Lessons from the Horse Rescue

2014-02-18T10:17:00.000-05:00

Starting Over

In her annual address to the British Parliament, Queen Elizabeth II referred to 1992, the 40th anniversary of her ascension to the throne, as her “annus horriblis” or horrible year. In the Queen’s case, the marriages of three of her children were failing, reports of their affairs were being gleefully reported in the press and a fire caused substantial damage to her home, Winsor Castle. It looked at that point, like the British monarchy could be in trouble but they recovered and with Kate and William’s strong marriage and recent baby, seem to have experienced a new renaissance. Last year, 2013, turned out to be my horrible year. The troubles began in October 2012 when I discovered, that my 89 year old mother had stage 4 colon cancer. This knowledge, which would be troubling in its own right, was devastating to me. My mother lived with me and she had survived a previous bout with colon cancer in her late 50’s. Mom had always been rigorous about her follow up care and had undergone colonoscopies every three year. When she turned 83, her doctor informed her that she didn’t need any more of these procedures. She had been cancer free for 25 years. So the discovery of this cancer, which should have been detectable at a much earlier stage if she had continued with the colonoscopies, had been missed. Earlier in the year, Mom had complained of pain in the area of her right ribs. Suspecting a cracked rib, her doctor had ordered an x-ray but nothing appeared to be amiss and the pain subsided. My mother routinely took pain medication to deal with chronic back problems and this probably masked most of the pain associated with the cancer. Over the summer Mom’s weight began to drop and when the pain under her ribs reappeared, her doctor order a CAT scan which showed the cancer was forming a blockage in her colon and that it had already metastasized to her liver. Mom’s primary care doctor, Hal Kramer, delivered the news and then immediately went into action to help us deal with the next steps. Although he knew that the cancer was terminal, and told us so, he also told us that we didn’t want my mother to die from a blockage. He contacted the surgeon who had operated on his own mother-in-law and called me at home to make sure I had arranged an appointment. When he found out the appointment had not been made for the following week, he called the surgeon’s office himself and had it moved up so that the surgery could be scheduled right away. My mother began to prepare for her surgery on the Sunday just as hurricane Sandy approached the area. The preparation, which was designed to clean out her digestive system, made her violently ill. The surgery had been scheduled for Tuesday, which was the day Sandy was supposed to hit the area. The governor of Delaware had already declared a state of emergency. I called the surgeon, Dr. James Tikellis to ask him what to do. He felt that since the hospital was likely to cancel any non-emergency surgeries as a result of the storm, I should have Mom stop her prep and he would reschedule for the following week. By Monday morning, Mom seemed to be recovering but by Wednesday it was clear to me that something serious was wrong. Mom was almost continually nauseous and retching. I wanted to take her to the emergency room but she didn’t want to go to the hospital. I brought an air mattress down into her apartment so that I could sleep close to her in case she needed me. Neither of us got any sleep and her condition deteriorated. She was becoming seriously dehydrated by the continual retching. Having been warned by both by Dr. Hal and by my sister, who is a nurse, about the symptoms of a blockage, I became increasingly worried and finally called 911. We arrived in the emergency room at Christiana Care at 4 AM. The doctor listened to my report and then immediately commenced treatment. Fluids and pain medication were administered and then my mother was taken for a CAT scan. At 10 AM, Dr. Tikellis came into the room to tell me that my mother’s colon was now blocked and emergency surgery was necessary. The operation almost didn’t take place. Mom’s heartbeat was irregular but after a consultation with the surgeon, the anesthesiologist and Mom’s cardiologist, we decided to go forward. When the surgery was over, Dr. Tikellis told me that while he had been able to remove the tumor in her colon, Mom had a large tumor in her liver and a smaller one in her lungs. That was the bad news. The good news was that he had been able to sew her intestines back together so that she did not need a colostomy bag and he was sure she would recover from the surgery and be able to go to the Florida Keys for one final vacation. It was something to look forward too, perhaps just what she would need to engage her will to get better. I returned home feeling a little more hopeful. Then I listened to the message on the answering machine. My horse, Sonny, had gone dead lame. Sonny had been experiencing sporadic lameness issues for about a year. I had been working with the vet to diagnose the problem. We’d done x-rays and ultrasounds, all inconclusive. The problem seemed to be worse when Sonny moved on a circle. I had rested him for the entire summer, taking my lessons on my local Parelli instructor, Jane Bartsch’s levels mare, Lynn. Jane even allowed me to ride Lynn in a three day Carol Coppinger clinic that fall. I had been using a red light on Sonny’s hoof and thought he was making progress but the message on my answering machine was grim. Sonny was so lame that he hadn’t come in from the field for breakfast. Sonny is an incredibly food oriented