Most “bad behavior” in horses isn’t defiance. It’s communication. But if you’re too focused on control and bravado, you’ll miss what they’re trying to tell you.
Humans, I’ve come to realize, can barely address their own problems. We treat symptoms, not causes.
“I have anxiety! I need medication to stop worrying all the time.”
“I have terrible nightmares! I take meds so I can sleep.”
These are statements I’ve heard recently from people I care about. And the recovering rescue ranger in me wanted to jump in. Prescribe a book on shadow work. Point out that anxiety and nightmares are the psyche’s way of saying: something’s wrong. But as a know-it-all self-helper in recovery, I held back.
Still, a theme echoed loud enough to become an epiphany: Humans struggle to face the root of their own issues. So of course, they do the same with horses.
“You need a harsher bit.”
“Just kick him through it.”
“He needs to be desensitized.”
I’ve been that person, too. Quick to fix, slow to listen. But horses aren’t broken. They’re trying to be heard. It’s up to us to listen.
Unfortunately, if the horse’s problem is an emotional one and the human fails to address the cause, they can exacerbate the issue and blow it up into a problem so severe, the horse is faced with certain death.
Allow me to introduce Stormy…
Stormy is my second free horse. He’s a 3 year old Arabian gelding, given to me as a last resort. He was facing the death squad for the crime of being difficult. He is:
- Reactive
- Impossible to catch
At three, he was sent to a trainer where he bolted under saddle. The trainer told the owner she was wasting her money with the horse in training, he was too “reactive” and needed to spend a lot of time being left alone.
Enter me, a sucker.
As the owner and a mutual friend were on their way to get the horse, I got some text messages asking if I wanted a free horse.
Short answer: no fucking way, I’m maxed out. But being the bleeding heart rube I am, my friend knew it would only take a wee bit of coaxing via a picture. Plus baby colt pictures.
So fine, I went to check him out just to “see” (I am so full of shit).
When I arrived, I met the problem. And no, it wasn’t the horse. It was one of the staff, a mid-thirties woman who hated the horse and wanted him snuffed. She stared the horse down when he was bothering no one in his too small paddock, and highlighted only his problems. Telling me that if this horse was so bad the trainer couldn’t even handle him, he was dangerous.
Side note: sending an already reactive horse to a trainer, at THREE, is INSANE.
I didn’t see a dangerous horse. I saw a horse who was terrified.
His owner didn’t want to send him to the next life simply because he was reactive and hard to catch. I met her, met Stormy (then known as “Manny”) and knew the horse wasn’t impossible to save. He just needed to be listened to, not lectured at.
They’d left the halter on him because he couldn’t be caught. This is but one red flag among a see of red flags. But every time I tell people that he won’t be caught, I get met with more of the same:
“You should lasso him.”
“Sounds like he needs a neck collar.”
“Don’t feed him until you can halter him.”
Lather, rinse, no wonder he’s insane.
Time for a mental exercise
Imagine, if you will, a chair. Imagine someone leads you into the room and has you sit in the chair. As you’re sitting in the chair, someone stands over you and drops a snake in your lap. Then they don’t allow you to leave the chair. The snake is harmless, just a garter snake. But still. You probably wouldn’t like it. Eventually you get away. The next day, you’re led into the same room where the same chair sits. You’re seated in the chair. Then someone drops a spider on you. You eventually get away. On the third day that you’re brought into the same room with the same chair, you’re forced into the chair. Then someone pours water on you.
On the fourth day, when a person comes to get you, what do you do? When they finally corner you and catch you, then lead you into the room with the chair, how do you feel about the chair? Pro or con?
By the fifth day you’re really hard to catch and force into the chair. You’re then called “reactive” and “overly sensitive.”
So let’s say a brand new person comes to meet you. She’s 5’7″ with a crooked smile and bad habit of rescuing animals she doesn’t need. Purely random example. She has with her a chair. And she wants you to sit in it.
Do you? Or do you tell her to fuck all the way off?
Congratulations, now you understand why Stormy doesn’t like being caught. The halter is just the trigger, just like the chair in my analogy. But you needed to see things from the victim’s perspective.
What I want to do with the halter and Stormy is to lead him to a grassy field to graze and play with his friends. But he doesn’t know that. All he knows is halter=getting caught. Getting caught=forced into things I hate.
