Horses are creatures of habit. And the habits they learn can be good ones or
bad ones depending on who’s handling them. And whatever habits or patterns
they have when they come to you can be changed if you go about it in a
methodical, horse-logical way. If memory serves, one of the horses that taught
me this was a Morgan stallion that belonged to a friend of mine. This was back
in the ‘60s and I don’t remember the horse’s registered name but we called
him Little Brother.
Now my friend Ray was raising a few Morgans and when breeding time rolled
around, he’d call me to help him handle the stallion. Little Brother was
always very, very easy to handle. He had a favorite wife named Quaint. When she
was in season and ready to breed, my buddy would hold Quaint on a lead line out
in the pasture. I’d go to barn and bring Little Brother along. The stallion
would nuzzle and tease and do his job then I’d take him back up to the barn. I
never needed a chain shank or anything. Little Brother knew Quaint, she knew
him, they liked each other and there was never any fuss.
One year Ray fell off another horse, broke his leg, and decided to skip
breeding that spring while he healed. Somebody asked him about leasing Little
Brother to use on his mares and that sounded like a reasonable idea to Ray,
given the circumstances and all. Little Brother was leased to this other guy
and, at end of breeding season, he came back home again.
The next spring Ray’s leg was fine, Quaint came into season, Ray took her
took her to field, and I went and got Little Brother. This time, however,
instead of going to nipping and loving her, he started eating grass. Quaint let
Little Brother know in every way she could that she was interested in him but he
just ignored her. Ray was pretty upset. He figured the stallion was ruined. But
I was at the beginning of thinking about training from the horse’s point of
view and I thought I knew what might be wrong. So I took Little Brother back to
his stall.
When I got Little Brother back to his stall, I put chain under his chin and
picked up a whip. I slapped and jerked and screamed and made a huge fuss. Sure
enough, Little Brother got all excited and in no time at all, he was ready to
breed Quaint before he even got out of stall door. So I took him back to the
pasture, he served mare and then he went back to eating grass.
Now, in those days, everybody knew that every stallion in any barn was just
naturally mean and ornery. If you didn’t knock ‘em around and show ‘em who
was boss right from the get go, you were sure to get hurt. So I figured this
other guy had probably handled Little Brother like he was afraid of him. I
figured that he’d probably fought with the stallion to show his who was boss
before he took him to breed. So the fellow taught Little Brother that a big
fuss, there was going to be a party. But, horse-logically, Little Brother had
also concluded that if there was no fuss, there wasn’t going to be a party. So
each year we did a little less fussing in the stall and in a couple years,
Little Brother was back to being the laid back breeding stallion he’d been
before.
Horses are so very pattern-istic. The patterns or habits that they learn can
work for you or against you. So it’s important to think through what you’re
teaching a horse from the horse’s viewpoint. You can try to physically
dominate a horse to control him or you can psychologically control him by
becoming the safest, most comfortable place for him to be. One big difference
between the two systems is going to be how events unfold when something
physically scarier than you comes along.
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