Sparks Fly for New Years.

Last day of the year finds me starting yet another horse project. This one another mustang from the Tres Piedras herd, which are more purely Iberian. He belongs to a ranching family, nominally the property of a 12 year old girl, who has had him for a year and has yet to name him. I am calling him The Spark Keeper, or Sparky for short.

I've been documenting Chaco Bay's progress on YouTube. He follows me around the yard, comes when I call and lets me pick up and examine his hooves. I haven't put a rope on him yet, but I've trained him to come touch the rope with his neck. I can touch him anywhere with my hands and most anywhere with a pole. Sometimes I forget that he is still wild, but when strangers come in the yard, his wildness shows itself again.

I wasn't going to start Sparky out the same way. I thought I should use something more traditional, but then when I looked into his eyes, I couldn't think of a reason to try to make him less afraid by doing things that would scare him. I've been out this morning feeding him his breakfast, a handful at a time, through the fence. My toes are now frozen as a result.

Sparky's owner and her sister are coming to spend a week training horses with me. A pair of 12 year old girls is going to be so much fun!!! We will be sure to take lots of video clips for the parents, but you might want to check them out too.

Link to My YouTube channel

I am also trying to get people training with positive reinforcement to share videos through a YouTube group. You might like to check them out if not post your own. If you want to share a training video using other techniques, that would be great too. The main thing is to show something about training. Link to Equine Training Group on YouTube

The High Line

With two less animals (and needy ones at that), I got to refocus my efforts today on the remaining equids. The Cisco Kids inability to be tied is the first and foremost thing that needs fixed so I started implementing a plan. First I pulled the big 1 inch cotton rope out of the grain shed/bus. I spent a half an hour trying to toss the end of it over a big branch in the cottonwood tree that overhangs the paddock. Finally it went over and I shook and wiggled it until the free end dropped low enough for me to catch.

It's not easy to tie a knot in rope that thick and stiff, but I managed to make it into a big loop with the bottom just as high as I can comfortably reach. I didn't want it to look that we were planning a lynching, so the rope is hanging in a big loop. Then I put all the animals in Rita's old pen and got a halter and leadrope with a safety snap.

I started with Cracker since he is the littlest. I tied him to the loop with a quick release knot and set about giving him a good grooming. He wiggled the highline rope, but he never really put any force against it. I cleaned his hooves and let him go. Paisley is always keen to be in the limelight so she was next. She just acted like she was raised on a highline, so away she went all spiffy groomed and clean hooved. Chester has been so snappy lately, maybe he would test the system. He does not like any pressure on the curry comb and he let me know it with a quick snap towards me. I slapped him hard, but he didn't try pulling on the highline. Again, another clean animal left the paddock. Tobiah needed the grooming so he was next in line. He pulled against it once and then just stood while I brushed. There was only one dirty animal left.

Well, I started getting second thoughts about this so I came in and googled highline & horse. I came up with the Natural Horseman's Supply page on "Tying from above". I have read almost all the articles on their website and would recommend that everyone take the time to give it some study. There is a lot of valuable information pulled together in the NaturalHorseSupply domain.

Cisco had his halter on and was waiting for me in a stall when I went back out. I thought he might spook from the overhead rope, but he stood beneath it calmly while I rubbed his neck and started singing to him. I was a little bit frightened and the adrenaline made my voice waiver, but I kept singing until I felt myself calm down. Then I reached up and tied the safety knot. The dynamite was in place and the fuse was lit.

I kept singing and petting him. He sighed and I rewarded him with a horse cookie. He was quite relaxed. I started turning and walking away for increasing lengths of time, then bridging him with a resounding "X" and giving him a cookie. While I was away, he started playing with the rope, twisting it around his face and ears. At the most I was away about 1 minute. He never pulled back even a little bit. I was on the 600th chorus of Twinkle Twinkle Little Mustang, when his 10 minutes was up and I pulled the safety knot free. The dynamite was defused.

Tomorrow or perhaps sometime when I am not here alone, I will have to let the explosion happen. It will be good for him. Once he can be safely tied, we'll be on the road to rehabilitation. We've done what we could to prepare. We spent several afternoons in the round pen with a lunge rope practicing stopping in response to pulls on the rope. He knows. He is smart. Heck, he might even know not to try it.