horse. If he was willing to miss breakfast, I knew he was really hurting. I rushed to the barn, hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as it sounded on the message, but when I got there I found Sonny in his stall and not wanting to walk at all. There was no apparent wound and although we couldn’t find any real sign of heat on the foot, both the barn manager and I thought it most likely an abscess. Since the vet was already scheduled to be there on Monday to give Sonny his flu shot, we decided to treat it as if it was an abscess and see what happened. We applied a poultice and gave Sonny some bute. By Monday no abscess had broken out but my vet, Dr. Clark Cushing, agreed that was the most likely cause and suggested we continue the poultices and bute. As the week progressed, there was no evidence of an abscess breaking through the wall of the hoof but Sonny was slowly improving. Dr. Cushing came to the conclusion that there probably wasn’t an abscess and perhaps Sonny had sustained a tendon injury in his hoof. He suggested I discontinue the poultices and start him on a course of Previcox, a stronger anti-inflammatory medicine. This was actually bad news. I knew that Sonny would recover from fairly quickly from an abscess. Any type of tendon injury that was bad enough to make him go dead lame however would probably require an extended recovery period. But at this point, I didn’t really have time to worry about this because Mom was coming home from the hospital. My sister and brother-in-law had arrived from Maryland to help when Mom was released from the hospital. Lynn is a register nurse and her husband, Dan, is a physician’s assistant so their arrival was no small thing. They were so much better prepared than I to deal with Mom’s recovery but they were only going to be able to stay for a week. In the spring, before they knew that Mom had cancer, they had decided to move to Florida. They arranged to have a house built near Tampa and had sold their house in Maryland. They were now scheduled to pack up their all of their belongings and move in the middle of November. I knew that my sister felt awful about the timing. I was just glad they were going to be here for the first week. Mom came home from the hospital weak and disoriented. She could only sit up for a few minutes without being in pain. She didn’t want to eat anything. She was also having issues with incontinence. The tumor in her colon had been at the junction between her large and small intestines. That junction has a valve that slows down the flow of the semi-solid small intestine waste into the large intestine. Between the serious inflammation that had resulted from the blockage and the absence of that valve, Mom’s digestive system was a mess. The surgeon had failed to mention that this would probably happen. It was not uncommon, I learned from researching on the internet, for this to happen following blockage surgery. In the best case it could take weeks to resolve and in the worst case scenario it never would. I cried when Lynn and Dan left the following week. I don’t think I have ever felt so helpless and alone watching them pull out of the driveway. Mom was still very weak and she was also depressed. Sitting up was painful for her and she didn’t want to eat. I knew that I needed to get some nutrition into her if she was going to recover from the surgery but meals were a struggle. We both soldiered forward but the atmosphere at home was grim. Then one afternoon I received a call that would prove to be a lifeline for both Mom and me. The call was from my niece, Karole. Karole was Mom’s only surviving grandchild. Her brother, Mark, had died in a car accident when he was only 25. Karole lived in California and didn’t get back to visit very often but she was between jobs and offered to come and stay with us to help take care of Mom. She could come right after Thanksgiving and stay until New Years, she told me. My sister had offered to pay her airfare. Mom and I both leaped at the offer. Mom was slowly improving. She was still bothered by incontinence but the episodes were becoming less frequent. She was able to sit for longer periods of time and she was getting crabby, which was actually an improvement from her earlier impassiveness. I was tired of being stuck in the house all the time but I didn’t feel comfortable leaving Mom alone. I had done no Christmas shopping and I was depending on Bree, our barn manager, to handle Sonny’s recuperation. I hadn’t been to the barn in weeks. Karole arrived the Saturday after Thanksgiving and she was a godsend. In addition to giving me the freedom to get out of the house, she turned out to be a terrific caregiver for Mom. She was incredibly attentive to Mom. When Mom took a tumble and ended up with a sprained ankle, Karole applied an ice pack at 20 minute intervals until the pain and swelling were gone. Besides that, in her presence, Mom’s spirits began to rise. She insisted we decorate for Christmas and put up her Christmas village, an elaborate display of miniature buildings and figures that covered the entire dining room table. Now that I was able to spend more time at the barn, I was determined to get to the bottom of Sonny’s lameness. On both Previcox and Isoxsuprine, he had recovered somewhat but was still off when moving in a circle. There had never been any heat that Dr. Cushing was able to detect in the foot and given the inconclusive x-rays, he was baffled by the continued lameness. Finally I decided to make an appointment for Sonny with Dr. William Riddle, a lameness specialist in nearby Port Deposit, Maryland. On the morning of our scheduled appointment, Bree trailered Sonny and me