Horses are gentle, sensitive animals whose first instinct is to run from danger. Their eyes are on the sides of their head so they can better see danger approaching from all directions. They have flat teeth for eating grass. Not ripping flesh.
I, on the other hand, have eyes corrected by LASIK to better than 20/20 on the front of my head. I have both sharper and flatter teeth for eating flesh. This makes me an omnivore predator to a horse’s herbivore prey. My meat-eating, derived from millennia of my ancestors doing the same, means I also have a large brain compared to the horse’s itty bitty one. This means, in theory, I’m smarter than the horse. Ergo, I should be able to think a little better and help the horse through his problems more than the horse can. It is incumbent upon the smarter being to empathize with the one who isn’t capable of it.
This is why I never kick a horse through their fear, put in a harsher bit when they’re excited to run, or push them into doing more of what scares them to “desensitize” them.
That is, in a word, insane. If that offends you, good. Stop doing that shit.
Full disclosure, I still screw up. Of course I do. I might have the bigger brain, but that doesn’t mean I always have common sense.
I have never had a horse like Stormy. I have the opposite problem. Two of my horses, Cat and Hondo, have a hard time maintaining boundaries and will full on lean on me to get scratches and cuddles. Nisha and Ransom love swinging their giant asses into my face so I scratch nipples and tails respectively. Dante rubs his face on me as a way of greeting me as his person, and longest adult relationship of my life.
A horse that won’t be caught is new to me.
Next steps
The other horses, though, know me. They trust me. Halter to them means “we get to go somewhere new to eat” nine times out of ten.
The problem with Stormy is not the halter. The halter is the trigger. The problem is Stormy doesn’t trust me enough to halter him. He has, likely, never trusted a person in his whole life. Why should he?
From Stormy’s perspective, his new paddock is sweet. It’s much larger than where he was before. He’s fed multiple times a day, he has friends around him and sometimes in with him, he’s never had to leave since being here two months, to be kicked around and forced to do things he hates. Why, WHY, would he want to leave such a safe space?
That’s how he sees it.
How I see it is a dust bowl of boredom when he could be frolicking about in grassy fields with free food growing faster than I can mow. Not to put too fine a point on it.
I have to think not like a human, but a terrified horse. I have to establish trust with an animal who has an active distrust of humans. This is not a freshly caught wild mustang. This is a horse who’s experience with people is not great. Where the humans in his life have, repeatedly, violated his boundaries, not allowing him to say “no.”
But I will. I go in with him and sit. In a chair, on the ground, on an upturned bucket. And I just sit there. He can come if he wants. He can touch me if he wants. I do not force him to stand quietly as I touch him. He makes the first move. If he wants to run away, he can. If he wants to ignore me, he can. If he wants to sniff my ear and get his snotty nose all over my book, he can. Purely random example. Random, I say.
Is this a safe thing to do for him? No, actually.
Last night he had a mild colic. He wasn’t eating or drinking, and kept dropping to the dirt for a roll or a lay down, then repeated the process. But a horse that can’t be caught can’t be medicated. My plan was to, when he was down for long enough, “catch” him and see if we might inject him with Banamine. But that wasn’t what I wanted at all. Of course, he didn’t allow me close enough and his running and fleeing and nerves made him poop six times and fart himself empty. Problem solved.
Related: Ode to a long wet fart.
Instead, I once again sat my fat ass down, talked to my mom on the phone (she was on standby) as I made myself relax while observing him. He came to stand right beside me, head lowered, sniffing and touching me. Not in fear, in curiosity.
I have no idea how long it will take for Stormy to trust me. There isn’t a timeline. It could be months. It could be he has a lightbulb moment tomorrow. And don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me to spike Stormy’s feed with a sedative, get a halter on him, and take him out to eat grass instead. The equivalent of forcing you into that damned chair and handing you pizza and ice cream. That would cure your fear of the chair, wouldn’t it?
But I’m not there yet.
Stormy has to feel he has choices. He has to feel he can say yes, no, and not yet. He needs a person to empathize with him as a horse. To see his perspective and address the cause of the problem, not to slap a bandage on it. Not just now, with the halter, but for the rest of his life.
All horses deserve the exact same.