I loaded a pony!
We have had an absolutely adorable arab mare staying at our yard for the last few weeks because she needed to be on box rest for severe mud fever and she had been living out somewhere with no stables. She was moving on to a new yard this week, getting a lift with one of the other liveries on our yard in her trailer. Unfortunately, she wouldn't go into the trailer, and the more the person whose trailer it was tried to bully her into getting into it, the more she wouldn't go. Far be it for me to stereotype and gender, colour or breed of horse, but there's simply no point in trying to bully a chestnut arab mare. In the end they gave up. We had already offered our lorry as a plan B if they had problems with loading her, as she's not been great at it in the past, so today we were plan B.
She had no real interest in going into the lorry- she wasn't afraid of it, she had just learned that she didn't have to go in. She felt quite able to ignore one of the Richard Maxwell pressure halters and the traditional lunge line around her hind quarters so after half an hour or so of various unsuccessful attempts I offered to try a bit of leading work with her and see if we could get her to go on. I took her into the school and did a bit of groundwork, using a long rope and her regular nylon halter, and it was really lovely- she has all that sensitivity and floating responsiveness you would hope for from her type and it was a fascinating change from working with Zorro, who is at the opposite end of the whoa/go continuum. After establishing a bit of communication we tried again and sure enough, she still didn't feel like loading, mostly she just wanted to turn around the side of the ramp and look back at the nearest horses. An entirely understandable sentiment, but not the job in hand. We worked at it for a while with me leading and sleepsy_mouse and her owner trying to keep her from swinging round, but she wasn't interested so I figured the easiest thing to do was to get my stick and string so I could reach down and move her hindquarters without having to get off the ramp myself. I also figured that if you're working with pressure and release in this way it's useful to have just one person doing it, unless you have a team with almost telepathic timing. I was pretty sure I could get her to load by just keeping asking for the same thing in the same way and letting her work it out. In the meantime sleepsy_mouse took on the valuable task of explaining to the other liveries who were stopping to watch what I was doing and gently refusing offers of help unless the help involved bringing tea. When it comes to opinions about how to load a horse, well, everybody has one. It can get to be a bit like one of those puzzles where everybody thinks it will be easy to solve until they try themselves and suddenly it turns out to be much more difficult than expected.
Having got the stick and string we went back to the school and I did the basic desensitisation work to show her that it wasn't something scary but that it was something I was going to use to communicate with her and ask her to respond to when I put some intention behind it. Once she could accept the string swinging around and over her we went back and I spent a while just using it to get her facing the ramp rather than swinging to the side. This more or less entailed tapping her side with the stick when she swung round until she started moving back. She had a rug on so this made a lot of noise but I think she hardly felt it ( certainly she didn't react very strongly ) and it took a while to be effective enough that she really understood swinging round wasn't an option. She did have a whole lot of try in her, it just wasn't necessarily in the right direction- at one point we had a pause because she had tucked her head under the flap of my coat and appeared to be using it to keep her ears dry, which was just ridiculously cute. Of course, having worked out that gave her a break she spent a while after that trying to hook her ears under my coat again in the hope that was what we were asking her to do.
Hiding under my coat
Once we had set things up so that she could keep facing the ramp it wasn't too long before she could put a foot up on it and then another. That was a big change so we went back and had a break then and the next time she got about half way up the ramp. Another turn around and break and sure enough she had all four feet on the ramp and we were about ready to get her in. Of course, that would have been far too easy, so she tried to swing around again and her hind foot came off the side of the ramp, catching her hindquarters between that and the back partition door thing. A bit of a scrabble and she was back on the ramp and then in the lorry. It was such a shame though, we'd used so much patience and I was being so careful to make it a positive and easy experience for her as much as I could and I'm sure that undid a lot of it, though she's surely smart enough to be aware that she actually fell of her own accord. In a world of theoretical ideals one would go back and work through that to make sure she would be happy to load in future, but in a world of theoretical ideals you haven't been out in the freezing rain for three hours trying to load a reluctant horse, so we made the most of her being in the lorry, closed the partition and then discovered that in her stumble she had knocked the loop that one of the bolts that closes the ramp goes through and it was misaligned so we couldn't actually close the ramp. Fortunately the Yard Owner's son, who drives and looks after heavy plant machinery, was on hand with his big hammer, but again having to hammer part of the lorry straight with the pony in it isn't part of that theoretical ideal.
sleepsy_mouse travelled in the back with the horse, who was very anxious about travelling but reassured by human company and apparently chattered away for most of the trip. It was only about twenty-five minutes, over past Liphook, before we could unload her at her new home and the journey went reasonably smoothly. She unloaded nicely and aside from a small nick above the coronet band on one of her hind feet she seemed happily to be largely unscathed from her little moment.
