but I wanted to get back into riding so I adopted a 12 year old thoroughbred gelding from a local horse rescue and set about trying to get myself back into shape. It was a bad match from the beginning. The horse was a RBE with some serious post racing mental issues. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of natural horsemanship and I had no idea how to help him through his issues. After 9 months of frustration I admitted to myself that I was actually afraid of this horse and I donated him back to the rescue before I got hurt. Then I started searching again for my next horse and found Sonny.
Sonny was a 6 year old paint with an easy going disposition. He had been a husband’s horse, used mostly for trail riding and while he was solid as a rock on trails, he could hardly trot in a circle without tripping all over himself. Unlike my original horse, Sonny didn’t have particularly smooth gaits, although he could produce a nice little jog trot when he wanted, so for the first couple years of our partnership, I mostly used him for trail riding and I seldom pushed him into a canter. We might canter up the occasional hill but mostly we walked and trotted and I felt pretty comfortable riding him.
Sonny and I got along pretty well most of the time. He was very easy going, which I liked, but his attitude toward me seemed pretty indifferent. Unlike my first horse Max, he wasn’t crazy about being groomed and while he didn’t seem to mind being ridden, he could be stubborn and argumentative. I’d had Sonny for a couple of years when I began working at a local horse rescue and was introduced to Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I was so intrigued by the concepts that I barrowed a set of the original level one program video tapes and started practicing on Sonny. From the first day the change in Sonny’s attitude and behavior was remarkable. It was as if he had been deaf and suddenly he could hear me, although now I know what really going on was that I had been speaking gibberish for two years and now I was beginning to speak horse.
I was hooked and we progressed quickly on the ground but when I started to ride I ran into problems. I rode English style and only rode on a loose rein at a walk. At a trot or a canter, I had been taught to ride with contact and I found that if I tried to trot Sonny on a loose rein, I felt very uncomfortable. More disconcerting to me was the idea of riding with a hackamore but according to the Parelli method that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at this point. I bought a hackamore to ride in it but whenever Sonny started trotting, I gathered up the reins as if he still had a bit in his mouth and he clearly didn’t like that.
I slowly worked through my anxieties at the trot and after several months was trotting on a loose rein but the canter was another story. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, but even the thought of cantering Sonny made me anxious. He was a big horse with a big stride and he didn’t have a smooth canter departure. Most of the time when I asked him to canter he would just trot bigger and faster until I was bouncing all over the place. By the time he did canter, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
This is where Jane Bartsch enters our story. Fortunately for me, Jane lived close and had recently become a Parelli Instructor. I began taking weekly lessons and Jane helped me refine my balance point riding. She also helped me develop a smoother canter departure from a walk. Finally I gained enough confidence where I could canter Sonny in the arena on a loose rein. I still had some slight anxiety but I thought I had the problem licked. I didn’t realize that things were about to get much worse.
With Jane’s help, I progressed to the point where I was accepted into a three day clinic with Six Star Parelli Master Instructor Carol Coppinger. Sonny and I did so well at the clinic that we passed our level 2 freestyle test. I was thrilled and thinking that we would soon be riding easily at level 3 but at the end of the clinic, Carol did something in passing that had the unintended consequence of putting my riding into a downward spiral. She came over to Sonny and tried to slip her hand between his saddle and his shoulder.
“I think this saddle is pinching your horse,” she said. “See how I can’t get my hand in here. There isn’t any clearance. Have you thought about getting a Theraflex® saddle pad for him?”
Since I began studying Parelli, I had been slowly changing out Sonny’s equipment. I had changed the bit I was using, added a chin strap and had taken off his breast plate. None of these changes had resulted in anything dramatic so it didn’t occur to me that changing the saddle pad would so I purchased a new Therafex® pad. Clearly the saddle had been pinching his shoulders because the first time I put the new pad on, his stride was noticeably freer.
While Sonny liked the new pad, I was struggling with it. At first I felt like I was tipping forward in the saddle. Jane helped me shim it properly but I had trouble placing the pad consistently in the same position under the saddle. Each time I mounted, I felt like I was sitting a little differently and this created some anxiety. Sonny’s longer stride was also making me nervous but I was trying to push through my nerves at each lesson so I could continue to make progress.
I had been riding with the Theraflex® pad for a couple of months when I took Sonny down to the Parelli Florida campus to attend the Fast Track course. I must admit that I was nervous about being at Fast Track and nervous about riding Sonny in such an unfamiliar environment. Early on, one of the instructors came up to me, stuck his hand under the edge of Sonny’s saddle pad and told me that he thought the saddle was still pinching his shoulders. Over the month that I was there, I realized that when I was riding Sonny, he seldom relaxed enough to blow. While some of that was probably a reflection of my lack of relaxation, I came to the conclusion that Sonny needed a different saddle.
While I would like to have ordered a Parelli saddle for Sonny, my budget wouldn’t accommodate that large of a purchase so after trying several saddles, I settled for a new Wintec wide. The effect of the new saddle on Sonny was immediate and intense. Freed of the restriction on his shoulders, his stride was huge. I could feel it in the walk and trot but in the canter it was dramatic. It felt to me like he was leaping into the canter and the thrust pushed me forward in the saddle, throwing me off balance. To make matters worse, I couldn’t seem to get the shimming correct. Pretty soon I had 4 shims in the Theraflex® pad.
Sonny seemed to love the new saddle. The first time I rode him in it he blew inside of five minutes. The second time it took only two minutes. The third time he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. His stride was free. He relaxed more quickly. His trot became smoother and less bumpy to ride. There were all good things and I should have been pleased but I hated the new saddle. I didn’t feel comfortable in it. The saddle was deeper than my old one and I felt like I was sitting too far forward in it. With all the shims, the saddle was perched on the Therafelx® pad like a turtle on a mossy log, slipping this way and that depending on where I put my weight and I didn’t feel stable. I was relatively OK at the walk and the trot but even the thought of cantering put me in a panic. Sonny would leap into a canter and I would grab the reins as if they were my only lifeline.
Jane did her best to help me work though my discomfort. She was patient with me in lessons and we practiced a lot of approach and retreat, cantering only a few strides and then stopping. She respected my thresholds and when I said that was enough in any lesson she let me stop. But as the winter progressed, things got worse for me. Whenever Sonny cantered, I felt completely out of control. I knew my emotional fitness was going to hell in a hand basket because I had gotten to the point where I was so worried about cantering that I didn’t even want to go out to the barn anymore. I would bargain with myself by telling myself that I didn’t have to ride or if I did ride, I didn’t have to canter. It finally got so bad that even if I was only thinking about going to the barn, I could feel a knot growing in my stomach and I was worried that if I didn’t do something to reverse this trend soon, I would stop riding altogether.
One night I was lying in bed thinking about my first horse, Max and I remembered the first time I had taken a lesson on Max. The instructor had wanted me to ride without stirrups. When I told her that I hadn’t ever done that before and I was a little worried about riding without stirrups, she put Max on a lunge line and had me ride him while he moved around her in a circle. She told me I could hold onto the saddle if I felt like I needed that for balance. Pretty soon she had him cantering. Pushing on the saddle, I had gripped him with my legs and ridden his rocking chair canter around and around. I remembered how it felt like I was flying but connected to the instructor by the lunge line, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt safe.
“That’s it!” I thought to myself. “I need to get the feel again of flying without feeling like I have lost all control.”
I was excited at my next lesson and I told Jane that I wanted her to put Sonny on a 45 foot line so when we cantered I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except getting comfortable with the feel of the canter. She agreed that would be a good idea and after we’d had a good warm up, she clipped the 45’ to the halter I had left on under his bridle.
“OK.” Jane said as she played out the 45’. “Ask him up into the canter with your body. Try not to hit him with your heels”
I brought the energy up in my body and Sonny leaped into his canter. Reflexively I planted on hand on the front of the saddle and pressed myself onto my balance point. He cantered a lap and a half around Jane before dropping into a trot.
“You need to breath” she told me.
I smiled weakly in her direction and walked for a couple of laps until I felt a little calmer. Then I brought my energy up again and asked Sonny to canter. This time the departure was a little softer. I still had my hand on my saddle but I felt a little more relaxed. We repeated this pattern for about 20 minutes, alternating walking with one or two laps of canter; until I had done all that I felt I could do for the day. I was pleased with the result and even though I was still nervous about cantering, with Jane holding onto Sonny, I no longer felt completely out of control.
Jane and I repeated this on line lesson for several weeks. I could feel myself slowly becoming more confident with
Sonny’s canter and also more comfortable in the new Wintec saddle. An added benefit of these lessons was the refinement that it was creating in Sonny’s canter departures. I was learning just how little I had to do with my body to get Sonny to step off into a canter. I no longer felt like he was leaping out from under me.
One day I asked Jane if I could try just cantering around her in a circle, as if she still had the 45’ line in her hand. I walked Sonny around her until I felt we were both calm and relaxed. Then I asked him to canter. He stepped into a nice canter. I put my outside leg on him and took a tiny feel on the inside rein to keep him moving in a circle but I basically had him on a casual rein. His canter felt almost like a lope, slow and balanced and we circled Jane twice before I asked him to stop. I was grinning from ear to ear. The war might not be over but I had just won a major battle.
