Update on recent trailer work

In my last post on trailer loading practice, I talked about how I was wondering whether I should change tactics on trying to teach Panama to load. The comments I received made me decide to experiment with other methods a little. Then Kate wrote a fantastic post about keeping the feet moving, among other things, which gave me some other ideas.

This will be a long post — sorry about that.

I worked with Panama for a long time Tuesday afternoon. Inspired by Kate's comments, I started out by seeing how Panama gave to halter pressure. The answer: pretty good, though not perfect. There's a slight hesitation before he moves his feet, but he knows what halter pressure means and responds to it.

Unless there's a trailer in his way.

I wanted to work for a bit without the grain as incentive (read: blatant bribery), so I tried out some different ways to approach the trailer — me standing to his right, me standing to his left, me standing inside the trailer, trying to get him to follow me into the same stall, etc.

Normally, with this trailer I wouldn't try to get him to walk into the same stall as me. I know the dangers, particularly when this trailer is such a small one. It's a pity, because Panama is much more willing to follow me onto a trailer when there's enough room for both of us inside the stall. I've decided that's why he loaded so easily this time. However, at this point on Tuesday I was pretty sure I wasn't in danger of him actually getting all the way in and squishing me. I was hoping that he would put a foot in if I was already in there, but unfortunately it didn't work out that way. He did walk all the way up to it and bump his legs up against the edge of the trailer, but no further.

Until the grain came out, of course. He quite happily put two feet in the trailer for that. Well, not entirely happily — he's worried about it, so it takes quite a few tries to get to his grain. It's like playing the hokey pokey:

Put your left foot in,
Put your right foot in,
Put both feet out and shake your head about...

It takes a few times of that before he makes it as far as the grain.

After he had his grain, we worked on it some more, but he still wouldn't put a foot in without the incentive (read: bribe). I did discover that it worked best if I stood on his left side, in front of the door, and I swung the end of the lead rope lightly at his belly while clucking to him. He knew what I wanted, but didn't want to do it, so he danced back and forth and every once in a while stepped up until he bumped the edge of the trailer with his knees.

Now here's where my horse demonstrates his infuriating intelligence. I started out by rewarding the smallest advancement by letting him step back, praising him, and walking him around the trailer or around the pasture a little. I would generally watch for where he froze up, apply halter pressure and/or a go command, and then reward him as soon as he went a step beyond that point. So the little bugger caught on, and started freezing up farther back so that his step forward, when he gave it to me, was still within his comfort zone. Arrrrghhhh. I had to start drawing a line in the dirt after that to mark where his last step was.

Anyway, I ended up having to be satisfied with him bumping the trailer with his knees sans-grain, as well as a couple of other lessons that we seemed to reinforce during that period (Don't challenge Mommy being the boss because she makes you run laps, and Walk nicely on the lead line even when you're nervous).

Yesterday I had to be satisfied with even less, because I only got about 15 minutes to work with him at the trailer before breakfast was served and I got distracted by other work.

Today I never made it to the trailer because it started raining on us, but I did have a chance to test a suggestion that my new hero, Kate, made: that some horses hesitate about loading because they aren't comfortable (or are scared of) backing out. She mentioned practicing backing through obstacles, and one she mentioned was a practice bridge. Hey, I've got one of those at my disposal, and it's a pretty narrow one too — perfect! So today I led him up it, stopped him at the top, and backed him down again.

No big deal. He walked carefully down the ramp, as I would expect, but seemed completely comfortable, if a little confused about why Mommy was making him do this. I did this several times, each time with the same unconcerned response.

Okay, so backing is apparently not the issue. I still need to practice it a bit more to be sure, and I would have had it not started raining at this point. But it certainly seems that it is his previous bad experiences with the trailer that make him reluctant to load.

But I have a couple other new ideas now, thanks (again) to Kate. She had a couple of suggestions for using a second person to keep his feet moving, and you know what, they even seem like something my non-horsey husband can manage. I'm still going to practice backing some more first (why the heck not), but hopefully we'll get back to the trailer practice this weekend!

Horsey Headlines for July 3, 2009

These were supposed to be posted on Wednesday, but I spent the day at the barn, wore myself out, fell asleep early, and just in general forgot to post them.

The first is complements of a friend of Michael's (thanks Sam!). USA Today chose a gorgeous photograph of horses for the winner of their Picture America contest. It's a beautiful photo, of course, but it doesn't surprise me in the least that the judges thought a photograph of horses running wild in front of beautiful scenery was the most representative of America.

Which makes me wonder why, if wild horses are considered such a symbol of America, we are considering euthanizing them as opposed to using other, more humane methods of controlling their population.