It did take a long time to get her loaded, but I'm really happy that through patience, persistence and consistency we managed to get her in the lorry without it ever having to turn into a fight. It's the first time I've ever tried to load someone else's horse for them and I'm proud that I made a decent job of it, especially as both horse and owner are as lovely a pair as you could hope to meet.
She had no real interest in going into the lorry- she wasn't afraid of it, she had just learned that she didn't have to go in. She felt quite able to ignore one of the Richard Maxwell pressure halters and the traditional lunge line around her hind quarters so after half an hour or so of various unsuccessful attempts I offered to try a bit of leading work with her and see if we could get her to go on. I took her into the school and did a bit of groundwork, using a long rope and her regular nylon halter, and it was really lovely- she has all that sensitivity and floating responsiveness you would hope for from her type and it was a fascinating change from working with Zorro, who is at the opposite end of the whoa/go continuum. After establishing a bit of communication we tried again and sure enough, she still didn't feel like loading, mostly she just wanted to turn around the side of the ramp and look back at the nearest horses. An entirely understandable sentiment, but not the job in hand. We worked at it for a while with me leading and sleepsy_mouse and her owner trying to keep her from swinging round, but she wasn't interested so I figured the easiest thing to do was to get my stick and string so I could reach down and move her hindquarters without having to get off the ramp myself. I also figured that if you're working with pressure and release in this way it's useful to have just one person doing it, unless you have a team with almost telepathic timing. I was pretty sure I could get her to load by just keeping asking for the same thing in the same way and letting her work it out. In the meantime sleepsy_mouse took on the valuable task of explaining to the other liveries who were stopping to watch what I was doing and gently refusing offers of help unless the help involved bringing tea. When it comes to opinions about how to load a horse, well, everybody has one. It can get to be a bit like one of those puzzles where everybody thinks it will be easy to solve until they try themselves and suddenly it turns out to be much more difficult than expected.
Having got the stick and string we went back to the school and I did the basic desensitisation work to show her that it wasn't something scary but that it was something I was going to use to communicate with her and ask her to respond to when I put some intention behind it. Once she could accept the string swinging around and over her we went back and I spent a while just using it to get her facing the ramp rather than swinging to the side. This more or less entailed tapping her side with the stick when she swung round until she started moving back. She had a rug on so this made a lot of noise but I think she hardly felt it ( certainly she didn't react very strongly ) and it took a while to be effective enough that she really understood swinging round wasn't an option. She did have a whole lot of try in her, it just wasn't necessarily in the right direction- at one point we had a pause because she had tucked her head under the flap of my coat and appeared to be using it to keep her ears dry, which was just ridiculously cute. Of course, having worked out that gave her a break she spent a while after that trying to hook her ears under my coat again in the hope that was what we were asking her to do.
Hiding under my coat
Once we had set things up so that she could keep facing the ramp it wasn't too long before she could put a foot up on it and then another. That was a big change so we went back and had a break then and the next time she got about half way up the ramp. Another turn around and break and sure enough she had all four feet on the ramp and we were about ready to get her in. Of course, that would have been far too easy, so she tried to swing around again and her hind foot came off the side of the ramp, catching her hindquarters between that and the back partition door thing. A bit of a scrabble and she was back on the ramp and then in the lorry. It was such a shame though, we'd used so much patience and I was being so careful to make it a positive and easy experience for her as much as I could and I'm sure that undid a lot of it, though she's surely smart enough to be aware that she actually fell of her own accord. In a world of theoretical ideals one would go back and work through that to make sure she would be happy to load in future, but in a world of theoretical ideals you haven't been out in the freezing rain for three hours trying to load a reluctant horse, so we made the most of her being in the lorry, closed the partition and then discovered that in her stumble she had knocked the loop that one of the bolts that closes the ramp goes through and it was misaligned so we couldn't actually close the ramp. Fortunately the Yard Owner's son, who drives and looks after heavy plant machinery, was on hand with his big hammer, but again having to hammer part of the lorry straight with the pony in it isn't part of that theoretical ideal.
sleepsy_mouse travelled in the back with the horse, who was very anxious about travelling but reassured by human company and apparently chattered away for most of the trip. It was only about twenty-five minutes, over past Liphook, before we could unload her at her new home and the journey went reasonably smoothly. She unloaded nicely and aside from a small nick above the coronet band on one of her hind feet she seemed happily to be largely unscathed from her little moment.
It did take a long time to get her loaded, but I'm really happy that through patience, persistence and consistency we managed to get her in the lorry without it ever having to turn into a fight. It's the first time I've ever tried to load someone else's horse for them and I'm proud that I made a decent job of it, especially as both horse and owner are as lovely a pair as you could hope to meet.