Jane continued to help me work my way thought my anxieties. After I mastered cantering in a circle, my next big step was to get comfortable when Sonny cantered down the long line of the arena. This was a problem for me because when he came off the corner and began moving down the line, his stride would begin to lengthen and I would begin to panic. My left brain knew he wasn’t running away with me by my right brain would begin screaming loudly and I would tighten up and pull him down into a slower gait.
“The next time he begins to lengthen on you,” Jane told me, “I want you to sit down on him and sigh. He knows what that means and it will slow him down. He might even stop.”
I asked Sonny to canter in a circle and then headed down the long line of the arena. Sonny’s stride began to lengthen. I sat deep in the saddle and sighed. Sonny almost skidded into a trot and I pitched forward laughing.
“See,” said Jane, “He listens to you. He responds to your body. It’s like a cruise control. You can use it to adjust his gait.”
We worked through the spring and the summer, Jane encouraging at each lesson. Gradually I stopped feeling anxious when I thought about going down to the barn. Some days when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t relaxed enough to canter but that no longer stopped me from riding. I began doing more carrot stick riding and for short distances was even able to canter Sonny without holding on to the reins. I felt like I was finally developing some of the mental and emotional fitness I needed to conquer this fear.
My fitness was finally put to the test in September when I attended another three day clinic with Carol Coppinger. I had worked really hard in preparation for the clinic and I knew that I would be reasonably comfortable when we were asked to canter. On the first afternoon of the clinic, Carol had us following the rail in the indoor arena. She had us count off in pairs.
“OK, here’s what we are going to do now,” she announced. “While the group keeps following the rail, one pair at a time is going to come into the center of the arena and using only your carrot sticks, canter your horses in a figure 8.”
My stomach immediately started to tighten into a knot. I had expected to be asked to canter Sonny but not without reins, using only a carrot stick. My right brain began to whisper urgently that I was not ready to do this and I knew that Carol wouldn’t think any less of me if I used my reins. But my left brain said ‘wait a minute’. You have done this before and you can do it now. Just breathe and stay relaxed.
I was in the 3rd pair. While I watched the two pairs before me go with some measure of success, I focused on breathing and staying relaxed and positive. When our turn came, I walked Sonny into the center of the arena, dropped the reins, looked in toward the center of the circle I wanted him to canter and brought the life up in my body. Sonny stepped into a canter and we cantered a circle. When he broke into a trot, I slowed him to a walk and asked again. We didn’t make the figure 8 exactly (Sonny has trouble with his right lead) but I did canter two circles without touching the reins. I glanced over at Jane who was assisting with the clinic. Now we were both smiling ear to ear.
I’d like to say I’ve completely conquered my fear but I know that isn’t true. I still sometimes get nervous before I canter my horse and there are even some days when I know I’m not in the right mental state for trying. But I also know that I am making progress and that someday soon, I’m going to take Sonny back to Fair Hill and have him galloping cross country, with his mane blowing in my face and we are going to be flying.
I wasn’t always afraid of flying. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to take my first horse Max for long rides through the 6000 acres of Maryland’s Fair Hill resource area, galloping up every hill I could find, jumping logs along the way. But I learned to ride as an adult and I never really developed the sense of balance that seems to come so naturally to people who learned to ride as children. Besides that, I’m a bit of a buttoned up type of person who has never thrived on that feeling of being right at the edge of control.
After taking riding lessons for about 3 years, I bought my first horse, Max. I was 30 years old and he was almost 10, but he had been professionally trained and was the kind of horse people refer to as a “school master”. Max had wonderful, smooth gaits and if I could even approximate the correct aid, he would do whatever I asked. This gave me great confidence when I was riding and I wasn’t even afraid to hop on him bareback with only a halter and lead line and ride him though a pasture full of horses back to the barn.
Max lived to be almost 33 years old and during that time I seldom rode any other horse. In his last few years, I didn’t ride often and when I did, we mostly took long walks in the fields around the farm. He was bothered by navicular changes as he got older but when I put the saddle on him, he walked away from the barn with his head up and his ears pricked, looking forward to the adventure at hand.
I was devastated when Max died but I wanted to get back into riding so I adopted a 12 year old thoroughbred gelding from a local horse rescue and set about trying to get myself back into shape. It was a bad match from the beginning. The horse was a RBE with some serious post racing mental issues. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of natural horsemanship and I had no idea how to help him through his issues. After 9 months of frustration I admitted to myself that I was actually afraid of this horse and I donated him back to the rescue before I got hurt. Then I started searching again for my next horse and found Sonny.
Sonny was a 6 year old paint with an easy going disposition. He had been a husband’s horse, used mostly for trail riding and while he was solid as a rock on trails, he could hardly trot in a circle without tripping all over himself. Unlike my original horse, Sonny didn’t have particularly smooth gaits, although he could produce a nice little jog trot when he wanted, so for the first couple years of our partnership, I mostly used him for trail riding and I seldom pushed him into a canter. We might canter up the occasional hill but mostly we walked and trotted and I felt pretty comfortable riding him.
Sonny and I got along pretty well most of the time. He was very easy going, which I liked, but his attitude toward me seemed pretty indifferent. Unlike my first horse Max, he wasn’t crazy about being groomed and while he didn’t seem to mind being ridden, he could be stubborn and argumentative. I’d had Sonny for a couple of years when I began working at a local horse rescue and was introduced to Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I was so intrigued by the concepts that I barrowed a set of the original level one program video tapes and started practicing on Sonny. From the first day the change in Sonny’s attitude and behavior was remarkable. It was as if he had been deaf and suddenly he could hear me, although now I know what really going on was that I had been speaking gibberish for two years and now I was beginning to speak horse.
I was hooked and we progressed quickly on the ground but when I started to ride I ran into problems. I rode English style and only rode on a loose rein at a walk. At a trot or a canter, I had been taught to ride with contact and I found that if I tried to trot Sonny on a loose rein, I felt very uncomfortable. More disconcerting to me was the idea of riding with a hackamore but according to the Parelli method that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at this point. I bought a hackamore to ride in it but whenever Sonny started trotting, I gathered up the reins as if he still had a bit in his mouth and he clearly didn’t like that.
I slowly worked through my anxieties at the trot and after several months was trotting on a loose rein but the canter was another story. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, but even the thought of cantering Sonny made me anxious. He was a big horse with a big stride and he didn’t have a smooth canter departure. Most of the time when I asked him to canter he would just trot bigger and faster until I was bouncing all over the place. By the time he did canter, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
This is where Jane Bartsch enters our story. Fortunately for me, Jane lived close and had recently become a Parelli Instructor. I began taking weekly lessons and Jane helped me refine my balance point riding. She also helped me develop a smoother canter departure from a walk. Finally I gained enough confidence where I could canter Sonny in the arena on a loose rein. I still had some slight anxiety but I thought I had the problem licked. I didn’t realize that things were about to get much worse.
With Jane’s help, I progressed to the point where I was accepted into a three day clinic with Six Star Parelli Master Instructor Carol Coppinger. Sonny and I did so well at the clinic that we passed our level 2 freestyle test. I was thrilled and thinking that we would soon be riding easily at level 3 but at the end of the clinic, Carol did something in passing that had the unintended consequence of putting my riding into a downward spiral. She came over to Sonny and tried to slip her hand between his saddle and his shoulder.
“I think this saddle is pinching your horse,” she said. “See how I can’t get my hand in here. There isn’t any clearance. Have you thought about getting a Theraflex® saddle pad for him?”
Since I began studying Parelli, I had been slowly changing out Sonny’s equipment. I had changed the bit I was using, added a chin strap and had taken off his breast plate. None of these changes had resulted in anything dramatic so it didn’t occur to me that changing the saddle pad would so I purchased a new Therafex® pad. Clearly the saddle had been pinching his shoulders because the first time I put the new pad on, his stride was noticeably freer.
While Sonny liked the new pad, I was struggling with it. At first I felt like I was tipping forward in the saddle. Jane helped me shim it properly but I had trouble placing the pad consistently in the same position under the saddle. Each time I mounted, I felt like I was sitting a little differently and this created some anxiety. Sonny’s longer stride was also making me nervous but I was trying to push through my nerves at each lesson so I could continue to make progress.
I had been riding with the Theraflex® pad for a couple of months when I took Sonny down to the Parelli Florida campus to attend the Fast Track course. I must admit that I was nervous about being at Fast Track and nervous about riding Sonny in such an unfamiliar environment. Early on, one of the instructors came up to me, stuck his hand under the edge of Sonny’s saddle pad and told me that he thought the saddle was still pinching his shoulders. Over the month that I was there, I realized that when I was riding Sonny, he seldom relaxed enough to blow. While some of that was probably a reflection of my lack of relaxation, I came to the conclusion that Sonny needed a different saddle.
