Sistine targeting her ball while I simulate a jugular stick.

In the dog world, cooperative care is a concept that is really catching on. There’s an entire “fear free” movement, and a certification for trainers, vets, vet techs and motivated owners. The horse world, though, lags behind the dog world in terms of an awareness of the science of learning and fully understanding the components of animal-friendly practices. Because most of the focus of the fear free movement is on small animals, it’s very satisfying to develop fear free protocols for horses.

My mare, Sistine, a mustang rescued from a kill pen,  is the perfect horse for this work,

Sistine Seraphim

because of her previous bad handling. Because she is afraid of all traditional handling, she is helping me to develop new ways to approach husbandry and vet care. I don’t know for sure what happened in her earlier life: if she was ever fully tame, if she was tamed well but mistreated later or a little of both. I do know she ended up starving and about to ship for slaughter, so it’s safe to assume there was little to no attention given to her emotional states during training. What that means for us today is that I have a very large mare (easily 1350 lbs) who is afraid of: halters, ropes, basic handling, people and objects. We desperately needed to build a relationship, but I needed to approach it creatively.

For most horse husbandry and vet protocols, the base behavior is “stand still and don’t move.” It sounds easy enough until you are staring down the lead rope at a thousand pound animal who is nervous and doesn’t have the coping skills to self-soothe and stand still at the same time. Fights are born, the chain is tightened over the nose and the horse learns that the vet predicts stress.

The other problem is that “stand still and don’t move” is passive. When your only job is to do nothing, it’s really natural to worry about what everyone else is doing. It enhances fear. It’s far easier to be involved in an active behavior so that your mind has a directed focus separate from the procedure being performed. Make sense?
In order to give Sistine an active focus WHILE standing still, I taught her to touch a jolly ball with her lips for grain. At first she just needed to learn to touch the ball at all, because she was nervous of any objects humans held in their hands. Once she learned to touch the ball with confidence, I taught her to touch the ball continuously, with duration. Once she understood both of those concepts, I went through a few sessions to teach her to do the same behaviors with a ball hanging on a post rather than in my hands. And once she could remain targeted on her ball with duration on the post, I introduced the idea that I would touch HER while she was touching the ball. Below is some short video of our process:

In the above video, you can see Sistine learning to target her ball on a post. You can see by all her extra head movements, and the fact that I need to put my hand on the ball to help cue her, that she has some anxiety about touching the ball in a new context. As the videos progress, you can see these extra movements resolve.

In the above video, you can see me introducing Sistine to the idea that I am going to initiate touch while she targets her ball. The first two repetitions are nice, but you can observe that she hesitates to put her nose back on the ball on the third repetition, and when she does and I touch her, she turns her neck away. I leave my hand out, which is a mistake, I should have taken it away and just clicked her for returning to the ball. Because this repetition was too hard for her and elicited signals of stress and body irritation (lean away, head shake, tail flip), I go back to re-establishing duration at the ball.

The next video is after a few more sessions. You will easily see Sistine is more relaxed, more eager to get to the ball and all the stress behaviors – looking away, waiting awhile to walk back to the ball, tail swishes – have all disappeared. I am able to touch her while she maintains contact with her target. In addition, it’s windy and I have two other trainers observing, normally something that causes Sistine concern. Watch below:

It’s easy to see that by giving Sistine an active focus, she is able to stay quite calm when she would otherwise be afraid. Over time I will be able to listen to her heart, take her temperature, rehearse vaccinations and needle sticks. There’s a process to introducing each novel procedure, but the familiarity of the ball will serve to anchor Sistine in place and provide a sense of safety.

Teaching a nose target/ball target is a fairly simple procedure, even for newer trainers. Considering that a study out of the U.K. found that being a horse veterinarian is more dangerous than even being a firefighter, it would seem logical that we would be looking for new ways to train horses to relax and be less fearful during procedures. With a nose target, the moment Sistine removes her lips from the target, I stop whatever I am doing – brushing, sliding down her neck for a jugular stick, brushing her mane. When she puts her nose back on the ball target, I click and reinforce. In this way, she can say “no” to anything that makes her uncomfortable by just taking her nose off the ball. Rather than run off, kick, or struggle, she can just back up half an inch. And, because I take her at her word, she can relax and go quickly back to her nose target behavior. It keeps emotional spikes low and relaxation high. That is the place where safety lies.
As we move toward the next century, our consciousness about what comprises humane care for animals will continue to evolve. I suspect that in the near future, cooperative care and the fear free movement will move into the mainstream, rather than just the sidelines. Medical care for any species holds the potential to be stressful, painful and scary. With horse’s size compared to ours, restraint isn’t always the smartest or safest choice. Teaching them how to partner in their own care, so they can be as fear free as possible, is the ethical choice for horse and human lives. I am grateful for and to Sistine for being an integral part of helping develop these protocols for everyone.