to Dr. Riddle’s clinic. Using a combination of x-rays, thermography and nerve blocks, Dr. Riddle was able to diagnose Sonny’s problem as a chronic tendonitis resulting from navicular degeneration. On the x-ray he showed me the rough surface of the navicular bone. The tendonitis was cause by the tendon rubbing across the uneven surface of the bone and aggravated by the upright and narrow construction of Sonny’s hoof. He suggested a series of injections and rest. He felt that Sonny’s prognosis was only moderate at this point. I was disappointed at the prognosis but relieved to finally have an answer. It was clear that Sonny’s career as a levels horse was over but I was hoping that I would be able to trail ride him in the future. The entire family was arriving for Christmas and we were doing everything we could to raise Mom’s spirits. To help assure her that she was going to get to the Florida Keys, we had tee shirts made for the family and friends. We were calling ourselves “Mom’s Pit Crew” and even got a tee shirt for Mom’s doctor. I left the shirt at Dr. Kramer’s office on the Monday before Christmas and then next day I received an e-mail with a picture of Dr. Kramer, wearing his tee shirt and requesting that Mom take him with her! Dr. Kramer even called Mom on New Year’s Eve to wish her a Happy New Year. On January 9th, Sonny returned to Dr. Riddle’s for his second injection. When Dr. Riddle had given Sonny the first injection, the pressure from the inflammation in his hoof had caused blood to well up out of the needle when it had been placed into his coronet band. He had shown great improvement after the first injection and I was really hopeful at this point. There was still a little fluid that came up out of the needle before the second shot, an indication that there was still some pressure in the foot, but this liquid was clear, indicating that the inflammation was greatly reduced. We discussed treatment options and settled on a series of injections that could be administered by Dr. Cushing. He also suggested that I continue the Previcox and Isoxsuprine until spring, and then gradually wean Sonny off so we could re-evaluate at the beginning of July. On January 10th, I took Mom for her final visit to the surgeon. Much to our great relief, Mom’s issues with incontinence had completely resolved and she was also much more comfortable sitting for long periods of time. Dr. Tikellis was amazed at how well Mom had recovered. He had told me after her surgery that it would take a normal, healthy adult eight to ten weeks to recover from this type of surgery but with Mom’s age and compromised immune system, it could take her twice as long. Yet here she was just less than ten weeks after her surgery looking pretty good. He cleared her for the trip to the Keys and Mom came away from the doctor’s office happier than I had seen her since she received her diagnosis three months before. It had been a hard three months but we’d made it this far and in a couple of weeks we would be on our way to the Keys. We had a lovely time in the Keys. For the past few years I had been renting a three bedroom condo on Long Key which is about a third of the way between Key Largo and Key West. It is a small complex, only twelve units, and is right on the Atlantic Ocean. We have become friendly with several of the owners there and Mom loved the warm weather, spectacular sunrises and heated pool. Because it is a three bedroom unit, it is large enough for friends and during the six weeks we stayed on Long Key, friends from as close as Coral Gables and as far away as Grand Junction, Colorado, came to spend time with Mom. On February 27th, Mom celebrated her 90th birthday and the entire condo complex got in on the act. My best friends from Delaware flew down to join us and we gave Mom a rousing party around the pool, complete with presents and lots of good food. I think Mom was actually thrilled to have made it to 90. Both of her parents died relatively young and she had often told me that she hadn’t expect to make 80 let alone 90. Near the end of our stay in Florida, Mom announced that she wanted to spend a little more time in Florida and that she was going to stay with my sister for another month. We had visited Lynn and Dan on our way down to the Keys. They had a lovely new house in a 55 and older community located just south of Tampa. It contained a nice guest bedroom and bathroom where Mom could be comfortable and so toward the end of March, I transferred care of Mom to my sister and headed home on the Auto train by myself. I was grateful for the break. As much as I loved Mom, being a full time caregiver is hard work and I was feeling a bit frazzled. There were things that I needed to get done around the house and I wanted to spend some time with Sonny to evaluate where he was in his recovery. And although Mom had done pretty well in the Keys, I could see that she was slowly getting more fragile and knew that as the tumor in her liver continued to grow, she would eventually go into liver failure, a condition that she could not survive. Sonny was doing pretty well when I arrived in Delaware and looked pretty sound when trotted in a straight line, but he still wasn’t up to any work and I was anxious to get back to my Parelli studies so I needed a horse. I was fortunate to find an affordable solution right at the barn. A friend of mine who owned two appaloosas that I had worked with on and off had decided to get out of horses. She had actually offered to give me one of them several times but worried about the financial commitment that owning a second horse would entail, (I am retired and Sonny was already costing me a fortune in