While I would like to have ordered a Parelli saddle for Sonny, my budget wouldn’t accommodate that large of a purchase so after trying several saddles, I settled for a new Wintec wide. The effect of the new saddle on Sonny was immediate and intense. Freed of the restriction on his shoulders, his stride was huge. I could feel it in the walk and trot but in the canter it was dramatic. It felt to me like he was leaping into the canter and the thrust pushed me forward in the saddle, throwing me off balance. To make matters worse, I couldn’t seem to get the shimming correct. Pretty soon I had 4 shims in the Theraflex® pad.
Sonny seemed to love the new saddle. The first time I rode him in it he blew inside of five minutes. The second time it took only two minutes. The third time he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. His stride was free. He relaxed more quickly. His trot became smoother and less bumpy to ride. There were all good things and I should have been pleased but I hated the new saddle. I didn’t feel comfortable in it. The saddle was deeper than my old one and I felt like I was sitting too far forward in it. With all the shims, the saddle was perched on the Therafelx® pad like a turtle on a mossy log, slipping this way and that depending on where I put my weight and I didn’t feel stable. I was relatively OK at the walk and the trot but even the thought of cantering put me in a panic. Sonny would leap into a canter and I would grab the reins as if they were my only lifeline.
Jane did her best to help me work though my discomfort. She was patient with me in lessons and we practiced a lot of approach and retreat, cantering only a few strides and then stopping. She respected my thresholds and when I said that was enough in any lesson she let me stop. But as the winter progressed, things got worse for me. Whenever Sonny cantered, I felt completely out of control. I knew my emotional fitness was going to hell in a hand basket because I had gotten to the point where I was so worried about cantering that I didn’t even want to go out to the barn anymore. I would bargain with myself by telling myself that I didn’t have to ride or if I did ride, I didn’t have to canter. It finally got so bad that even if I was only thinking about going to the barn, I could feel a knot growing in my stomach and I was worried that if I didn’t do something to reverse this trend soon, I would stop riding altogether.
One night I was lying in bed thinking about my first horse, Max and I remembered the first time I had taken a lesson on Max. The instructor had wanted me to ride without stirrups. When I told her that I hadn’t ever done that before and I was a little worried about riding without stirrups, she put Max on a lunge line and had me ride him while he moved around her in a circle. She told me I could hold onto the saddle if I felt like I needed that for balance. Pretty soon she had him cantering. Pushing on the saddle, I had gripped him with my legs and ridden his rocking chair canter around and around. I remembered how it felt like I was flying but connected to the instructor by the lunge line, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt safe.
“That’s it!” I thought to myself. “I need to get the feel again of flying without feeling like I have lost all control.”
I was excited at my next lesson and I told Jane that I wanted her to put Sonny on a 45 foot line so when we cantered I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except getting comfortable with the feel of the canter. She agreed that would be a good idea and after we’d had a good warm up, she clipped the 45’ to the halter I had left on under his bridle.
“OK.” Jane said as she played out the 45’. “Ask him up into the canter with your body. Try not to hit him with your heels”
I brought the energy up in my body and Sonny leaped into his canter. Reflexively I planted on hand on the front of the saddle and pressed myself onto my balance point. He cantered a lap and a half around Jane before dropping into a trot.
“You need to breath” she told me.
I smiled weakly in her direction and walked for a couple of laps until I felt a little calmer. Then I brought my energy up again and asked Sonny to canter. This time the departure was a little softer. I still had my hand on my saddle but I felt a little more relaxed. We repeated this pattern for about 20 minutes, alternating walking with one or two laps of canter; until I had done all that I felt I could do for the day. I was pleased with the result and even though I was still nervous about cantering, with Jane holding onto Sonny, I no longer felt completely out of control.
Jane and I repeated this on line lesson for several weeks. I could feel myself slowly becoming more confident with
Sonny’s canter and also more comfortable in the new Wintec saddle. An added benefit of these lessons was the refinement that it was creating in Sonny’s canter departures. I was learning just how little I had to do with my body to get Sonny to step off into a canter. I no longer felt like he was leaping out from under me.
One day I asked Jane if I could try just cantering around her in a circle, as if she still had the 45’ line in her hand. I walked Sonny around her until I felt we were both calm and relaxed. Then I asked him to canter. He stepped into a nice canter. I put my outside leg on him and took a tiny feel on the inside rein to keep him moving in a circle but I basically had him on a casual rein. His canter felt almost like a lope, slow and balanced and we circled Jane twice before I asked him to stop. I was grinning from ear to ear. The war might not be over but I had just won a major battle.
Jane continued to help me work my way thought my anxieties. After I mastered cantering in a circle, my next big step was to get comfortable when Sonny cantered down the long line of the arena. This was a problem for me because when he came off the corner and began moving down the line, his stride would begin to lengthen and I would begin to panic. My left brain knew he wasn’t running away with me by my right brain would begin screaming loudly and I would tighten up and pull him down into a slower gait.
“The next time he begins to lengthen on you,” Jane told me, “I want you to sit down on him and sigh. He knows what that means and it will slow him down. He might even stop.”
I asked Sonny to canter in a circle and then headed down the long line of the arena. Sonny’s stride began to lengthen. I sat deep in the saddle and sighed. Sonny almost skidded into a trot and I pitched forward laughing.
“See,” said Jane, “He listens to you. He responds to your body. It’s like a cruise control. You can use it to adjust his gait.”
We worked through the spring and the summer, Jane encouraging at each lesson. Gradually I stopped feeling anxious when I thought about going down to the barn. Some days when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t relaxed enough to canter but that no longer stopped me from riding. I began doing more carrot stick riding and for short distances was even able to canter Sonny without holding on to the reins. I felt like I was finally developing some of the mental and emotional fitness I needed to conquer this fear.
My fitness was finally put to the test in September when I attended another three day clinic with Carol Coppinger. I had worked really hard in preparation for the clinic and I knew that I would be reasonably comfortable when we were asked to canter. On the first afternoon of the clinic, Carol had us following the rail in the indoor arena. She had us count off in pairs.
“OK, here’s what we are going to do now,” she announced. “While the group keeps following the rail, one pair at a time is going to come into the center of the arena and using only your carrot sticks, canter your horses in a figure 8.”
My stomach immediately started to tighten into a knot. I had expected to be asked to canter Sonny but not without reins, using only a carrot stick. My right brain began to whisper urgently that I was not ready to do this and I knew that Carol wouldn’t think any less of me if I used my reins. But my left brain said ‘wait a minute’. You have done this before and you can do it now. Just breathe and stay relaxed.
I was in the 3rd pair. While I watched the two pairs before me go with some measure of success, I focused on breathing and staying relaxed and positive. When our turn came, I walked Sonny into the center of the arena, dropped the reins, looked in toward the center of the circle I wanted him to canter and brought the life up in my body. Sonny stepped into a canter and we cantered a circle. When he broke into a trot, I slowed him to a walk and asked again. We didn’t make the figure 8 exactly (Sonny has trouble with his right lead) but I did canter two circles without touching the reins. I glanced over at Jane who was assisting with the clinic. Now we were both smiling ear to ear.
I’d like to say I’ve completely conquered my fear but I know that isn’t true. I still sometimes get nervous before I canter my horse and there are even some days when I know I’m not in the right mental state for trying. But I also know that I am making progress and that someday soon, I’m going to take Sonny back to Fair Hill and have him galloping cross country, with his mane blowing in my face and we are going to be flying.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
The Importance of Doing the Unexpected
Before I began studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship I never thought much about the fact that I was a predator or that my beloved first horse, Max, was a prey animal. In fact the very term predator, rather than evoking in my mind the natural image of lion or a wolf, carried instead the negative connotations associated with that sub-human group of people who prey on those who can’t defend themselves, children, animals and the elderly. As a result, I seldom critically examined the effect of my own behavior on my horse. That’s not to say I was completely ignorant about how I influenced the people and animals around me. Years of working in the chemical industry managing people had taught me that the only behavior I could predictably change was my own and that the fastest way to rescue a situation that was falling apart around me was to shift what I was doing that was contributing to the mayhem.
Still, it was quite an eye opener for me when I first heard Pat Parelli talk about horse behavior as prey animal behavior and I began thinking about my relationship with horses in terms of a ‘predator – prey animal’ relationship. Suddenly everything I did when I was with my current horse became more significant. I started paying more attention to how the little, everyday things I did without thinking, like walking directly up to Sonny in his pasture or entering his stall without waiting for his permission or grooming the front of his chest between his front legs seemed to annoy him. Often his reactions weren’t large, perhaps only the turning away of his head or a swish of his tail, but the reactions were definitely there, signaling to me that the predator in my nature was emerging, affecting the development of our partnership. As a result, I have tried over the past several years to become more conscious of my behavior when I am working with horses and to act less predictably like a predator.
Being conscious of my predatory behavior has really helped me at the horse rescue where some of our horses come from situations of neglect or abuse. This spring the rescue took in three horses from a serious neglect situation. The horses had been left in a field without food and water and were in poor physical condition when they arrived. One was so significantly compromised that despite everything we could do, she had to be euthanized, but the others came to Greener Pastures in the hope that good care and good pasture could restore their health.