I would love to hear from you if you have any experience with high lines. I have had lots of domestic horses tied up that way and never had a real problem, but I never had a errant mustang.

Patricia

Post Thanksgiving Relapse for the Mustangs

We were putting in a new woodstove in the guest wing so I didn't have much time to spend with the animals. I doubt if they really missed me while I was gone to Mom's. On the way back, I picked up a new kind of horse treat. Rita spit them out.

Both Rita and Cisco had relapsed in their training. Rita snorts more but Cisco snorts just as loud. It's not a nice horse sound and it almost always means that the horse is about to exit the vicinity. They had a hard time coming up to me. Cisco wouldn't allow the rope to be on his neck. Rita wouldn't let me pet her right side. Isolation is generally prescribed and then you have to just spend enough time with them that they remember that the human is the source of all good things. Within 10 minutes they were each sticking their heads through the rope loop and letting me scratch the scary part.

This week, Cisco gets to try something new in the way of learning to tie. I picked up a surcingle at the Socorro pawn shop. After he consents to wear it, I will run the lead rope through a side-ring and tie it to his tail, with just a slight bend to his neck. He can jerk his head back and bolt, if he likes, but it won't get him untied. The surcingle will ensure that the rope stays along his side and doesn't get tangled under his feet or flipped over his back. He is not going to like it. But, I will have stepped out of the corral and it will be between him and his tail.

If it works well, I think Rita will be due for a treatment too.

Yrs,
Patricia

Learning Disabled Mustang

This posting was stuck in limbo yesterday when the server went down.

This morning, I posted something to the BridgeAndTarget group on Yahoo.

I have a new mustang to work on. Rita is 2 years old and was captured when she was 1. The first owners, who have other horses, had no luck with her and she was given away to a trainer that usually does well with very broncish horses. He had no luck with her and so he said if I could get her to settle down, she was half mine. I didn't want her, but I saw the opportunity to learn something new.

She is about 12 hands high, has a stout little body and a bulging forehead. She panics over most anything and doesn't respond like a normal horse to natural horsemanship methods. You can't keep her with other horses because she attacks them.

I was browsing through Linda Tellington-Jones's book that has stuff about horse personalities and it showed a horse with a similar but less pronounced head profile. Linda wrote that horses like that were usually learning disabled and impossible to keep with other horses because of their aggressive tendencies. She said it was probably a good thing that the horse in her example had been put down. Yikes!!

This got me very curious so I looked into a couple of other books with horse phrenology stuff in them. Klaus Ferdinand Hempfling has a category called the "Peasant" where Rita would fall. Hempfling says they are extremely difficult but can be turned into general riding horses if you are willing to take the time. The old time head profile books all have very negative things to say about horses with her lumpy face.

Not knowing that I had a learning disabled mustang, I have been out there doing bridge and targeting with her. She is doing just fine. From panic scale of 10, she is now not going any higher than a 7. I think this mare really needs the control that operant conditioning gives her. It may also be that those kinds of horses have more brains (hence the bulging forehead) and can think for themselves, so they are
unmanageable. More like a donkey with a big panic button.

I don't know, but I will keep you updated as we go along. Right now we are learning "neck", "shoulder", and "face" and targeting a rope. She has a really big cut on a hind leg, but there is no chance of getting near it to doctor it, until she lets me touch that part. I have cut back the quality (but not quantity) of her feed since she is a tiny mustang and can survive on almost nothing, so she will be keen for
those rewards.

Yrs,
Patricia

This afternoon, I had a follow up:

The more I work with this mare, the smarter I think she is. She learned to stick her head in a loop of rope in about 10 minutes. She was willing to let me touch her neck, her shoulders and her face BUT ONLY WHEN I ASKED TO TOUCH THE SPECIFIC PLACE FIRST (Lucky for me, Kayce showed me this!) She never freaked out today and only snorted when I was reaching for a body part I hadn't asked for.

I took off the halter she has been wearing for a couple of months and gave her a good face rubbing. She really liked it.

When I return the mare to the cowboy, he might not appreciate her learning style. I think I will train her to stand on a pedestal so he can't pretend she doesn't know anything. He'll have to start out by getting soft enough to get on her pedestal. Or maybe I can find her a better home. You never know what will happen next.

Yrs,
Patricia