medical bills) I had declined. It turned out, however, that our barn manager’s boyfriend, a nice guy just out of the navy, wanted to buy the larger of the two horses but couldn’t really afford the board. The barn manager brokered a deal whereby I could take a half lease on the horse, making the situation affordable for everyone and so Dillon came into my life. Mom returned to Delaware at the end of April. My sister flew with her and when I picked them up at the Philadelphia Airport I could see how weak and exhausted she looked. We managed to get her home but just as she got to her apartment she began to retch. We were able to bring the situation quickly under control and both Lynn and I wrote the incident off to the stress of the trip but it was to become a more and more frequent occurrence as Mom’s cancer progressed. Mom seemed glad to be home in familiar surroundings and was in relatively good spirits, looking forward to our annual Kentucky Derby Day Party, scheduled for the first Saturday in May. Lynn had remarked about Mom’s increasing confusion while she had been with her in Tampa and we both thought she would benefit from being home, but right away, I could see that there had been deterioration in Mom’s mental state. I guess it should not have been a surprise to me. Mom was 90 years old, on some pretty heavy pain medication and dying of liver cancer so she was probably suffering from an increased level of toxins in her blood. But my mother had always been mentally sharp. It was something that all of my friends remarked about and more than the physical decline, this metal decline threw me for a loop. It wasn’t just that Mom’s memory was failing. I could have dealt with that. It was that her personality was changing and she was confused a lot of the time. It was very hard for me to deal with the confusion and often when she became confused, she became agitated or angry. I knew that her behavior was a result of her conditions found myself also feeling frustrated and angry at time and would occasionally speak sharply to her out of the frustration. Each time that happened I was then filled with remorse. It was a difficult cycle that got worse as the summer progressed. In 2006, when my father was dying of cancer, we had used Vitas Hospice and they had proved to be a godsend during his finally months. Soon after my mother’s surgery, she had asked Dr. Kramer to arrange for hospice care and they had been with us ever since. Although I was willing to do almost anything Mom needed, I was a little uncomfortable bathing her and the hospice aides, a group of caring younger women, had been a huge help from the beginning. The hospice nurses also tried to help me understand what to expect as Mom’s cancer advanced and were quick to respond to any medical situation that might occur. Mom continued to have good and bad days but as spring melted into summer, the bad days began to outweigh the good ones. I still felt comfortable leaving Mom for short periods of time on her good days so I was able to continue working with Dillon and monitoring Sonny. My next door neighbor, Helen, who was good friends with my mother, was also happy to come and sit with her when I had to be away for more than 30 or 40 minutes. I had put a monitor in Mom’s bedroom so that I could hear her at night and get to her quickly if she needed me. On June 1st, we began weaning Sonny off his medicine. First we took him off the Isoxsuprine. This caused him to be a little gimpy. The change was not dramatic but it was big enough to make me realize that the medicine had been helping him. Then we started to wean him off the Previcox. Within days of taking the last dose, his lameness came back with a vengeance. It was almost as bad as it had been in November, with him reluctant to move around. I was devastated. I put him back on both medicines and made another appointment with Dr. Riddle. I had pretty much decided that if it would make him comfortable, I would have Dr. Riddle permanently nerve the bad foot and then I would retire him. Dr. Riddle took another set of x-rays and together we looked at new films side by side with the pictures taken in December. In just six months, the degeneration of his navicular bone had gotten much worse. When I asked Dr. Riddle if nerving Sonny would be a solution, he wasn’t encouraging. He told me that he couldn’t be sure how long a nerve block would actually last given Sonny’s conformation and the degree of damage. He also said that given how fast the disease had advanced in the six months since the last set of x-rays, nerving the foot to allow Sonny to move around without pain would in all probability result in even faster progression. Finally I asked Dr. Riddle what he would do if Sonny was his horse. Dr. Riddle is a kind man. On each of my visits to the clinic he had remarked on what a nice horse Sonny was. When I asked this question he looked away for a moment. Then he put his hand on Sonny’s neck and rubbed him. Finally he looked at me and said, “I know you love this horse, but if he were my horse, I would probably put him down.” I just nodded my head. I was close to tears at that point and was almost afraid to speak. I told him that my mother was dying and I wasn’t sure if I could lose Sonny right now. He said that we could always do more injections and keep Sonny comfortable with anti-inflammatories for a while but at some point it would become more than we could manage. I thanked him, loaded Sonny in the trailer and cried all the way back to the barn. Early in July, Mom had a pain crisis. Up until that time, we had been doing a pretty good job of keeping her comfortable using a morphine patch and some breakthrough