I had been in Florida when the horses were rescued and when I returned, the director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked if I could evaluate them. One, a Welsh pony mix, had behavior problems and the other, a quarter horse son of Zip’s Chocolate Chip, was very difficult to catch.
The first time I saw the quarter horse, Chip, he was standing in a stall. He was a tall, thin bay with a white blaze, a dull, muddy coat and a listless look in his eye. Standing at his stall door, I tried to look past his shabby appearance for the potential that must be hidden in this well bred gelding. When I opened his door, Chip turned his head away from me and retreated into the far corner of the stall. Although he was a good sized horse, he gave the impression of trying to make himself as small as possible. Realizing that just by standing there I was putting a lot of pressure on the horse, I opened the stall door as wide as it would go and turned away from Chip. After what seemed like an eternity, Chip stepped toward the fresh hay piled in the corner and began to eat. When I offered him the back of my hand, he looked nervously in my direction but couldn’t seem to bring himself to smell or touch it. Because he seemed so hesitant to make contact, I tracked the rescue’s director to get some additional background on Chip.
“Well,” Elena told me, “we don’t have a lot of information. I know that he’s 8 years old and broken to ride. I was told that he was actually used for one of the local college equestrian teams at one point, but beyond that, I only know what we’ve seen since he’s been here. He seems very apprehensive around people and he’s very hard to catch.”
Armed with that information I returned to Chip’s stall. This time he didn’t retreat when I opened the door so I snapped a lead line on his halter and led him out of the corral and onto the grass to graze. In the sunlight he looked a little less shabby but no less apprehensive. When I kissed to him after a few moments to get him to step forward he actually leaped sideways at the sound.
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “This guy is really sensitive. I better make our friendly game is solid.”
While Chip grazed, I started to brush the dried mud out of his coat. Noticing that he flinched whenever I touched him suddenly, I slowed my approach way down. I showed him the brushes and used long, soft strokes. I softly asked him to yield his head and his hindquarters. Even the slightest pressure caused him to freeze and look away from me. I quickly realized that convincing Chip I wasn’t like all the other humans he’d met was essential but it was not going to be easy.
My chance came the next day. Chip was out in the lower pasture by the river and when I entered the pasture he immediately turned and walked away. I paid no attention to him, wandering from one horse to the next, offering the back of my hand and stopping to give each horse a good scratch. I could see that Chip was watching me as I walked around, but I made no attempt to move purposefully in his direction. Before long, he was standing on the far side of a horse I was petting. Reaching my arm under the horse’s chin, I asked him to yield his front end and change sides. This put me between Chip and the horse I had been petting. Chip didn’t move. Without looking at him, I held out the back of my hand and waited until I felt whiskers tickle my skin. We had contact.
Normally at this point with any other horse, I would probably have tried to press my advantage, but I didn’t want Chip to think I was like other humans so I just walked away from him and continued to make my rounds of the herd. I was concentrating on pulling some tangles out of Beau’s mane when I caught a glimpse of Chip out of the corner of my eye. He had taken several steps in my direction and was now standing less than an arm’s length away. When I reached over to scratch his withers he didn’t pull away, so I moved to his side and began to rub his neck with the rope halter in my hand. Chip was standing stock still but his eyes were wide open and he wasn’t blinking. He looked to me like he might bolt at any second. I continued to rub his neck slowly, taking deep, slow breaths at the same time. After what seemed like an eternity, he started to blink and his head lowered a couple of inches. I stopped rubbing and waited. He signed. When I touched his neck again, he turned his head toward me ever so slightly and I was able to slip the halter over his nose.
I was anxious to begin playing with Chip so I started to turn and lead him toward the gate but then a thought came to me. I bet this is exactly what Chip expected me to do. Probably every time a human put a halter on him, he was taken out of his field and put to work. So I untied the halter, rubbed him on the neck, offered him and cookie and when he took it, I walked away. Reaching the gate, I turned to look at Chip. He had been standing facing away from the gate when I left him. He was still standing in the same position but he had craned his neck around and was watching me as I opened the gate and left the pasture.
I walked to the tack room and went in to hang up the halter and lead line. While inside, I picked up some lines that had fallen to the floor and generally tidied things up. It was several minutes before I left the building but when I stepped outside, I saw Chip standing in the same position that I had last seen him, head craned around looking toward the spot where I had disappeared a few minutes earlier. It was as if he was still trying to figure out what had just happened.
Somewhere in Chip’s past, he’d developed some serious trust issues with humans. I don’t know exactly what happened but I suspect that with his sensitive nature, he’d been worked too hard or pushed through thresholds before he was ready. I was determined not to let that happen to him again, at least not while I had anything to say about it and walking away from him had been the first step. For the next few weeks, I continued to play the catching game with Chip, often only taking him for a walk to a good patch of grass outside of his pasture and sometimes not doing anything at all with him after he caught me. I practiced doing the unexpected with Chip and it paid off. Chip slowly relaxed and became easier for other volunteers to catch and handle. Eventually the director of our rescue found Chip a good home as a companion horse and while I was sad to see him leave, I knew it was best for him. At his new home, there would be no pressure on him to perform and he could live out his life just being a horse.
The relationship we can build with a horse can be a beautiful thing but it also can be very fragile. Without meaning to we can damage that relationship simply by being ourselves and that is why understanding a horse’s nature as a prey animal and our own as a predator is so very important. With each new horse at the rescue that touches my life, I am reminded of the tremendous advantage that we human predators have because we are conscious of the choices we make. Every interaction with a new horse is a chance for me to live out my number one responsibility to act less like a predator and more like a partner. And every time I make that conscious choice, I am making the world a better place for horses and humans alike.
Still, it was quite an eye opener for me when I first heard Pat Parelli talk about horse behavior as prey animal behavior and I began thinking about my relationship with horses in terms of a ‘predator – prey animal’ relationship. Suddenly everything I did when I was with my current horse became more significant. I started paying more attention to how the little, everyday things I did without thinking, like walking directly up to Sonny in his pasture or entering his stall without waiting for his permission or grooming the front of his chest between his front legs seemed to annoy him. Often his reactions weren’t large, perhaps only the turning away of his head or a swish of his tail, but the reactions were definitely there, signaling to me that the predator in my nature was emerging, affecting the development of our partnership. As a result, I have tried over the past several years to become more conscious of my behavior when I am working with horses and to act less predictably like a predator.
Being conscious of my predatory behavior has really helped me at the horse rescue where some of our horses come from situations of neglect or abuse. This spring the rescue took in three horses from a serious neglect situation. The horses had been left in a field without food and water and were in poor physical condition when they arrived. One was so significantly compromised that despite everything we could do, she had to be euthanized, but the others came to Greener Pastures in the hope that good care and good pasture could restore their health.
I had been in Florida when the horses were rescued and when I returned, the director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked if I could evaluate them. One, a Welsh pony mix, had behavior problems and the other, a quarter horse son of Zip’s Chocolate Chip, was very difficult to catch.
The first time I saw the quarter horse, Chip, he was standing in a stall. He was a tall, thin bay with a white blaze, a dull, muddy coat and a listless look in his eye. Standing at his stall door, I tried to look past his shabby appearance for the potential that must be hidden in this well bred gelding. When I opened his door, Chip turned his head away from me and retreated into the far corner of the stall. Although he was a good sized horse, he gave the impression of trying to make himself as small as possible. Realizing that just by standing there I was putting a lot of pressure on the horse, I opened the stall door as wide as it would go and turned away from Chip. After what seemed like an eternity, Chip stepped toward the fresh hay piled in the corner and began to eat. When I offered him the back of my hand, he looked nervously in my direction but couldn’t seem to bring himself to smell or touch it. Because he seemed so hesitant to make contact, I tracked the rescue’s director to get some additional background on Chip.
“Well,” Elena told me, “we don’t have a lot of information. I know that he’s 8 years old and broken to ride. I was told that he was actually used for one of the local college equestrian teams at one point, but beyond that, I only know what we’ve seen since he’s been here. He seems very apprehensive around people and he’s very hard to catch.”
Armed with that information I returned to Chip’s stall. This time he didn’t retreat when I opened the door so I snapped a lead line on his halter and led him out of the corral and onto the grass to graze. In the sunlight he looked a little less shabby but no less apprehensive. When I kissed to him after a few moments to get him to step forward he actually leaped sideways at the sound.
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “This guy is really sensitive. I better make our friendly game is solid.”
While Chip grazed, I started to brush the dried mud out of his coat. Noticing that he flinched whenever I touched him suddenly, I slowed my approach way down. I showed him the brushes and used long, soft strokes. I softly asked him to yield his head and his hindquarters. Even the slightest pressure caused him to freeze and look away from me. I quickly realized that convincing Chip I wasn’t like all the other humans he’d met was essential but it was not going to be easy.
My chance came the next day. Chip was out in the lower pasture by the river and when I entered the pasture he immediately turned and walked away. I paid no attention to him, wandering from one horse to the next, offering the back of my hand and stopping to give each horse a good scratch. I could see that Chip was watching me as I walked around, but I made no attempt to move purposefully in his direction. Before long, he was standing on the far side of a horse I was petting. Reaching my arm under the horse’s chin, I asked him to yield his front end and change sides. This put me between Chip and the horse I had been petting. Chip didn’t move. Without looking at him, I held out the back of my hand and waited until I felt whiskers tickle my skin. We had contact.
