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.