medicine. For some reason the pain got out of control. Mom became very agitated and I wasn’t able to calm her down. I was beside myself. Hospice bought nurses in 24 hours a day for a week. Using massive doses of pain killers and a combination of anti-anxiety and anti-depression medicines, they managed to get the pain back under control but we seemed to have reached some kind of turning point with her illness. One of the symptoms of liver failure is a general sense of not feeling well. Shortly after the pain crisis was resolved, Mom began telling me that she “just didn’t feel good”. There was really nothing I could do about it. She stopped eating. I tried tempting her with her favorite foods but dishes she had always loved, she turned up her nose at. She might eat a few bites and then push the food away. I made her milkshakes with coffee ice cream, her favorite or vanilla ice cream and chocolate malt. Her weight loss began to accelerate. She was wasting away before my eyes. At the end of July, Lynn and Dan came up for a week so that I could get away for a few days. I booked a short vacation with a good friend. We went to a lovely bed and breakfast in Charles Town, West Virginia. One night we went to the race track and proceeded to lose every cent we wagered. We wandered around our old haunts in the Shenandoah Valley, where we had worked together for the DuPont Company many years before. I returned home more relaxed than I had been in several month, happy to discover that Mom had actually been pretty good while I was away. I had come home on Saturday, a day early because the weather had been terribly hot that week, temperatures flirting with the 100 degree mark, even in the mountains. I noticed that my cat, Mac, a 20 lb. bruiser with bad eyesight, was acting a little oddly but didn’t think much of it and went to bed early. When I woke up in the morning, I found Mac in the exact same spot I’d left him in the night before and it was obvious to me from his behavior that there was something seriously wrong. Because it was Sunday, my normal vet wasn’t open so I packing him up in his carrying case and rushing him to the emergency clinic that was recommended on my vet’s website. At the emergency clinic, a technician came into the small exam room where we were waiting and took Mac back to see the vet. After a short wait the vet came into the room where I was waiting and told me that it was a good thing I had brought Mac in. Apparently he had a urinary track blockage, a not uncommon but potentially life threatening problem in male cats. Fortunately we had caught it early and it was easily treatable but Mac was going to have to stay at the vet for a day or two. She told me that a technician would be in shortly with an estimate of the cost of the care and some paperwork. The technician arrived minutes later. I took one look at the estimate of $1800 and started sobbing. I couldn’t afford that, I sobbed. I told them that they were going to have to put him down. I told them that everything in my life was dying; my mother, my horse and now the cat. I was inconsolable. I called my sister but I was crying so hard I couldn’t even tell her what was wrong. Apparently I could be heard in the waiting room. The technician left and the vet returned. She told me they didn’t want to put the cat down. They could remove the blockage and keep Mac overnight. I could take him to my own vet in the morning for the follow up care. That would only cost about $600. I pulled myself together enough to tell them to go ahead and then cried all the way home. The incident with Mac highlighted to me how fragile my emotional state had become. Most days I was just barely holding it together. I found that I had a hard time concentrating on anything. If I got the bed made, I felt like I had accomplished something. I had always been an avid reader but now I could only read about a page of anything without losing focus. My mother had always been uncomfortable with anyone crying in front of her so I tried to be her rock but at night I often cried into my pillow. I felt angry at the situation I was in. I was a scientist by training, used to being able to solve any problem but this was something that I couldn’t fix. I felt helpless and frustrated. I was angry at being trapped in the house all the time. I was angry at my mother for being sick and then I was angry at myself for being so selfish. I didn’t like myself very much anymore. Despite the fact that Mom had been pretty good while Lynn and Dan were visiting, my sister must have recognized how bad things had gotten for me. A couple of days after she returned to Florida, she called me and told me that she was going to come up for a week each month while Mom was still alive. I was so grateful for that show of support that I started to cry. I hated myself for my neediness. After Sonny’s last visit to Dr. Riddle, I knew that I needed to find a place where he could retire. I loved my current barn but with an indoor arena on the property, it was a high rent district now that I was supporting one and a half horses. The first barn I thought of as a place for Sonny’s retirement was Stray Fox Farm where my horse, Max, had lived for the last 10 years of his life. Max had also had a navicular problem but he lived to be 32 years old and I was able to trail ride him occasionally until the last year of his life. At the time Max was alive, the barn was run by Bob and Phyllis Malin. We had become close friends during the years Max was boarded there and I knew they would take good care of Sonny. The barn was being managed now by their daughter, Lisa, who told me that right she didn’t have any openings right now but