Sunny with her Girth Rope
Sunny has developed a pull back problem over the past year, culminating in a spectacular display on our final checkout ride for the Wilder Ranch Horse Patrol. (BTW, I intend to blog about the Horse Patrol Real Soon Now.) I’ve been using Blocker Ties with her, which give up some rope under pressure, the idea being that if the horse can get a little relief but still have tension on the poll, they won’t panic, but they will learn that the tension only goes away when they step into it. And I had her on a Blocker Tie that morning.
Anyhow, something startled her and she went straight up, landed on all four feet, reared, slipped and fell back on the asphalt, which pulled the rope out of the Blocker tie completely. She scrambled up and I grabbed the rope as it went by. She did two bucking revolutions around me and came to stop. Sheesh! It was scary, but it finally motivated me to do something about the problem. (Note: I saddled her up and we went on our ride, where she was her normal “What, me worry?” self.)
When I analyzed it, I think I had been making the issue worse by using Blocker ties. Sunny had learned that if she just really stuck to it, she’d eventually get some extra rope. After she figured this out, she did two types of pull-backs: the truly terrified kind (which I think the Wilder Ranch one was) and the “I-want-to-see-around-the-corner-of-the-trailer” kind. I wanted to address both, so I went to see Marybeth, as I usually do when I run into a problem.
The first thing that Marybeth did was point out that that on the pull-backs where Sunny was truly scared, the real problem was that when she was startled, her head went up and her body went back – then she ran into the lead rope and it scared her more and it turned into a pull-back. So, for that case, we had to work on Sunny’s “startle reflex” – that is, what she does when she’s surprised. To do that, we surprised her: Marybeth jumped up and down and waved flags, etc, while I tried to keep Sunny’s head at a a “normal” place; if it didn’t go up, there wasn’t any pressure. If her head did go up, I held on until it came down. We did that one time at Marybeth’s and it got assigned as homework to keep up in Santa Cruz.
The hardest part was to keep startling her: I’ve worked a lot on desensitizing her to various sounds and sights, so we had to really work to come up with something that she’d respond to, particularly on her home turf. Even when we found something, she’d only be frightened by it the first couple of times we used it, then it was back to the drawing board. And if I do something, by definition, it’s pretty much not scary. Sheesh. I had Cory be my Horse Startler and she had to work so hard she hurt her back gyrating around! Also, Marybeth warned that we couldn’t do it often, or Sunny’d start to expect to be scared every time I took her out, thus turning her into a ditzy Arab instead of a sleepy one.
The next issue was the “because-I-wanna” pull backs. MB addressed these in a couple of ways. First, she had me buy Sunny a flat halter. I always used a rope halter, so the thought was that the flat halter would make Sunny think the rules had changed. Second, since she wasn’t yielding to poll pressure, we used a girth rope on her – it’s in the picture at the top. This is a rope around her body at the withers. When she pulled back, if she didn’t yield to poll pressure, I would tighten the girth rope a bit, which she responded to instantly. It took about two tries for Sunny to learn how to respond to the girth pressure, then after just a few trials, she started to respond to poll pressure again, so we were off to a good start.
(Note: when we started this, we were in the arena and the girth rope was NOT run through the halter. After she learned what it meant, we set up the arrangement in the picture, which serves the purpose of keeping the ropes organized at the trailer. This is probably not something you’d want to do without adult supervision.)
I worked on these things at home and returned to Marybeth’s right before our first NATRC ride, where the horses have to be “securely” fastened to the trailers, to see if Sunny had gotten to the point where she didn’t need a girth rope in order to stand still at the trailer. In order to test this, we had to give it a try under conditions as close to a camp out as we could manage.
The first thing MB did was to verify that I’d done my homework: that the startle response was safer, if not completely safe, and that Sunny was responding to poll pressure. And she was. Yah!
The next item was to actually tie her, surprise her and see how she did. The first step of that process was to set up a safe environment to try it. MB has a stout little tree growing just outside her arena which she uses for this. Because of the way the tree is placed, a horse can be tied to the tree while staying in the arena, where the footing is good and it’s pretty safe if the horse does slip. Also, MB puts a sort of screen over the metal arena fence so a horse can’t slip and cast itself, or put a foot through.
The second step was to attach Sunny to the tree, surprise her and see what happened. Note that I said “attach” not “tie”. We attached her to the tree by wrapping a rope around it, with an end set up so that, if it was pulled, the wraps would just loosen and Sunny could pull it out under slight tension, and when she stopped, we could pull her back in.
It didn’t matter. We hooked her to the tree and danced around like maniacs. We got her to pull back once for about 10 seconds, then she decided there were better ways to live through the experience, namely by standing still.
So we advanced to the trailer. Marybeth got me an inner tube from a kid’s bike – it was about as wide as it was round, and we attached that to the tie point on my trailer. We then tied the lead rope to that, so there would be some give, but not a lot. I got a sharp knife (to cut the tube if necessary), we tied Sunny to the trailer via the tube, and we started our scary routine. She pulled back just far enough to test the tire and stopped. And we couldn’t make her do it again.
Soooo, I ate dinner, procrastinated as long as possible, went back to the truck, tied Sunny to the trailer, and went to bed in the camper. I got up about every hour or so to check to see if she was still okay. She was always okay, and I must have been confident about it because about 2 AM I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 5:30 AM, when she was still quietly standing tied to the trailer, demolishing the alfalfa I’d given her.
So Sunny and Marybeth came through like champs. Next stop: NATRC!