Normally at this point with any other horse, I would probably have tried to press my advantage, but I didn’t want Chip to think I was like other humans so I just walked away from him and continued to make my rounds of the herd. I was concentrating on pulling some tangles out of Beau’s mane when I caught a glimpse of Chip out of the corner of my eye. He had taken several steps in my direction and was now standing less than an arm’s length away. When I reached over to scratch his withers he didn’t pull away, so I moved to his side and began to rub his neck with the rope halter in my hand. Chip was standing stock still but his eyes were wide open and he wasn’t blinking. He looked to me like he might bolt at any second. I continued to rub his neck slowly, taking deep, slow breaths at the same time. After what seemed like an eternity, he started to blink and his head lowered a couple of inches. I stopped rubbing and waited. He signed. When I touched his neck again, he turned his head toward me ever so slightly and I was able to slip the halter over his nose.
I was anxious to begin playing with Chip so I started to turn and lead him toward the gate but then a thought came to me. I bet this is exactly what Chip expected me to do. Probably every time a human put a halter on him, he was taken out of his field and put to work. So I untied the halter, rubbed him on the neck, offered him and cookie and when he took it, I walked away. Reaching the gate, I turned to look at Chip. He had been standing facing away from the gate when I left him. He was still standing in the same position but he had craned his neck around and was watching me as I opened the gate and left the pasture.
I walked to the tack room and went in to hang up the halter and lead line. While inside, I picked up some lines that had fallen to the floor and generally tidied things up. It was several minutes before I left the building but when I stepped outside, I saw Chip standing in the same position that I had last seen him, head craned around looking toward the spot where I had disappeared a few minutes earlier. It was as if he was still trying to figure out what had just happened.
Somewhere in Chip’s past, he’d developed some serious trust issues with humans. I don’t know exactly what happened but I suspect that with his sensitive nature, he’d been worked too hard or pushed through thresholds before he was ready. I was determined not to let that happen to him again, at least not while I had anything to say about it and walking away from him had been the first step. For the next few weeks, I continued to play the catching game with Chip, often only taking him for a walk to a good patch of grass outside of his pasture and sometimes not doing anything at all with him after he caught me. I practiced doing the unexpected with Chip and it paid off. Chip slowly relaxed and became easier for other volunteers to catch and handle. Eventually the director of our rescue found Chip a good home as a companion horse and while I was sad to see him leave, I knew it was best for him. At his new home, there would be no pressure on him to perform and he could live out his life just being a horse.
The relationship we can build with a horse can be a beautiful thing but it also can be very fragile. Without meaning to we can damage that relationship simply by being ourselves and that is why understanding a horse’s nature as a prey animal and our own as a predator is so very important. With each new horse at the rescue that touches my life, I am reminded of the tremendous advantage that we human predators have because we are conscious of the choices we make. Every interaction with a new horse is a chance for me to live out my number one responsibility to act less like a predator and more like a partner. And every time I make that conscious choice, I am making the world a better place for horses and humans alike.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
The Gift of Curiosity
The Gift of Curiosity
Horses come to our rescue from all kinds of situations and even when we have a reasonably complete history of a new horse, we seldom know exactly what to expect. While many horses arrive malnourished or with injuries that require veterinary care, it is often the horses with emotional issues that are the most difficult to diagnose and rehabilitate. This was the case with Elvis.
Before Elvis came to our rescue, he was being used for pony rides and according to the information our director had been given, he had never been mistreated or neglected. He was a good looking black pony with four while stockings, a large white blaze and two blue eyes and other than a slight lameness due to poor foot care, he seemed to be in good physical condition when he arrived at Greener Pastures. .
The first time I saw Elvis, he was standing inside the corral that encircles our round pen. New horses at the rescue are always segregated when they arrive and this corral is a convenient holding spot. Standing at the fence, I watched the pony for several minutes before entering the enclosure and noticed that unlike most new horses, he wasn’t showing much interest in anything around him, including the horses in the adjoining pasture. I thought this behavior was odd.
When I opened the gate to the corral, the pony immediately began walking away from me. Since our round pen sits like a donut hole in the center of this particular corral, the catching game can turn into an exercise of endless circles. Rather than precipitating a situation where the pony felt pursued, I went to corner of the corral with the best grass and sat down on the fence. The pony stopped walking as soon as I sat down but he didn’t seem very interested in coming over to me and when he did look at me, his ears were folded back against his head. The ears didn’t appear to be pinned in anger and the pony didn’t look aggressive. As I watched him, it struck me that his expression was apprehensive, like he wasn’t exactly sure what I was up to but I wasn’t to be trusted. I gave the pony plenty of space and eventually grazed his way over to lush grass where I was sitting. He wouldn’t approach any closer when I offered my hand but he didn’t move away. Eventually I was able to move to his side and stroke his neck but the pony certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying the contact.
If eyes are the window to the soul, this pony’s eyes were telling a sad story. When I tried to play with him on line, his expression was worried and his behavior depressed. He had a hard time looking in my direction and when he did look at me; his ears were rotated back and pressed against his head. I had the impression that he was trying really hard to be compliant but there was no interest or enthusiasm. I brought obstacles into the round pen; a ball, cones, a tarp. Most horses would have had some reaction to the introduction of these objects even if it was only to snort and retreat to the opposite side of the pen but Elvis had no reaction. He stood stoically, head down, ears folded back, breathing fast.
When the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked me later what I thought of the new pony, I wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her. “I don’t know what people were doing with him before he got here,” I said, “but somewhere, somehow, this little fellow has really had the curiosity knocked out of him.”
At that point, I set a simple goal for my work with Elvis. All I wanted to do was to get him curious enough about something that he would put his ear forward toward it. Rather than playing with him in the round pen and running him through the 7 games, I started to take him for long walks around the property, driving him from zone 3 and playing the ‘touch it’ game. At first he was reluctant to step out in front of me. I smooched to him, then tapped him gently and rhythmically on his back with the carrot stick. I tried to release instantly even if he just rocked forward. Before long he would step forward at my smooch. I walked Elvis down to the river so he could put his front feet in the water. I walked him past tractors, horse trailers and lawn mowers. I asked him to touch large black pipes and overturned kayaks but I never forced the issue. I sat on the retaining wall to the healing garden and let him graze. I carried horse cookies in my pockets and gave him one any time he checked in with me.
Whenever a volunteer wanted to play with the pony, I suggested they take Elvis for a walk. He was such a good looking pony that he got a lot of attention. He was groomed so often that he coat took on a special shine. One day Elena came to me and said she was going to change the pony’s name. “He’s such a nice looking pony” She said. “He needs a classier name than Elvis. I think I’m going to call him Black Tye Affair.”
It took several weeks, but finally the pony had become more confident. He was swiveling his ears forward whenever he saw me. His expression had softened and he looked less worried. He no longer flinched when someone touched him unexpectedly and he had become much easier to catch. But best of all, his curiosity had returned. When he approached something new, he investigated with his nose and sometimes his feet. He pushed the blue exercise ball around the round pen and I even saw him pick up a cone in his mouth one afternoon. When I started to play the 7 games with Tye, he progress quickly. He was finally able to look at me and soon he began asking questions.
Tye became a favorite of some of the younger volunteers. When his lameness resolved, some of the smaller volunteers began riding him. Eventually he found a family that wanted to take him home. We were all sad to see him leave but we knew that this more confident and engaging pony had a much brighter future than the timid little Elvis who had stepped off the trailer in Greener Pastures several months before.
I once heard Pat Parelli tell a story about how one of his mentors told him to never knock the curiosity out of a colt. That made a lot of sense to me at the time but I hadn’t given much thought to what I would do if I ever met a horse that already had the curiosity knocked out of him. Then I met Elvis. Curiosity is a gift. It keeps our minds active rather than passive. It opens us and our horses to the possibility of learning something new and it can bring excitement and adventure into our lives. I’d like to think that because I needed to help Elvis rediscover his curiosity, I also had to sharpen my own. Rather than follow my usual plan with a new horse, I had to open myself to other possibilities to investigate the power of patterns in order to find a way to build confidence and develop curiosity. It is interesting that not long after I began taking Elvis for walks and using the ‘touch it’ pattern to help encourage his curiosity, I received the Savvy Club DVD featuring that pattern. How reinforcing was that?
Horses come to our rescue from all kinds of situations and even when we have a reasonably complete history of a new horse, we seldom know exactly what to expect. While many horses arrive malnourished or with injuries that require veterinary care, it is often the horses with emotional issues that are the most difficult to diagnose and rehabilitate. This was the case with Elvis.
Before Elvis came to our rescue, he was being used for pony rides and according to the information our director had been given, he had never been mistreated or neglected. He was a good looking black pony with four while stockings, a large white blaze and two blue eyes and other than a slight lameness due to poor foot care, he seemed to be in good physical condition when he arrived at Greener Pastures. .
