Horse Problem - Afraid of Other People- Horse needs help getting used to other people

When I first met him my heart broke, he was so beautiful, but my goodness his behaviour was so aggressive and dangerous it was awful. He was totally not what I was looking for but something inside of me told me that I had to at least try to help him, so as to avoid him ending up at the abattoir. In fact, if I'm honest, I'd say that I swear to God he was begging me to help him. I couldn't sleep at night for thinking about him and his terrible situation. Anyway, being fairly experienced with horses and having done some natural horsemanship in Australia, I volunteered to try and work with him and I set about scouring the Internet for some natural horsemanship tips to deal with specific behavioural problems and came across your site and methods.

Well for the past month I have followed your system of training to the letter and have been rewarded way beyond my expectations, and I now have a wonderful horse who is sweet, kind and trusting. Ok, we're a long way from perfect, because he's still an aggressive thug with third parties, but we're working on that too. But all of the ground problems have been solved and today I swear he "invited" me to get on him - so I did! And I was rewarded with the most wonderful ride of life. He was young and unbalanced, but there was not one iota of naughtiness, just the absolute desire to do the right thing. By the way, my absolute favourite of your training tips is the feet handling "trick" with the rope (http://www.naturalhorsetraining.com/TrainingTips16.html). From it being nearly impossible to handle his feet without sustaining injury, he is now 100% cured of that problem. The farrier came and trimmed his feet last week without incident. The farrier actually assumed that it was a different horse he was dealing with!

But I would really appreciate your tips on improving his behaviour and general reaction to other people. He's basically very respectful around me (he accepts me as lead mare) but he is still aggressive to others and will try to bite and kick anybody else who approaches him.

Your advice would be much appreciated. Kind regards.

As for now getting him past his issues with others, what I like to do with a horse like this is to get more people involved in the program, teaching them how to help the horse as well as you are, and have them one by one work with the horse, with you guiding them. Males and females both.

Maybe you can go the route of having people close by, but you in control, while you do relaxation techniques to "cool down" the horse's reaction around others (using these bonding/relaxing techniques -- most important being: getting the horse's head down using pressure/release on the lead rope, and your finger in the mouth feathering the tongue to get the horse relaxing/letting down: http://www.naturalhorsetraining.com/TrainingTips58.html). That will work for a start to begin reprogramming the horse's brain to RELAX around people. And this will also keep other folks safer if they're too scared to work one-on-one with this horse without you at first. Give that a shot. And then ease them into the picture to work with the horse as well, starting with bonding. The more people you get working with the horse consistently now, using the same methods, the more he will lose his aggression and fears involving all humans and settle down to trusting humans in general for once in his life. If he sees you in close proximity to the lessons you guide others to do with him now, then he'll build greater trust for whom you send in to work with him, and that will eventually translate outward to all other humans. That's your next step there and it will do him good, you'll see.

Keep up the good work! Proud of you!

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