Month: January 2013

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A short history of Tarot

First picture of TarotTarot: Tarot is a 2000, grey Comstock mustang stallion. I bought Tarot before I even had a place  to keep him, knowing how difficult it is to find a boarding barn that will keep a stallion, much less a mustang stallion who is fearful of humans. I was scrolling down the internet looking at pictures of horses when I saw the picture to the left. His price was cheap in comparison to his beauty so I was curious. People usually set a high price for beautiful animals. When I called his owner, Trisha, she was open and honest: Tarot was an unusually fearful horse who would require a very patient owner and quiet, gentle handling. Despite having trained many mustangs herself, she could not teach him to allow his back feet to be handled without  kicking or to accept a saddle without fear. She had sat on him three times. The first time he had bolted and she had fallen off, the second and third he just stood stock still, frozen in between just a few tense steps. In Las Vegas where she lived, there were a lot of cowboys just waiting to try their hands with difficult horses. She was scared if one of them got their hands on Tarot he would be ruined permanently.
Horses in a holding penTarot’s introduction to humans was a warning about human carelessness. The Comstock mustangs aren’t under the jurisdiction of the BLM so all the individual pieces of gathering horses: the round up, the transport, the long-term holding are often handled by different private companies. I don’t know the finer details of the situation, but once Tarot was rounded up with his herd, the company that was supposed to transport the horses from the temporary pen to the long-term holding either didn’t show up or had never been hired. Tarot and the rest of the gathered horses spent two weeks in a holding pen in the desert without food or water. Some of the horses died. Tarot survived but obviously he was stressed and frightened. He went to a horse rescue for the next three years where he received good care but minimal handling. He was adopted out three or four times, but each time he was returned. He had a total of six homes before at eleven years old he was listed for sale again. I felt a deep, immediate connection to him. I wanted to know what it would mean to build a common language with him. I offered to buy him as long as I could get thirty days to find a place for him to stay.

Mystical TarotTarot arrived a month before we closed on our own farm, so he was dropped off at a friend’s property only minutes from our future home. I was there all day waiting since you never know with cross country transport what time a horse will show up. I paced back and forth with a coca-cola and waited for the call from my hauler, Rick.  Rick is an older cowboy  and one of the kindest, gentlest people I’ve ever met. Once he pulled in with his rig, he got out with his dog and came over for a smoke and a chat. After a moment he leaned in,”You know what you got yourself into, right? Normally, I take the horses off the truck at the rest stops so they can stretch their legs. But this one, this one I thought I might never get back if he got away from me. Better to leave him on.”

When I met Tarot he had a three foot aura around his body in every direction that he preferred no one breach. There was an energy field that surrounded him.  If you entered it he walked away. He was the most reserved, careful, watchful horse that I have ever met. I think most people picture a spooky, bolting kinetic horse when they imagine a fearful mustang but Tarot never wasted any energy. He was the definition of self-preservation. You do not squander energy when it might be needed later for survival. He was so self-contained that he felt like a dignitary and I felt both awkward in my human-ness and guilty for what my species had done to him. But guilt doesn’t build new relationships so I put it away and began the work of teaching him to trust, inch by inch.

We started at the beginning.

Tarot in the long grassCan I share space with you? Can you eat from my hand? Can you touch this target with your nose for a click and treat? Can you follow the target, follow me? All of our training sessions were done out in his pasture with him loose, so he could choose whether or not to engage in the lesson. There were no halters, no lead ropes, no whips and no round pens. This was not a horse you could coerce. Despite the fact he always chose to engage in the game and  his learning progressed, he still felt like he was just tolerating me for the food. I felt guilty that he was captive at all and wanted to offer him a life that felt good to him and larger than the size it had shrunk to with his fear. I gave up training for awhile and just took him out grazing every morning. I didn’t pressure him to offer any behavior, I just walked along with him and watched him eat. There were weeks and months I felt like he would never open up and that I was just a necessary evil in his life. I talked with him while we walked about horses and humans, what it means to be wild, what it means to be tame and how strange the world is. I know horses don’t understand a spoken language but it cleared my body and my heart.

My horse training mentor, Alex, says it’s important to tell stories that benefit the animals we’re training. People are conceptual thinkers with big episodic memories and we can’t help but tell ourselves stories about the horses we love and work with even when we don’t know the whole truth of their past. We understand a lot of the world through narrative. And the stories we choose to tell influence our work. So I wrote a story for Tarot:

PerseidsMy grey horse used to be a star. On his last day in the heavens he was offered three roads and he chose a narrow path made of crushed indigo stone. The path of the horse. He picked his way carefully down out of the sky, his mane spilling silver as he walked. Everyone who meets him knows he is ancient. Mere strangers understand he can move between worlds. He is a messenger. But stars speak an old language that has so far gone undeciphered. It is up to me to learn. 

So I am learning a new language. Learning to translate our rough syllables to something graceful for an animal who sometimes seems entirely made of light. Light shifts, it changes. You can’t capture it and you can’t hold it down.

This summer something shifted in Tarot and he began to express emotions other than caution and fear. He started to whinny to me when I came outside, chortling through his nostrils like he does for the mares. He trotted up to the fence for the first time Tarotwhen I came out to train and now does so every time, waiting at the fence line while I train my other horses. He would even come trotting up while loose on the property  from over fifty feet away, leaving his freedom voluntarily to choose the games I offer over long grass and wandering. He feels looser and happier. Now, he is able to participate in some of his care with the vet through the use of the clicker, he is relaxed in the barn and able to work down in the outdoor arena without worry. He trusts me, not fully, but he trusts me. We have some good agreements in place.