she would keep me in mind. Miraculously, within two weeks she had a boarder move to Pennsylvania and called me to say that she had a spot for Sonny. In the meantime I had been taking lessons with Dillon but I was struggling. Before Sonny’s lameness we were a solid level three on line and at liberty and we were working on our level 3 freestyle skills. Sonny was still struggling picking up his right lead consistently, a problem I now knew was most likely related to the navicular issues in his right front hoof. I was riding bridleless at the walk and the trot and was building confidence at the canter. I felt that we were getting close to being able to pass our level three freestyle audition. I didn’t really want to be switching horses at this point and if I was going to switch, I needed a horse who was at least as far along in his development as Sonny. Dillon was proving to be a sweet guy, anxious to please and a quick learner but he was starting from Parelli ground zero and I found that demotivating. I felt like I was starting over. Just when I had gotten Sonny to the point where I could work on my level three freestyle skills, he had gone lame. Now my only option was a young, relatively green horse that wasn’t even confident in level one skills. I felt like I was going backwards. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. At this point in my horsemanship journey I needed to be working on my riding skills but here I was saddled with a horse that didn’t have the basics. By the beginning of August, my mother had become so weak that she needed assistance to get around. She refused to use a walker and I was afraid that she was going to fall and hurt herself so I had a single bed moved into her living room and began sleeping downstairs. That way, if she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she could call me and I could get up and help her. The only problem with that plan was Mom’s unwillingness to wake me up in the middle of the night. Whether out of confusion or a desire to remain independent as long as possible, she would get out of bed without calling. Usually, she put her light on and that was enough to pull me out of sleep. She was getting up several times a night. I wasn’t getting much sleep and was getting tired and cranky. Everyone told me I should try to nap whenever Mom napped but I found it almost impossible to sleep in the daytime. One night she got up to use the bathroom and did not turn on the light. When a loud noise woke me up, I rushed into the bedroom to find her on the floor. When I asked her what happened she didn’t seem to know. I got her to the bathroom and then back into bed but the incident made me realize that I needed help. The next morning I called my sister and we agreed that Mom needed someone with her at night. I arranged through a home care agency for nursing aides to be with Mom from 9 pm to 7 am but I continued to be her primary caregiver during the day. By that time, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving Mom alone for more than a few minutes. I had great support from our friends who would come over so I could go to the store and once a week, Helen would sit with Mom so I could take my riding lesson. Then Mom took a bad spill while Helen was with her, hitting her head on the corner of her bedroom dresser. I was at the barn getting ready for my lesson. I was just putting my foot in the stirrup when my cell phone rang. Helen was frantic. She had gotten Mom up and back in bed but she was afraid that Mon had a concussion. I called hospice right away, untacked Dillon and rushed home. I arrived home before the hospice nurse to find Mom sitting in bed laughing about what happened. I didn’t think it was at all funny. This was the fourth fall she taken that week, all because she refused to ask for help. I knew she was sick and confused but I was scared that she had fallen and I was furious. I began to yell at her and then I began to cry. By the time the hospice nurse arrived I was sobbing. The nurse examined Mom and was pretty sure Mom didn’t have a concussion but she was very concerned about Mom falling. She insisted that we get a hospital bed with side rails. Even in her confused mental state, Mom was adamant that she did not want a hospital bed. With the degenerative disc disease in her back, Mom found hospital beds uncomfortable. She and the nurse argued furiously while I sobbed in the living room. I was trying to control myself because I knew she could hear me but I couldn’t stop. I think my mother didn’t want the hospital bed for another reason. I was pretty sure that she saw the hospital bed as the beginning of the end. My father had spent his last two months in a hospital bed and I suspect that when the bed arrived, Mom saw it as a physical representation of her eventual death. Finally Mom agreed to the bed. She called me into the room and apologized for scaring me. I felt horrible. Here my mother was dying and I was acting like a spoiled child. The hospital bed marked another turning point in my mother’s illness. After the bed arrived, Mom pretty much stopped eating. At the end of August my sister came for another week. She was shocked at the change she saw in Mom since her last visit. That week, to save some money, Lynn and I took turns staying with Mom at night. Mom was now showing evidence of sundowners syndrome, a common problem with Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients. People with sundowners show increased confusion in the evening and often don’t sleep well at night. Mom’s confusion was increasing as her liver continued to fail. Often she would sleep most of the day and then be up most of the night. The