Here's another thing I can't help but wonder about. In Longmont, Colorado, a 12-year-old boy was killed bull riding after he fell off and was trampled. Now, the woman can talk about letting her kids do what they enjoy until she's blue in the face, but how much do you think a 12-year-old enjoyed dying like that? Sheesh.

This is just a fun humorous article about horses, but I love the opening line. It also has a list of "explanations" about what various terms mean in horse classified ads. Definitely worth a peek — most anyone who has ever spent time browsing horse ads will be able to appreciate the humor.

A hard day's work

Sorry for neglecting my blog the last couple of days. I've been pretty busy lately, so I have a lot of catching up to do. Sorry in advance for all the posts coming your way this weekend!

Yesteday especially was a big day at the barn. I got out there around 8:30 in the morning, and stayed until about 3:00.

When I got out there, the horses hadn't had breakfast yet, so I groomed Panama and took him over to work with the trailer a little. The property owner gave them their breakfast about 9:30 (showing that he is indeed respecting my wishes to have them fed a little earlier in the mornings), so we didn't get much time to work on it — but I'll talk about trailer stuff in another post.

While the horses ate their hay, I mucked a little bit (more on that in another post too). The property owner had gotten some free mulch from a company that had taken down a couple of trees in the neighborhood (not ones that are toxic to horses — I checked!), and we were planning on putting some in the barn as well as spreading it out in the front pasture, so I got started cleaning out the barn in preparation for it.



I don't think I've taken very many pictures of it, but the barn was actually kind of nasty — the horses poop in there but not excessively, so the barn owner never mucks it, and as a result there was a year or two's worth of broken-down manure dust in there. There are four stalls (two large ones, two medium sized), and each one had at least six inches of manure dust. I almost completely filled the dumpster with that stuff.

Then I started moving the mulch into the barn. Of course, by this time it was getting quite hot, and I had a lot of mulch to move! But the property owner got his three college-age boys to help me, and we got it all done in about an hour.





It's amazing how tired, and yet how great, I felt after working so hard all day. It was really satisfying to see the results of all our hard work! My only frustration is that when I was there today, the barn owner hadn't finished spreading the rest of the mulch in the pasture — it's still sitting there in piles, just as I left it yesterday afternoon. I feel like it's a little unsafe, not to mention undesireable to have the horses picking through them to eat dead cottonwood leaves. I also feel like I put in six hours at the barn yesterday, and it's incredibly irritating that they can't put in an hour or two more to finish it. I'm not paying my board every month (which is kind of expensive, I might add) to have the place neglected.

Baby steps

Today was better than yesterday, but still not quite what I had hoped for. We accomplished some stuff, but haven't quite regained the ground we lost yesterday, particularly with the trailer.

I went over to the barn in the morning, right after dropping Michael off at work. I thought the property owner was still feeding them around 10:00 am, so I figured I'd have time to get a quick ride in before it got hot — and possibly have more luck tempting him into the trailer with grain when he hadn't had his breakfast yet. I don't usually hold with riding a horse before they've had their breakfast, but I figured 15 minutes riding bareback at a walk in the pasture shouldn't be too mean!

However, while I was trying to separate the other two horses into the front pasture while keeping my horse in the back pasture, the owner came out with their hay. I knew riding Panama on an empty stomach with the horses eating on the other side of the fence was a really bad idea, so I set Panama loose (which confused him), and sat down in the shade to relax and wait.

I gave Panama a little over an hour to eat — half an hour spent watching him and the other horses (which was educational, as I don't usually doo that), and another 45 minutes or so spent chatting with the property owner. Then I caught Panama, groomed him, and bridled him.

We rode bareback for 15 minutes or so, just like I'd intended, except that it had gotten a lot hotter in an hour. He behaved himself really well. I worked on getting him to collect at the walk (he'll collect for short periods of time, so I'm trying to get him to hold it for longer), going over the bridge, and of course my balance. I also rode him around the trailer — something we've done before, but he was much more nervous about it today, which demonstrated to me that there's a reason for the lost ground we've experienced lately. Whatever scared him and made him jump into the trailer on Saturday has apparently left a lasting impression.

Another thing we worked on was turning on the forehand. I've always found that he does it better bareback than when there's a saddle between us, probably because he feels the shift in my seat and my leg pressure better. But he still seems to require a lot of pressure on his mouth in order to understand what I want, so today I worked for quite a while on getting him to do it with a looser rein. It took him a while to turn without walking forward, but once he got it, he really got it! I was so pleased!