The first time I saw Elvis, he was standing inside the corral that encircles our round pen. New horses at the rescue are always segregated when they arrive and this corral is a convenient holding spot. Standing at the fence, I watched the pony for several minutes before entering the enclosure and noticed that unlike most new horses, he wasn’t showing much interest in anything around him, including the horses in the adjoining pasture. I thought this behavior was odd.
When I opened the gate to the corral, the pony immediately began walking away from me. Since our round pen sits like a donut hole in the center of this particular corral, the catching game can turn into an exercise of endless circles. Rather than precipitating a situation where the pony felt pursued, I went to corner of the corral with the best grass and sat down on the fence. The pony stopped walking as soon as I sat down but he didn’t seem very interested in coming over to me and when he did look at me, his ears were folded back against his head. The ears didn’t appear to be pinned in anger and the pony didn’t look aggressive. As I watched him, it struck me that his expression was apprehensive, like he wasn’t exactly sure what I was up to but I wasn’t to be trusted. I gave the pony plenty of space and eventually grazed his way over to lush grass where I was sitting. He wouldn’t approach any closer when I offered my hand but he didn’t move away. Eventually I was able to move to his side and stroke his neck but the pony certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying the contact.
If eyes are the window to the soul, this pony’s eyes were telling a sad story. When I tried to play with him on line, his expression was worried and his behavior depressed. He had a hard time looking in my direction and when he did look at me; his ears were rotated back and pressed against his head. I had the impression that he was trying really hard to be compliant but there was no interest or enthusiasm. I brought obstacles into the round pen; a ball, cones, a tarp. Most horses would have had some reaction to the introduction of these objects even if it was only to snort and retreat to the opposite side of the pen but Elvis had no reaction. He stood stoically, head down, ears folded back, breathing fast.
When the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked me later what I thought of the new pony, I wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her. “I don’t know what people were doing with him before he got here,” I said, “but somewhere, somehow, this little fellow has really had the curiosity knocked out of him.”
At that point, I set a simple goal for my work with Elvis. All I wanted to do was to get him curious enough about something that he would put his ear forward toward it. Rather than playing with him in the round pen and running him through the 7 games, I started to take him for long walks around the property, driving him from zone 3 and playing the ‘touch it’ game. At first he was reluctant to step out in front of me. I smooched to him, then tapped him gently and rhythmically on his back with the carrot stick. I tried to release instantly even if he just rocked forward. Before long he would step forward at my smooch. I walked Elvis down to the river so he could put his front feet in the water. I walked him past tractors, horse trailers and lawn mowers. I asked him to touch large black pipes and overturned kayaks but I never forced the issue. I sat on the retaining wall to the healing garden and let him graze. I carried horse cookies in my pockets and gave him one any time he checked in with me.
Whenever a volunteer wanted to play with the pony, I suggested they take Elvis for a walk. He was such a good looking pony that he got a lot of attention. He was groomed so often that he coat took on a special shine. One day Elena came to me and said she was going to change the pony’s name. “He’s such a nice looking pony” She said. “He needs a classier name than Elvis. I think I’m going to call him Black Tye Affair.”
It took several weeks, but finally the pony had become more confident. He was swiveling his ears forward whenever he saw me. His expression had softened and he looked less worried. He no longer flinched when someone touched him unexpectedly and he had become much easier to catch. But best of all, his curiosity had returned. When he approached something new, he investigated with his nose and sometimes his feet. He pushed the blue exercise ball around the round pen and I even saw him pick up a cone in his mouth one afternoon. When I started to play the 7 games with Tye, he progress quickly. He was finally able to look at me and soon he began asking questions.
Tye became a favorite of some of the younger volunteers. When his lameness resolved, some of the smaller volunteers began riding him. Eventually he found a family that wanted to take him home. We were all sad to see him leave but we knew that this more confident and engaging pony had a much brighter future than the timid little Elvis who had stepped off the trailer in Greener Pastures several months before.
I once heard Pat Parelli tell a story about how one of his mentors told him to never knock the curiosity out of a colt. That made a lot of sense to me at the time but I hadn’t given much thought to what I would do if I ever met a horse that already had the curiosity knocked out of him. Then I met Elvis. Curiosity is a gift. It keeps our minds active rather than passive. It opens us and our horses to the possibility of learning something new and it can bring excitement and adventure into our lives. I’d like to think that because I needed to help Elvis rediscover his curiosity, I also had to sharpen my own. Rather than follow my usual plan with a new horse, I had to open myself to other possibilities to investigate the power of patterns in order to find a way to build confidence and develop curiosity. It is interesting that not long after I began taking Elvis for walks and using the ‘touch it’ pattern to help encourage his curiosity, I received the Savvy Club DVD featuring that pattern. How reinforcing was that?
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
The Trouble with Labels
The Trouble with Labels
I’ve learned a lot of important lessons during my Parelli journey but perhaps one of the most important is how my attitude can help or hinder my relationship with a horse. Pat Parelli teaches us that chauvinistic, autocratic, anthropomorphic and direct line thinking are four attitudes that can break up a potential partnership before it ever has a chance to get started. This year at the horse rescue where I work, I also observed how, when that kind of thinking results in labels being attached to a horse, it can pretty much destroy a rescue horse’s chance of finding a permanent, loving home.
This story starts in the spring, when the rescue took in three horses from a situation of neglect. The horses, a Welsh mix pony gelding, a quarter gelding and a mare of indeterminate breeding had been left out in a field with little food or water. The horses were very thin and after some negotiations with the owner, they were surrendered to the rescue. The mare’s condition was grave and she was sent to the rescue’s Hartly, Delaware site where she could be stabled and closely monitored. The other two, which were in slightly better condition, were sent to the Greener Pasture’s facility in Warwick, Maryland.
I was on vacation in Florida when the horses were rescued. The first day I returned to work, the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, approached me and asked if I would evaluate the pony.
“We are really having a problem with him and I’m afraid that we are going to have to put him down” she said. “The little bugger is mean”
“Mean?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”
“You name it.” Elena answered. “He’s biting, kicking, striking. No one wants to go near him.”
I thought about that for a moment. Mean isn’t a word I usually use to describe a horse. Horses can be dominant or aggressive or defensive but mean indicates a malicious intent that is more of a human characteristic.
“OK, I’ll take a look.” I answered Elena. “Where is he?”
Elena pointed to the upper pasture and when I looked, I saw and small, bay pony alone in the field, pacing restlessly along the fence.
“Is he still in quarantine?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, “We had to separate him from the other horses because he was being mean to them too.”
Since I was nursing a sore foot, a potential stress fracture, I asked if someone could bring the pony up to the round pen so I could take a look at him. Elena sent Meredith to get him and I watched her as she entered the field. The pony came right up to her with his ears forward. I could see nothing aggressive in his posture. He didn’t appear to be afraid or nervous when she put on his halter and he followed her quietly to the round pen. As the passed by me, I asked Meredith the pony’s name.
“We’ve been calling him ‘#*&%head’”, she answered. “Be careful around him. He bites.”
Meredith let the pony loose in the round pen. He trotted around, his attention fixed on the horses in the next field. He whinnied to them and paced back and forth while I watched but as soon as I opened the round pen door, he turned to face me from the opposite side of the pen. He was a nice looking bay pony with two small white socks and the kind of bushy main and tail found on Thelwell ponies. I was holding a rope halter in one hand and having been warned that the pony was “mean” I was trying to decide exactly how to proceed when one of our volunteers, Mary Burgholzer, wandered over.
“Is this one of the new rescues?” Mary asked?
“Yep. Elena asked me to see what I thought about him. She seems to think he might be too dangerous for people to be around but I don’t see anything particularly aggressive in the way he looks.”
I had turned to talk to Mary. I could still see the pony out of the corner of my eye. I seemed to have his attention and while his ears were swiveling around a bit, his posture was relaxed. As I continue to talk to Mary, the pony began to close the distance between us until he was standing out of my field of vision.
“You have company” she told me. “He’s right behind you.”
“Does he look like he wants to take a piece out of me?” I asked.
“No, he looks curious.”
Right then I felt a soft touch in the middle of my back. I turned slowly toward the pony and extended the back of I hand in which I was holding the rope halter. The pony lowered his muzzle to my hand and then immediately took the end of the halter into his mouth. He chewed on it softly as I reached over to scratch his neck. His ears were forward and his big, brown eyes were soft. He tugged on the rope halter and I could have sworn that I saw a twinkle in his eyes.
I continued to let him chew on the halter as I started to stroke him all over. He let me rub his legs and run my hand under his belly. After a few minutes he started to push into me so I waved my hands at him to back him off and he dropped the halter and retreated a few steps. After a moment he came back and grabbed the halter again.
“He sure doesn’t seem to be afraid of you.” Mary commented.
“Nope, he isn’t afraid and he doesn’t seem to be aggressive but he is a mouthy little bugger. Mary, can you get the blue exercise ball. Let’s see what he thinks of that.”