first night Lynn stayed with her on this trip Mom spent a couple of hours taking everything out of her wallet and purse one item at a time and then placing each item deliberately back in. By the end of the week, Lynn was convinced that I needed more help. In addition to the night aides, I contracted for aides to be with Mom several hours each day during the week and we split the cost. I lived for the aids to arrive. It was a timely decision because shortly after Lynn left for Florida, I came down with a terrible sinus infection. I ran a temperature and ended up on antibiotics. My primary care physician told me to wear a mask any time I went near Mom. As soon as the nighttime aide arrived, I fell into bed and slept until my alarm clock went off in the morning. It was several weeks before I began feeling better, just in time for my sister’s next visit. As my mother’s liver continued to fail she was having increasing bouts of nausea. These were often accompanied by dry retching which made her miserable. Her doctor prescribed, Haldol, an anti-psychotic medicine that is also used to control agitation. Haldol proved to be a miracle drug to control the retching. Unfortunately it could not be used as a preventative, but only once the problem had appeared. Usually it took less than 5 minutes for the drug to eliminate the symptoms but it was a miserable 5 minutes for both Mom and I while the drug took hold. By the beginning of October, my mother had gone without any solid food for over a month. She was wasting away before my eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. The liver failure was giving her a jaundiced look, with her skin looking a yellowish gray. I had gone from being angry to feeling just helpless all the time. I wasn’t sleeping well and couldn’t seem to get any pleasure from the things I had always enjoyed. Even seeing the horses didn’t help much. Sonny seemed to sense that something was wrong. Given his dominant nature, he had never much liked being groomed and would often reach around and nip at my clothes or shake his head in displeasure but as September rolled into October he began submitting to the curry comb and brush as if this was his all-time favorite activity. Dillon continued to be his sweet, lovable self, rushing to the gate to meet me when I arrived at the barn and progressing to level two skills during our lessons. But the worry over my mother was never far from my mind and both horses took advantage of my lack of attention. I was scheduled to take Dillon to a three day Carol Coppinger clinic in Frederica, Delaware the third week in October and I was determined to attend as long as Mom was in stable condition. I arranged with the service to have 24 hour coverage for the four days that I would be with Dillon in Frederica. Because the farm was only an hour from my house, I would be able to return relative quickly if problems arose and I would also be able to spend each night at home. I had no idea how Dillon would react to the clinic because I had never ridden him in a group of horses before but I knew he would be OK in an indoor arena so on Friday. October 17th, Bree trailered Dillon in the afternoon to Hartland Equestrian so that I could introduce him to the arena and let him get used to the presence of strange horses. When I arrived, Carol was already conducting private session with some of the participants and she asked me if I would like to have one of my two fifteen minute sessions before I returned to Newark. I jumped at the chance to get Dillon into the arena. Before we started to work with Carol, I let him walk around and investigate anything that looked strange to him. He was surprisingly calm and by the time we finished and I had fed him and tucked him into his stall for the evening I was beginning to feel confident that we were going to do alright in the clinic. I have been attending Carol’s clinics in Delaware for several years now and always feel like I am among friends there. Jane Bartsch, my local Parelli instructor and my friend, assists Carol when she is in Delaware and there is a regular core of attendees who I’ve come to feel close to over the years. The environment is always supportive so even though I was emotionally ragged over my mother’s condition, I wasn’t worried about exposing my emotions with the group. During the morning session we worked with our horses on line. Even though Dillon had never been in a clinic situation before, he was fabulous. He didn’t seem bothered by being in close quarters with a dozen other horses and I found myself more able to focus than I had been all summer. After lunch, we tacked our horses up and prepared to ride. I felt confident that Dillon was ready. He had been calm and relaxed after our morning session and when I worked him around me after he was saddled, he appeared to be OK. But as soon as I settled myself into the saddle I sensed there was something wrong. He felt all humped up and crooked to me. I tried adjusting myself in the saddle and walked him around the arena but the further we went, the more he felt to me like he was about to explode. It unnerved me so much that I dismounted. The minute my feet hit the arena floor, I began to cry. No one could see me at that point. I was at the far end of the arena and Dillon was between me and the rest of the participants. I took some deep breaths and tried to get myself under control but I couldn’t stop crying. Months of pent up emotion; frustration, anger, powerlessness, fear, regret, remorse and a crushing sadness came boiling over. I put my forehead on Dillon’s neck and repeatedly wiped my eyes but I couldn’t stop crying. Finally it was clear to me that I