I had so many titles to pick from I couldn’t decide which one I wanted. “Cinderella at midnight” A little bit of knowledge” or the one I chose. This title is a more positive and constructive start to this post.

A little bit of knowledge can become so dangerous. Someone sees something that works with one horse and thinks they can apply it to another. Then add it being a strange horse and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. All I can do is sit here and shake my head.

Okay, here’s the set up. My friend and her teenage neighbor trailered to the other side of the forest for an afternoon trail ride. They had a good time and it was getting close to dinner so they went to load and go home. Well the neighbors horse wouldn’t load. (Let me say right here I do not know the trailer or the horse, nor the teenager either. That’s my disclaimer for this story.) So they tried for two hours to load this horse. A person riding by stopped and asked if they needed help. They accepted her offer and they put a rope behind the horse and it pretty much sat down and still didn’t get into the trailer.

So my friend says to me. I didn’t want to run a chain through this horses mouth, it’s not my horse. Say what!!!!!! Yes she saw me do that with the OTTB she had sold a year ago. I knew the horse. I knew the horse had been on the track. I knew I didn’t have to use the chain. The horse just dropped his head and followed me onto the trailer with a slack lead line. I saw the vet use it on the horse when she was doing something. All she did was put it in his mouth and he dropped his head and let her proceed. She explained it’s an old track thing and if it’s been done before you didn’t even have to make contact, they just relax and go with the flow. Now this woman thought about doing this to a horse she barely knew. If it was an OTTB it might have worked, or maybe not. If they applied pressure the horse could have panicked and hurt them, hurt himself, or flipped over backwards. The rest of the story is that my friend loaded her horse and brought him home because it was getting dark. Her husband came to the site and walked with the girl, through the woods, to get the horse back to her barn.

So I just put out that they needed to feed this horse in the trailer for a week and get him to like being in there. Well she said that the owner told her that he wasn’t food oriented and that she had suggested that. I said, “well then the horse just doesn’t trust them, and doesn’t respect them, and until he does, nothing is going to work.”

So she then tells me that they are going to do positive training. They are going to load him at home, take him to the same place, and then the young girl will ride him home. Hello????? Yup that’s positive training for sure. You’re positively training him that he doesn’t have to load to go home. Her response – I didn’t think of that.

Once again. Every time you work with a horse you are either reinforcing a good habit or a bad habit. Oh my.

No comment.