Mary retrieved the large exercise ball from the tack room and tossed it over the top of the round pen. The ball bounced a few times and then rolled to a stop against one of the panels. That would have been scary enough to put many of our horses into a panic but the pony watched with interest and after a few moments walked cautiously over to the ball and poked it with his nose. The ball skittered away from him and he followed after it, pawing at it and trying to bite it. Mary and I were both laughing until I realized that he was actually starting to get a grip on the underinflated ball with his teeth and afraid that he might pop it, I ran to rescue it. The pony actually looked disappointed when I tossed the ball over the panels to safety so I grabbed a rubber cone and set it down in the center of the pen. Instantly the pony came over and picked the cone up in his mouth. What a play drive this little guy had, I thought to myself.
I continued to play with the pony at liberty, using my hands and the rope halter, which I was still holding to have him back up, yield his front end and yield his hindquarters. He would occasionally get pushy but he never pinned his ears and his behavior was more dominant than aggressive. After 90 minutes in the round pen, I had yet to see him do anything that I would consider even remotely hostile or dangerous. While he had taken almost every object he could, including at one point the front of my shirt, into his mouth, he had made no attempt to bite me. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that this horse wasn’t “mean” or dangerous; he was a left brain extrovert who wasn’t very respectful of people.
At the end of our session while I was returning the pony to his field, he pushed against me causing me to stumble on the uneven turf. Down I went, falling directly in front of him in a heap. He stopped dead in his tracks and lowered his head to look me directly in the eye. Then he started to graze. Clearly this wasn’t the man eating pony I had been warned about. As soon as I let him loose in his field he started to trot along the fence, calling to the horses in the adjacent field. If this little guy was a left brain extrovert, it was probably torture for him to be isolated from the other horses. He needed to play.
“I don’t think that pony is mean.” I told Elena when I found her. “I was in the round pen with him for 90 minutes and not once did he pin his ears or do anything threatening. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything, including people and he isn’t very respectful. He actually knocked me off my feet at one point and I fell right in front of him but all he did was take a mouthful of grass.”
“Can you work with him?” she asked.
“I think so.” I said. “But we need to give him a name. I was thinking maybe we should call him Rango.”
I continued to play with Rango over the next few weeks. He was a quick learner and bored easily so I had to make sure our sessions had variety. He also didn’t like to be bossed around so I tried really hard to make sure I was letting him adopt my ideas as his ideas. He quickly learned the Seven Games and I incorporated lots of obstacles in our sessions to give him new challenges. Everyone remarked how much his attitude had changed and no one complained about him his behavior so I was really pleased with his progress.
One day Elena came to me and told me that Jess, a member of the Washington College Equestrian Team, wanted to take Rango home for the summer. She had ridden him a couple of times and thought he would make a good summer project.
“She’s here today.” Elena said. “Can you watch her ride Rango?
Jess had gotten Rango from his field and was tacking him up. When she had finished, I followed her up to the riding arena and climbed up onto the fence to see how they got along. Jess mounted Rango and was trying to get him to walk him around the arena. She was kicking him to get him to move forward and she had a tight hold on the reins. He was shaking his head and swishing his tail with annoyance at the restraint. Neither of them looked very relaxed. I called Jess over to where I was sitting.
“This pony is very dominant. He’ll argue with you all day if you give him any reason to.” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can help you work better together but I’ll be asking you to do some things you might not have done before. Are you game to try something new?”
Jess said she would try so first I told her to give Rango his head. Then I explained to her that to get Rango to move forward, I wanted her to just squeeze with her legs and cluck to him once. “If he doesn’t take a step when you cluck, then try taking the end of your reins and gently, with rhythm, swinging it back and forth along your body, like this.” I said as I demonstrated with a lead line. “If he still isn’t moving, then gently, with rhythm, tap him on either side of his butt. Whatever you do, don’t kick him with your heels, and the moment he takes a step forward, relax and let him go. You don’t have to keep urging once he moves.”
It took Jess a few of attempts but pretty soon she had the hang of it. Rango was walking forward but she was struggling to keep the pony walking along the rail.
“He wants to turn all the time,” she said. “He won’t go straight.”
“Don’t worry about that right now, Jess. Remember how I said Rango was dominant. He is just looking for something to argue about. Rather than trying to keep him straight, when he wants to turn, just think about how you can help him do what he wants to do. Ask him for a bigger turn,” I told her. “Encourage his ideas.”
Jess looked skeptical but she followed my instructions and pretty soon she had Rango trotting along and even jumping a small cross rail. They seemed to be hitting it off pretty well and by the end of the session, the pony was looking more relaxed and rider was looking rather pleased with herself.
I was hopeful that this would be a good match and that it would be good for Rango to have just one person working with him for the summer. But I was also worried that if Rango was pushed too hard, his left brain introvert nature would kick in and he would rebel so I offered to continue to help with the pony after he had moved.
I wish I could say this story had a happy ending and that Jess and Rango got along beautifully after she took him home for the summer but unfortunately things didn’t work out that way. They did alright for a while but eventually the pony became harder for her to deal with. I’m not sure exactly what happened because I was never invited over to see how there were doing but eventually Elena received an e-mail from Jess reporting that Rango had become so aggressive that he chased her out of his enclosure. Her parents now thought the pony was ‘a dangerous animal” and would eventually hurt someone.
This happened in August and Elena took Rango back immediately but I wasn’t able to go see what was going on with the pony because I was recovering from foot surgery.
“I’m not sure what I am going to do at this point,” Elena told me over the phone. “I can’t really adopt this pony out to anyone now because if I did and someone got hurt, the rescue would be libel.”
I knew Elena had a point but I couldn’t square up in my mind the experience I had with the bright and curious pony and this new report of an animal that was chasing people out of his enclosure. I didn’t think Rango was dangerous, but he was now wearing that label and in many ways, it was worse than being thought of as ‘mean’.
Elena eventually did find a solution for Rango that would not put either the rescue or the pony at risk. She got him accepted into a study at the New Bolton Center in Pennsylvania where the researchers were looking at the long term neurological effects of starvation on horses. She knew that Rango would be well cared for by the researchers there and they accepted him into the study knowing his history.
It is always a hazard when working with rescue horses that there will be some trauma in their background that is so extreme, the rescuers will not have the knowledge or savvy to overcome. And this may have been the case with our Rango, but I don’t think it was. I think Rango’s left brain extrovert nature was misunderstood by most of the people who interacted with him. I think he was labeled as ‘mean’, when he was actually being dominant and disrespectful. I think he was labeled ‘dangerous’ when he was actually defending his dignity. I think if he had been placed with someone who had understood his horsenality and been able to interpret his behavior differently, they could have had a long and productive partnership.
I try not to get too attached to the rescue horses because I know that our job is to find homes for them and most of them will eventually leave the rescue. But somehow I let Rango get under my skin. I think the reaction he evoked in people represented to me every time I had been labeled or misunderstood by someone. Labels can hurt, and I hope that my experience with this little, bay pony can remind me to take both people and horses as they are and to never attach a label to man or beast again.
I’ve learned a lot of important lessons during my Parelli journey but perhaps one of the most important is how my attitude can help or hinder my relationship with a horse. Pat Parelli teaches us that chauvinistic, autocratic, anthropomorphic and direct line thinking are four attitudes that can break up a potential partnership before it ever has a chance to get started. This year at the horse rescue where I work, I also observed how, when that kind of thinking results in labels being attached to a horse, it can pretty much destroy a rescue horse’s chance of finding a permanent, loving home.
This story starts in the spring, when the rescue took in three horses from a situation of neglect. The horses, a Welsh mix pony gelding, a quarter gelding and a mare of indeterminate breeding had been left out in a field with little food or water. The horses were very thin and after some negotiations with the owner, they were surrendered to the rescue. The mare’s condition was grave and she was sent to the rescue’s Hartly, Delaware site where she could be stabled and closely monitored. The other two, which were in slightly better condition, were sent to the Greener Pasture’s facility in Warwick, Maryland.
I was on vacation in Florida when the horses were rescued. The first day I returned to work, the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, approached me and asked if I would evaluate the pony.
“We are really having a problem with him and I’m afraid that we are going to have to put him down” she said. “The little bugger is mean”
“Mean?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”
“You name it.” Elena answered. “He’s biting, kicking, striking. No one wants to go near him.”
I thought about that for a moment. Mean isn’t a word I usually use to describe a horse. Horses can be dominant or aggressive or defensive but mean indicates a malicious intent that is more of a human characteristic.
“OK, I’ll take a look.” I answered Elena. “Where is he?”
Elena pointed to the upper pasture and when I looked, I saw and small, bay pony alone in the field, pacing restlessly along the fence.
“Is he still in quarantine?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, “We had to separate him from the other horses because he was being mean to them too.”
Since I was nursing a sore foot, a potential stress fracture, I asked if someone could bring the pony up to the round pen so I could take a look at him. Elena sent Meredith to get him and I watched her as she entered the field. The pony came right up to her with his ears forward. I could see nothing aggressive in his posture. He didn’t appear to be afraid or nervous when she put on his halter and he followed her quietly to the round pen. As the passed by me, I asked Meredith the pony’s name.
