Training Tips

QUESTION: Hi Sylvia. I have adopted a six-year-old "green broke" paint mare from a local horse sanctuary and we've started your training program (I recently bought your Complete Package). In just a short time, I have seen many positive results in areas that needed improvement!

There is something that she has done a couple times that concerns me and I'm not sure what to do about it. When I am leading her outside of her pasture, she has a tendency to get nervous. I spent a lot of time leading her in the pasture and now I'm trying to venture out with her a little more (playing your red light/green light game). I can tell she is getting nervous because her breathing changes and her head shoots up. I do a lot of retreating back to the pasture fence line -- go out a little ways and then come back, go out a little further and come back. I try to get her to think about doing something such as dropping her head to relax or back up. That seems to help a lot and gets her to focus back on me instead of her perception of the scary world out there. She has a tendency to crowd into me and I've really been working on that (helicopter with the lead rope, flapping my arms, backing her up). I'm patient with her because I know she is reacting out of fear, not aggression.

This is the problem: I will be leading her and feeling like everything is fine -- she is not breathing hard, she's not dancing around, she's leading fine, but then all of a sudden before I even knew what happened, she has flown past me and ripped the lead rope out of my hand. She bolts so darn fast, without any warning, she is gone before I even know what happened.

The first time it happened she actually tried to kick me as she was passing me by. As I think more about it, I think she was trying to kick the rope that was "chasing" her as she ran away. She doesn't go very far even though she could run to Timbuktu if she wanted to. I thought for sure that I'd be spending hours trying to get her back home, but I was truly amazed at what happened next. She will run about 10-15 feet, stop and look at me like she is saying "help." I can then draw her back into me with my body language and she'll walk right back up to me without me even having the lead rope. I'll reassure her, she gets calm and then we are on our way again.

Is it possible to know when she is going to bolt like that? Am I missing a sign? I understand that it is fear-based and she is going to need more confidence in me as well as in herself. I'm trying to be a good leader and lead with confidence and reassure her when it feels right.

I have spent a lot of time desensitizing her. The lead rope is not a problem for her until it's "chasing" her. As part of desensitizing her to the rope, I have asked her to walk while I've dangled the rope all over her legs and it's not an issue for her. The bolting has happened three times now and I don't want her to think that this is the best option for her. It would be wonderful if she would think, "Ok, great, I'm going for a walk with my owner. She's pretty cool and she's never let anything hurt me. She's my leader and I'll trust what she says." Is this just going to take more time? I've had her for about two months and prior to living with me she was extremely neglected. Most of the time I get the feeling that if she could, she would jump into my pocket just to finally be able to be close to someone. She finally has a friend, our 35-year-old donkey, but I notice she does a lot of pacing around her 1 1/2 acre pasture fence line as if she is looking for something else. I wish I could read her better. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated!

REPLY: Hi. Good letter! You're actually doing better than you think there! Multi-directions you're doing better than you think. And you're doing everything right! But let me add in something new you can do there so that she starts "hitting a wall" so to speak for bolting/breaking away behavior (and it's for her own good that she hits that wall/rules that out as an option once and for all; she's scaring herself with this bolting behavior and so think of this next route as: therapy, so she can stop scaring herself so much, and instead will learn to turn to you at all times for reinforcement reassurance, you as her leader there).

For this next step, to work on this particular problem, let me direct you to a link on my web site that will go into more detail about it, and how to use a "belly rope" to fix this breaking-away problem now:

Pull-Back - Horse pulls back/freaks out when tied (solution for all pull back problems)

Work on that exercise, exactly as I've taught it there, skipping nothing and this'll work, you'll see!

The other thing I would suggest is in the category of further desensitizing her to the dangling ("chasing") rope. If you have access to a round pen, do it there, that's the ideal place to work on this (otherwise, a paddock will do as well). Tie the natural horsemanship halter/12' lead rope on like usual. Do your rope desensitizing, then, take the lead rope and dangle it over her back so that it touches the outside hind leg, then flag her off and away from you. If she's not too "whoo-hooey" about it, go ahead and round pen her there with that rope just dangling behind her, having her change directions, etc. If she gets kind of spooked about it and if she is at potential risk of ignoring your directions there (risk of running into you there, etc.), just clear out of the round pen the second you toss it over her back/flag her away, and immediately exit the round pen & leave her in there for a while, "living life with a rope dangling behind her." She'll work it out! This will serve you well in that as she learns to cope with that "chasing rope," that in the end, is very harmless to her there, she's going to regain new confidence. The opposite of fear is: confidence. So, the more creative desensitizing you do there, not tip-toeing around her problems/fears, but getting real proactive there, the more this raises her confidence level and erases her fears altogether.

With really over-reactive horses like that, I do that often -- toss the rope over their back, leave it dangling by their back feet, dragging behind them, and I exit the round pen/go take a break, and let them just live life with it for a bit, until they settle down about it. They work it out pretty quickly all by themselves there! Only after they have settled down about it at liberty there, all by themselves, do I then go back in and start round penning them at liberty, with the rope still dangling. After they're okay with that, and they follow my directions there completely, them finally ignoring that dragging rope, then I'll approach them, stroke reward, relax/bond with them, removing the rope; and then I go to the other side of the horse and toss the rope over to the opposite side now and repeat the exercise (remember: what you teach the horse on one side does not necessarily translate to the other, so you have to desensitize both sides separately, but equally!).

Hope all this helps. Put those suggestions to work and you're going to make even more positive progress there, you'll see! But you're doing great so far overall! Know that. Proud of you! :-)