One of the basic tenets in my work is: “Don’t steal from the horse’s flight response.” It means that even though it’s easy to get a horse to move off at a trot or a canter by shaking a whip or tossing a line, it routes through an emotional system created for survival and I don’t utilize those systems (at least on purpose) when training. So I am learning to be creative and figuring out how to ask the horse for trot and canter in this new paradigm. With Tarot, I had to be a thousandfold more careful, because of his past learning. He had only experienced trot and canter in his previous life during a training scenario in two ways:

1. When he bolted away in escape from handlers, hoof care professionals and his few times under saddle.
2. When the farrier came and he was round-penned (forced to trot and canter) until he was so exhausted they were able to work on a few feet because he was too tired to resist. In essence, sustained, effortful movement was used to punish avoidance behavior.

For the last six years,  we have worked in the walk to avoid increasing his arousal and to avoid triggering memories of how afraid he used to be. Motor patterns, specific co-ordinations and postures are often classically conditioned with the emotional states that accompany them. In his past, his energy was used pathologically, meaning, his energy was used against him to induce exhaustion to prevent him from offering any behavior at all. In a sense, his energy expression was weaponized against him. In that way, people could handle his body despite his lack of consent. A constructive use of energy is to use it to empower the animal to run away if scared, allow them to grow stronger and more balanced and to teach them to move to earn primary reinforcers, extrinsic or intrinsic. I was very worried that all expressions of increased energy over a walk had been poisoned by his history. But, I also knew that before we really began ridden work in earnest, it was important he develop a new relationship to his energy. Before it’s safe or wise to ride, I have to know Tarot can walk and trot during training sessions and stay calm, focused and engaged. There is no question that he already experiences movement for the joy of it  in the pasture. He trots, canters, rears, leaps and gallops up and down his lane, playing with the geldings in the adjacent lane.  But my job was to change the  old conditioning of movement around people from negative to positive. This was a completely discrete scenario.

This last fall, as we worked in the arena more and more and he became increasingly comfortable, he began to offer a really open and free walk with a lot of energy. I could feel that the trot was just below the surface, but I knew that the way I suggested trot to him would have to be with the utmost consideration..

I chose mirroring.

Horses mirror each other all the time, naturally. Just watch a herd of horses running and watch how they all turn at the exact same moment, no one so much as touching a hair on the other. Their sensitivity to each other’s movement is exquisite. Through our in-hand and liberty work, Tarot has been reinforced for mirroring movement with me over and over. It wasn’t out of line to assume he could make changes to his own gait based on changes I made in my body. The first time I tried, I brought my energy (and my knees) up way too high and he stopped short, threw his head in the air and snorted. Ok, too much. I re-established the energetic walk on a high rate of reinforcement and tried again. This time I rolled my shoulders forward, leaned my torso a bit out over my feet and “fell” foot to foot in a trot on my forehand. Presto! After a brief head shake, Tarot moved into a quiet, cadenced trot by my side. Click! He watched me with a touch of vigilance, but was able to

Me falling on my forehand and Tarot offering trot.

offer trot four more times that session. After that, trot was definitely on the table. He took the step that many of my horses do which was to begin offering trot all the time, even uncued. Of course, I accepted and reinforced it. Movement is good for him and offered movement is a sure sign the behavior is under the control of positive reinforcement.

A few weeks later, after some time off, Tarot and I went hiking in the huge farm field behind our barn. I really had no expectations beside exploring in the snow and getting some healthy exercise together. But Tarot had learned trot was a behavior that paid off. Over and over, as long as the footing was good he offered trot. Loose, in a field with no equipment he chose to hike with me and to offer the behavior he had learned in the arena. In the video below, you can see us heading toward home, Tarot trotting next to me, confident and relaxed. Movement as a road to reinforcement, constructional. The switch had flipped, quite quickly.

I no longer imagine there are any real limits with Tarot. There is only the time I am able to put in, the thoughtfulness of my plan and observation, and the reinforcement history we have built together. We are doing things together today that four years ago were a clear impossibility. It’s the long game, changing old responses by layering in skill after skill. You have to look at every aspect of your horse’s behavior. Assess their comfort. If they aren’t comfortable, go back. Go back. Go back. Teach another behavior to deepen their comfort, then another. Encircle the horse’s tension with roads to relaxation.This deep, detailed work is, for me, both a daily apology for the way humans have failed to listen to horses and a dazzling meditation on subtle emotional thresholds. I can go to Tarot and say,”Is this real magic or just an an illusion?” And he will laugh and gallop away or stay and join in the conversation. Real magic always yields engagement.