“We’ve been calling him ‘#*&%head’”, she answered. “Be careful around him. He bites.”
Meredith let the pony loose in the round pen. He trotted around, his attention fixed on the horses in the next field. He whinnied to them and paced back and forth while I watched but as soon as I opened the round pen door, he turned to face me from the opposite side of the pen. He was a nice looking bay pony with two small white socks and the kind of bushy main and tail found on Thelwell ponies. I was holding a rope halter in one hand and having been warned that the pony was “mean” I was trying to decide exactly how to proceed when one of our volunteers, Mary Burgholzer, wandered over.
“Is this one of the new rescues?” Mary asked?
“Yep. Elena asked me to see what I thought about him. She seems to think he might be too dangerous for people to be around but I don’t see anything particularly aggressive in the way he looks.”
I had turned to talk to Mary. I could still see the pony out of the corner of my eye. I seemed to have his attention and while his ears were swiveling around a bit, his posture was relaxed. As I continue to talk to Mary, the pony began to close the distance between us until he was standing out of my field of vision.
“You have company” she told me. “He’s right behind you.”
“Does he look like he wants to take a piece out of me?” I asked.
“No, he looks curious.”
Right then I felt a soft touch in the middle of my back. I turned slowly toward the pony and extended the back of I hand in which I was holding the rope halter. The pony lowered his muzzle to my hand and then immediately took the end of the halter into his mouth. He chewed on it softly as I reached over to scratch his neck. His ears were forward and his big, brown eyes were soft. He tugged on the rope halter and I could have sworn that I saw a twinkle in his eyes.
I continued to let him chew on the halter as I started to stroke him all over. He let me rub his legs and run my hand under his belly. After a few minutes he started to push into me so I waved my hands at him to back him off and he dropped the halter and retreated a few steps. After a moment he came back and grabbed the halter again.
“He sure doesn’t seem to be afraid of you.” Mary commented.
“Nope, he isn’t afraid and he doesn’t seem to be aggressive but he is a mouthy little bugger. Mary, can you get the blue exercise ball. Let’s see what he thinks of that.”
Mary retrieved the large exercise ball from the tack room and tossed it over the top of the round pen. The ball bounced a few times and then rolled to a stop against one of the panels. That would have been scary enough to put many of our horses into a panic but the pony watched with interest and after a few moments walked cautiously over to the ball and poked it with his nose. The ball skittered away from him and he followed after it, pawing at it and trying to bite it. Mary and I were both laughing until I realized that he was actually starting to get a grip on the underinflated ball with his teeth and afraid that he might pop it, I ran to rescue it. The pony actually looked disappointed when I tossed the ball over the panels to safety so I grabbed a rubber cone and set it down in the center of the pen. Instantly the pony came over and picked the cone up in his mouth. What a play drive this little guy had, I thought to myself.
I continued to play with the pony at liberty, using my hands and the rope halter, which I was still holding to have him back up, yield his front end and yield his hindquarters. He would occasionally get pushy but he never pinned his ears and his behavior was more dominant than aggressive. After 90 minutes in the round pen, I had yet to see him do anything that I would consider even remotely hostile or dangerous. While he had taken almost every object he could, including at one point the front of my shirt, into his mouth, he had made no attempt to bite me. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that this horse wasn’t “mean” or dangerous; he was a left brain extrovert who wasn’t very respectful of people.
At the end of our session while I was returning the pony to his field, he pushed against me causing me to stumble on the uneven turf. Down I went, falling directly in front of him in a heap. He stopped dead in his tracks and lowered his head to look me directly in the eye. Then he started to graze. Clearly this wasn’t the man eating pony I had been warned about. As soon as I let him loose in his field he started to trot along the fence, calling to the horses in the adjacent field. If this little guy was a left brain extrovert, it was probably torture for him to be isolated from the other horses. He needed to play.
“I don’t think that pony is mean.” I told Elena when I found her. “I was in the round pen with him for 90 minutes and not once did he pin his ears or do anything threatening. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything, including people and he isn’t very respectful. He actually knocked me off my feet at one point and I fell right in front of him but all he did was take a mouthful of grass.”
“Can you work with him?” she asked.
“I think so.” I said. “But we need to give him a name. I was thinking maybe we should call him Rango.”
I continued to play with Rango over the next few weeks. He was a quick learner and bored easily so I had to make sure our sessions had variety. He also didn’t like to be bossed around so I tried really hard to make sure I was letting him adopt my ideas as his ideas. He quickly learned the Seven Games and I incorporated lots of obstacles in our sessions to give him new challenges. Everyone remarked how much his attitude had changed and no one complained about him his behavior so I was really pleased with his progress.
One day Elena came to me and told me that Jess, a member of the Washington College Equestrian Team, wanted to take Rango home for the summer. She had ridden him a couple of times and thought he would make a good summer project.
“She’s here today.” Elena said. “Can you watch her ride Rango?
Jess had gotten Rango from his field and was tacking him up. When she had finished, I followed her up to the riding arena and climbed up onto the fence to see how they got along. Jess mounted Rango and was trying to get him to walk him around the arena. She was kicking him to get him to move forward and she had a tight hold on the reins. He was shaking his head and swishing his tail with annoyance at the restraint. Neither of them looked very relaxed. I called Jess over to where I was sitting.
“This pony is very dominant. He’ll argue with you all day if you give him any reason to.” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can help you work better together but I’ll be asking you to do some things you might not have done before. Are you game to try something new?”
Jess said she would try so first I told her to give Rango his head. Then I explained to her that to get Rango to move forward, I wanted her to just squeeze with her legs and cluck to him once. “If he doesn’t take a step when you cluck, then try taking the end of your reins and gently, with rhythm, swinging it back and forth along your body, like this.” I said as I demonstrated with a lead line. “If he still isn’t moving, then gently, with rhythm, tap him on either side of his butt. Whatever you do, don’t kick him with your heels, and the moment he takes a step forward, relax and let him go. You don’t have to keep urging once he moves.”
It took Jess a few of attempts but pretty soon she had the hang of it. Rango was walking forward but she was struggling to keep the pony walking along the rail.
“He wants to turn all the time,” she said. “He won’t go straight.”
“Don’t worry about that right now, Jess. Remember how I said Rango was dominant. He is just looking for something to argue about. Rather than trying to keep him straight, when he wants to turn, just think about how you can help him do what he wants to do. Ask him for a bigger turn,” I told her. “Encourage his ideas.”
Jess looked skeptical but she followed my instructions and pretty soon she had Rango trotting along and even jumping a small cross rail. They seemed to be hitting it off pretty well and by the end of the session, the pony was looking more relaxed and rider was looking rather pleased with herself.
I was hopeful that this would be a good match and that it would be good for Rango to have just one person working with him for the summer. But I was also worried that if Rango was pushed too hard, his left brain introvert nature would kick in and he would rebel so I offered to continue to help with the pony after he had moved.
I wish I could say this story had a happy ending and that Jess and Rango got along beautifully after she took him home for the summer but unfortunately things didn’t work out that way. They did alright for a while but eventually the pony became harder for her to deal with. I’m not sure exactly what happened because I was never invited over to see how there were doing but eventually Elena received an e-mail from Jess reporting that Rango had become so aggressive that he chased her out of his enclosure. Her parents now thought the pony was ‘a dangerous animal” and would eventually hurt someone.
This happened in August and Elena took Rango back immediately but I wasn’t able to go see what was going on with the pony because I was recovering from foot surgery.
“I’m not sure what I am going to do at this point,” Elena told me over the phone. “I can’t really adopt this pony out to anyone now because if I did and someone got hurt, the rescue would be libel.”
I knew Elena had a point but I couldn’t square up in my mind the experience I had with the bright and curious pony and this new report of an animal that was chasing people out of his enclosure. I didn’t think Rango was dangerous, but he was now wearing that label and in many ways, it was worse than being thought of as ‘mean’.
Elena eventually did find a solution for Rango that would not put either the rescue or the pony at risk. She got him accepted into a study at the New Bolton Center in Pennsylvania where the researchers were looking at the long term neurological effects of starvation on horses. She knew that Rango would be well cared for by the researchers there and they accepted him into the study knowing his history.
It is always a hazard when working with rescue horses that there will be some trauma in their background that is so extreme, the rescuers will not have the knowledge or savvy to overcome. And this may have been the case with our Rango, but I don’t think it was. I think Rango’s left brain extrovert nature was misunderstood by most of the people who interacted with him. I think he was labeled as ‘mean’, when he was actually being dominant and disrespectful. I think he was labeled ‘dangerous’ when he was actually defending his dignity. I think if he had been placed with someone who had understood his horsenality and been able to interpret his behavior differently, they could have had a long and productive partnership.
I try not to get too attached to the rescue horses because I know that our job is to find homes for them and most of them will eventually leave the rescue. But somehow I let Rango get under my skin. I think the reaction he evoked in people represented to me every time I had been labeled or misunderstood by someone. Labels can hurt, and I hope that my experience with this little, bay pony can remind me to take both people and horses as they are and to never attach a label to man or beast again.
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