Once we finished our ride, I brushed him off, scooped his grain, and took him out to the trailer. We started out with the grain on the shelf again, but after a while it became evident Panama wouldn't go for that. It took me forever just to convince him to stand in the doorway (i.e., so that his next step would have to be into the trailer), and it was clear to me that he wasn't going to get any further than that the way we were going.

So as much as it killed me to do it, I again moved his grain to the floor of the trailer. (This goes along with revising our goals when something is not working out. I felt bad about doing so yesterday, but Kate reassured me in her comments that she thought I'd done the right thing. Thanks Kate!) He was still hesitant at first — he put two feet in the trailer several times, and then backed out without getting to his grain. But after several false starts, he finally did get in far enough to eat his grain.

This time I didn't give up after he backed out once. I made him finish his grain in the trailer, which meant he stepped up with both front feet about a dozen times, all said and done. He seemed much more confident about it by the end.

I'm wondering if we're stuck at this point, and if I should try something new to get him the rest of the way in. On the DVD that came with the Pony Boy book I bought recently, there is a segment on trailer loading. The method he uses — basically working with baby steps and relieving the pressure every time the horse gets a step closer to the goal (loading) — seems like a good way to do it.

I'm just not sure if I should change tactics, or if I should hold out and see if Panama gets over whatever set him back. Until yesterday, he was doing really well with my method of using grain to make him more comfortable in the trailer. I'm not sure if I should assume that right now is just a temporary setback, and keep at it, or if I should switch gears and try another approach. What do you think?

A disappointing day

Do you ever have those kinds of days where nothing goes quite the way you planned it — and instead of feeling like you accomplished anything, you are left with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction?

Today was one of those days. Lots of little events seemed to conspire against me getting done what I wanted to. Not only were we there with (we thought) a limited amount of time, but also there was a lot of activity going on just when I was trying to accomplish something.

For starters, we were planning on going down to visit Michael's family after our visit to the barn, so we were only planning on staying at the barn for about an hour. I had a lot to get done, so I made some dumb decisions rather than working on what obviously needed work.

After grooming Panama, I rode him bareback to save time on tacking up and down. Panama started out very nicely.



Unfortunately, the property owner chose that particular moment in time to give the other two horses their grain. (grrrrr)



Panama could see and hear them getting grained, which made him anxious about getting his, too. He started misbehaving, so we did a few circles to remind him who and what he was supposed to be paying attention to.



He did eventually chill out a bit, but he wasn't truly ever listening again the way he should be. I got him to a point that I considered reasonable, and then decided to move on to the trailer loading practice so that he could get his grain — a decision I now regret. I should have kept riding him until he was truly behaving himself.



(I have to just mention quickly that this is the first time I've seen pictures of myself riding in months, and I was amazed at how good Panama and I look together. He has filled out nicely in the last year, and I feel like we look much more proportionate to each other than we used to.)

Another reason why I regret rushing to the trailer practice was that the trailer practice sucked. So instead of accomplishing just one thing today, I felt like I did two things and accomplishing NOthing. Quite the disappointment.

Panama wanted the grain pretty badly, but for some reason he wouldn't get into the trailer.



I think it's because there was too much commotion. The next door neighbor was working on his fence fifteen feet away, and Michael was there taking pictures of us. I didn't realize how much that would distract Panama, but it shouldn't surprise me, since it's always been just the two of us whenever I've always worked on this before.



He did put one or two feet in a couple of times, but each time he backed right back out, like he was worried about something. I wonder if he thought Michael was there to push him the rest of the way in?

After a while, I moved the grain to the trailer floor, pushed all the way back so that he'd still have to put two feet in to get to it. I decided that as difficult as this was, I would have to revise my goals — and if he would just put his front feet into the trailer and eat some grain, I'd be happy with that and give him the rest outside of the trailer.

Eventually he did get both front feet in the trailer and ate several mouthfuls of grain. I praised him, and when he backed out, I brought the grain to where he could reach it with all four feet on the ground.

This is another thing I regret. In my experience, once Panama gets past his fear at the beginning of a practice session, he'll go in again much more easily every time thereafter. So I should have made him do it again. But I was afraid that as hard as I'd had to work for those two feet in, if he wouldn't do it again I'd lose the opportunity to end on a positive note.

In a way, training a horse is sometimes like gambling. It's hard to stop when you're ahead, and when you do you always wonder what would have happened if you'd kept at it. Would you have had another win — or two — or three — or would you have lost everything?

After today's glaring failure, there's no doubt about it — we'll be practicing again tomorrow, and every day this week until I have to give up the trailer. Hopefully this is only a temporary setback.