When I named Djinn, I had no idea how completely she would embody her name. I like to name my horses so that they can be represented by one simple symbol, a charm I can hold in my hand. For Djinn, that symbol is a little brass lamp, the same as you would see in a movie about a genie. When I met her, I knew she felt magical and I knew there was something in her that was a little dark. Not dangerous, not evil, but bound up. The name came to me: Djinn, and I knew it was her name. But it was only an intuition.

Djinn looking unsure in our early days.

I trained Djinn in protective contact longer than any other horse I’ve had. I spent four months teaching her skills and refining her understanding, but the first time I entered the pen with her all her thresholds changed and she felt largely untutored. She had two very established behaviors when she initially came to the farm: bite when confused or frustrated, and rush forward with physical force when excited. Those were the behaviors she was most likely to choose and would pop out throughout her training. She remembered the new lessons I had taught her and was able to do most of them, but in the pen with her, I was able to feel how very superficial those lessons really were. Such a thin coat of varnish over the whole of her rough nature.

I would train her intensively for two or three months and then I would give her a few months off. I had to be really vigilant in order to keep safe when I worked with her.  Leading her felt like having a lurching train on a string. I often felt a fizzing in the pit of my stomach while I worked with her, warning me to stay mindful. She didn’t mean any harm, really, she just had so much trouble controlling her emotions. She had been captured as yearling and lived in the mustang holding pens for two years before I adopted her. So her exposure to man-made environments was very limited. She had inhabited one large, flat pen with a huge herd of same-sex, same-age horses and they had stood around and ate for a few years straight. Her emotional flexibility was incredibly low and her capacity to absorb any motivational conflict was non-existent. She had not learned to handle complexity, fear, or excitement and had been only in peripheral relationship to humans. But, worse than all of these details was the feeling that she was absent emotionally. She would perform behaviors but she always felt flat and only partially available. After three years, I accepted her completely for who she was and stopped waiting for her to change. I was ok if she only wanted to be a pasture pet. I considered changing her name to something softer, Black Bear, powerful and connected to the earth.
But when I fed her, and spoke to her, I knew she was still Djinn. Every few months I would take her out and work her for a few weeks, and assess where she was. People even asked me if I still had her.
This spring, just shy of our fourth year together, something shifted. I brought her out to work and let her free to graze as I usually do, to allow her to get a little grass in her belly, a good buffer for the grain we use in training. But instead of grazing, she would take a bite or two, pull her head up and walk over to me, waiting quietly with her head near my chest. Not biting, not mugging, a learned quiet that she was offering as a bid to begin our training session. How surprising. How gentle. Every time I took her out she was the same. Calm. Engaged. Thoughtful. Each time I would marvel at how amazing she was that day and think to myself, “Well, this was unreal but I’m sure she’ll be back to herself tomorrow.”
Except, she only got better. More open. More present. More thoughtful in her responses. Safe. Relaxed. By the seventh or twelfth session of the same horse meeting me, I started to believe in this new version of Djinn. She had been a horse I would only take out when my working student, Erin, was around just in case something happened and I got hurt. One day, I realized she was the first horse I was thinking of in the morning and the first horse I got out, even when no one else was home on the farm.

Everything culminated with a training session that left me speechless. I took her out to the arena to work on her education in the cavesson, playing at the mounting block and general “arena games” in a relaxed preparation for riding. Previous to this she had been very safe, accurate in her responses, but she lacked a bit of “sparkle”. She offered me trot in that session and was deeply emotionally engaged, joyful and so present that I could barely keep up mentally with this being who had so much to offer. She trotted off in-hand in the cavesson, balancing between the reins with energy bubbling up from her feet. I felt a tidal wave of emotion in my chest. It was exactly as if you had lived with a roommate for years who was very quiet and non-communicative, flat, and came home to find them at the table with a fabulous dinner set out for you, candles lit, smiling and full of fascinating conversation. Djinn was unbound, larger than life, granting wishes faster than I could gather them in my hands.

I could speculate endlessly about reinforcement histories, repetition, maturity and all the myriad factors that came together for Djinn to be who she suddenly is today. The truth is all of my horses have become pretty spectacular partners at the four year mark, but none of them have made such a sudden and vast leap. Which, when you think about it, is exactly like Djinn all along, to leap wholeheartedly into our conversation, the same way she used to leap away.