He’s thirteen now and if I’m lucky he’ll live to be thirty. He teaches me all the lessons good trainers must learn: how to be patient, how to be flexible, how to be consistent, how to be structured, self-aware and fully present in every moment. I named him Tarot because they are the cards that reveal you to yourself. He teaches me and I teach him. Together, we are mapping  out a new world.

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New habits for an older mustang

Tarot's eyeWhen I decided to purchase my mustang stallion, Tarot, I knew I had a long road in front of me. He had been in one home for each year he was captive. That made for six different homes before he finally made it to our farm. I knew he was what most people call a project and I wanted what he had to teach me. He was eleven years old and had yet to meet a human who could teach him what they wanted him to learn.

Things like walking up to be haltered, being fly sprayed in the summer, accepting a saddle without exploding and being led without bolting. But Tarot’s biggest issue from his past is allowing foot handling. He has a long history of kicking people that picked up his back feet but also of pulling away and being very uncomfortable with any of his feet being picked up, cleaned or trimmed. Most people just gave up and let them grow because he was dangerous or unpredictable when his feet were handled. It was uncomfortable for everyone. One of his past homes had a trainer out to help him learn to be handled but he took the “cooperate or run” approach. If Tarot kicked he made him run. Eventually Tarot would give in out of sheer exhaustion and they would get a few feet done, not always all four on the same day. It worked as a method outwardly,  he did  surrender his foot, but  Tarot never learned to be more open to having his feet handled. Instead he learned when a human reaches for your hoof they are likely to turn unpredictable, demanding and obsessive. Hoof care for Tarot is deeply poisoned. It’s also our winter project.

It is infinitely easier to teach a behavior correctly from the beginning than to teach a new response in place of an undesirable one. Once a neural pathway has been mapped it can’t be erased. You can only build a new one and help the learner choose it over and over and over until that pathway becomes the habit. It sounds kind of simple but in practice it’s not so easy. That’s why I love my untouched mustangs so much, they are blank slates waiting for good information. Tarot has already been “programmed”, so to speak, and it is up to me to avoid the expression of those old responses while teaching something new. Learning can be bound up in a tactile sensation, which is unfortunate, because picking up feet can’t happen without some touch at least once you get down to cleaning out feet or actually trimming them. So how to approach the subject with him?

One of my favorite writers, Jeanette Winterson, writes, “Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.”

I started out by teaching Tarot to target his knee to the end of a whip. Whips are something he isn’t afraid of – I guess there aren’t a lot of cowboys with whips – and more importantly, whips aren’t hands. I wanted to teach him to pick up his own foot and hold it up with a verbal cue. I wanted to split out the layers for him and just start with the subject, “Can you pick up your foot with a human near you?” instead of, “can you pick up your foot and surrender control of it to me?”  Staying outside the depth of the conflict and above the storm. Here’s a video of where we are starting from today:

I have already faded the whip to just a finger point, mostly because I am incredibly clumsy walking with it by my side in the slippery snow. So my cue for the foot lift is to say the word “foot”, switch my lead to my left hand and point to his knee. When he raises his foot I drop my hand and I click when he seems relaxed. I’m not working on teaching him to pick up his feet, he knows how to do that now. I’m working on building relaxation like bedrock into the skill. The foot lift is the motion but the relaxation within it is the goal.

How do you speak to a horse about relaxation? You need both a clear training language and good listening skills. Tarot has to have the freedom to refuse my requests and the safety to express his conflict or anger without punishment. I have to know how to stay safe and non-reactive myself when he is upset. I need to be able to read small expressions of conflict/tension so I can see how well he is handling the work and make adjustments accordingly. I also need not just a “yes” answer (the click), but a “that was spectacular” answer so he can more easily understand the work. Right now, any foot offer without any tail swish or head raise is clickable. But sometimes he kicks his foot backs when he goes to set it down because he is tense and frustrated. I have already clicked so I am going to feed him because I don’t want to seem unreliable. But, when he softly offers his foot and lowers his head and sets it down softly he gets a click and treat and a chance to do a few nose targets. The nose targets are an easy behavior where he is sure to earn reinforcers and they offer the functional reward of a break from focusing on his feet.

Here’s a video of his right side where he is significantly less comfortable:


Here you see he is unable to lift his foot without extreme tail swishing/tail wringing. This tail movement shows how conflicted he is about me being on his right side and asking for his feet. He also leans his head and neck off to the left which is another conflict behavior he offers when he is uncomfortable and thinking about leaving. In it’s extreme form Tarot would spin away and present his hindquarters to me in a kick threat. He also is hurriedly offering me feet over and over even though I haven’t even said the cue or changed my lead rope to my inside hand. I’ve found with my mustangs when they are still nervous about their feet they offer them quickly and often instead of waiting to be cued. I’m not going to fuss about stimulus control when I am working on relaxation. So what to do? My rule of thumb is if he can’t offer a quiet response I will feed him for any foot lifting response despite the conflict he is showing. If he can eat he will begin to relax. So even though he is full of angst I feed him for each and every time his foot is in the air regardless of his emotional state. I do make a few mistakes because I was surprised at the level of conflict he displayed and had to change my plan on the spot. I should have just reached in my pouch and began feeding him immediately, sans click, the moment his foot left the ground. This is called counter-conditioning. Once he is able to offer a more relaxed response, then I will click that response and ask him to target as a reward. That response will become my new criteria. He raises the bar on his own at his own pace. By the seventh(!) repetition he offers a relaxed foot lift with no tail swish. I click, reward him with an opportunity to target my hand, and go back to his left side to give him the ultimate functional reward of leaving his right side.

You can’t force relaxation, you have to draw it out like a shy animal. You create the conditions for it to exist.