Sakima and the Fear of People

Fear can be just hidden not replaced

What is fear in a horse? We see it everywhere, biting, bolting horses or shut down horses. What are our human responses? Force, yell, hit, react, pressure – we see them every day as people handle their horses.

Most domestic horses learn to respond to these traditional methods and they learn the behaviour that their person wants and go onto, to have worthwhile partnerships with their humans.

What of the horses that don’t learn or won’t learn and still revert to their fear responses when in a stress situation? Everyone has seen it – the balking horse, the horse that bites or bolts despite the threats and force; melted out to the horse. We know where they end up, owner after owner and then a one way ticket to the sale yard.

I had one such horse.

Sakima would die before he succumbs to the pressure form of training. In my search for a way to bring Sakima into the human world, friends from various areas offered their help. I watched as my brumby just got more and more extreme in his flight responses. I started to raise the question ‘was this training just reinforcing the flight response as the way to handle stress situations?’

My own background of working in values education had taught me that the only way to determine if an educational method to change what is deemed as inappropriate behaviour, is when the person is stressed. Usually they revert back to the earlier unfavoured response because that is what is ingrained. We do what we have learnt over many, many years and from powerful peer/family examples. Our new behaviour just drove the old behaviour underground to pop out when stressed.

So my brumby had learnt to respond to any fear by fleeing. Partly because he has an Arab heritage and partly because he learnt this response from the other herd members when in danger – like the brumby runners threatened their safety.

If all else fails, remove all choice from the horse with the popular starting methods in round yards or pressure and positive reinforcement where the horse learns to stop something unpleasant by offering another response – and when the trainer gets the response wished for then the unpleasant action is stopped. The horse learns to provide the preferred behaviour but have we really overcome and displaced the fear response fully?

This was a question that I was to debate with many horse trainers and professionals as they willingly tried to help me with Sakima.

In the horse world, there are many experts but few people working from a scientific basis. Rather they work from the basis of what seems to work on the surface.

I had made huge progress with Sakima and through conditioning he began to accept my presence and my close contact.

The problem was that on the surface the methods seem to work and progress was made. But then unexpectantly Sakima would just burst out when he had had enough and there was no stopping or calming this flight response.  It was so quick and so strong and unpredictable that there was a danger of him becoming a horse no one could trust with his reactions.

I did not know what to do. I decided to follow my inner self. It did not feel right to train this way so I stopped. I regrouped and thought long and hard. I carefully looked at Sakima’s responses to how people interacted with him. He told me clearly what was OK by him and what was not. So I left him and I just continued with my work of desensitization and attempting to not create circumstances that lead to his fear response.

The test came when it was time to have his feet trimmed. I worked with him to pick his front feet up when I touched his fetlock and then to trust when I held his foot.

Was I attuned to his subtle levels of stress?  Not enough. Yet I made progress. The day the bare foot trimmer came to do his front-feet, time was taken to introduce him and Sakima seemed to accept him. We successfully trimmed the front feet but the photo tells the story of fear still there.

I had become so used to the fear response that I would ask for his head down and he would drop it and calm down. This seemed to be working but anyone that needed to interact with him HAD to take time to introduce themselves properly.

In the next weeks we progressed on to the back feet. This time the bare foot trimmer arrived in a sweat fear and from the beginning made it clear he did not want to do this. By now his fear had translated to me and Sakima as we went into the yard he said “give me the rope”. I said are you not going to take time to be with him like last time.

‘No’ was the answer, ‘the horse has to get used to me’.

Well one step forward by the bare foot trimmer and Sakima was out of there. Enough to make the bare foot trimmers fear to bubble over and he threw the rope at me saying this horse was not ready and had I accepted we use a twitch on him; all feet would be trimmed by now. Best thing I could do was go and have a cup of coffee and he would fix Sakima.

Many would say this was the best way to handle Sakima’s fear. I knew from past trainers that all I would have is an even worse problem with Sakima’s lack of trust of people. Yes his feet would be trimmed – but from that day on that delicate trust would be broken.

So here I was in an even bigger, deep hole with my journey to bring Sakima into the human world. I did not know where to turn and only knew that the advice of people like the bare foot trimmer was not the way I wanted to go. Yet I had no other idea of what to do.

My early coach had got me so far, but I needed to be able to halter him and have him comfortable with the human touch.

It was a lonely and frustrating time.

The pressure to do it others ways was extreme but I knew there had to be a better, gentler way.

I went in search of this way…