wasn’t in an emotional state to ride. I led Dillon out of the arena, untacked and put him back in his stall. By this time everyone had noticed that something was wrong but they all assumed the problem was with Dillon. Carol sent Jane to find out what was wrong. I could barely talk. I waved Jane off and for the rest of the afternoon slumped miserably in a chair, watching the clinic participants ride their horses and barely holding myself together. The next morning I arrived to hear Carol tell the class that she had decided we were going to ride the entire day. I had been counting on working with Dillon on line in the morning. I took him out of his stall and warmed him up with the rest of the class knowing that I wouldn’t be able to ride. No one questioned my decision. I sat miserably through the morning session, angry at myself for wasting the money to come to a clinic that I was emotionally unfit to participate in. That afternoon I had my second private session with Carol. I asked for help with maintaining gate on line but I was so dispirited that Carol let me stop after 10 minutes. I arrived on Monday feeling a little better and determined to salvage something out of the clinic. In the morning we worked on two line driving from zone five. I had never done any driving with Dillon and was pleased when he took to it quickly. Soon we were driving all around the arena, changing direction fluidly at a walk and a trot. Even Jane was impressed with how he was doing. After that we played with some group liberty and once again, Dillon showed surprising maturity. By the time we were ready to tack our horses up, I was hopeful that I would actually get into the saddle. Dillon has always been difficult to bridle. When I first started riding him I discovered that he had some serious dental issues that had resulted in sores in his mouth. After the dentist filed off the rough edges, he was less sensitive but he still fussed occasionally before accepting the bit. Monday afternoon was one of those times and before long Dillon and I were fighting over whether or not he was going to take the bit. Unfortunately Carol noticed our struggle and came over to ask me if that was how I was supposed to bridle a horse. I was riding right on the edge of an emotional break and I snapped back at her that no, it wasn’t the way I was supposed to bridle a horse but it was the way I was going to do it today. There must have been something in my tone that warned her back and all she said was “Oh” before she stepped away. I managed to finish and mounted up before I changed my mind about riding. This time Dillon felt OK to me and I proceeded to finish our warm up without incident. By that time, Carol was giving the entire class a lecture about the correct way to bridle a horse, demonstrating with Legend, who was reaching down to take the bit out of her hand. Chagrined, I rode over to where Jane was standing told her that I thought the lecture was directed at me and then confessed what had happened while I was bridling Dillon. She told me not to worry, she was sure Carol understood what I was going through. The rest of the clinic was a blur. I didn’t ride as well as I might have but at least I was on the horse. Dillon was not really relaxed but he didn’t feel ready to explode and I managed to control my emotions enough to ride safely. All in all I felt like it was a win. On the Tuesday morning after the clinic, my mother seemed to me to be much worse. Her color was almost gray and the features on her face were sunken. She was almost too weak to get out of bed now and was sleeping almost all the time. I was happy that my sister was scheduled to return again to Delaware on Friday. I was afraid Mom wasn’t going to live much longer. By Thursday, Mom had become incontinent and we could no longer get her up to use the bedside commode but she was still recognized me and when Lynn arrived on Friday, Mom seemed happy to see her. Saturday morning Mom asked me to get Helen for her. When I texted Helen, she texted back that she was out shopping and she would come as soon as she could. By the time she arrived, Mom was barely conscious but she was able to squeeze Helen’s hand. Mom was slipping away but I didn’t realize how fast she was going. When I came down to the apartment Sunday morning, I noticed that Mom’s breathing had grown erratic. Mom’s usual night aide had not been available on Saturday night and the aide that was with her had not noticed the change. I ran upstairs to get Lynn and when she saw Mom she told me to call hospice. The nurse who responded assessed the situation and told us that Mom was now “actively” dying. The nurse started administering oxygen to ease Mom’s breathing. At around four pm the nurse told us there had been another change in Mom’s breathing pattern. When we went into the room she appeared to be struggling for air. We both sat on the bed with her and told her we loved her. We told her that we would be alright and that it was OK to go and be with Dad. Mom took one final breath. It looked like she was yawning. And then she was still. I couldn’t believe that after knowing Mom was going to die for a year, when it happened, it seemed to be so sudden. I thought I had been prepared for this but I wasn’t. I felt lost. The following days were a blur of activity. Lynn and I had to arrange the funeral. We asked the hospice pastor, a lovely man who had supported me and Mom for several months if he would perform the service. He suggested that we have the hospice music therapist sing at the service. I asked her to sing the song “Beyond the Sea”. It had been a favorite of my father. My parents had grown up at the beach in New Jersey and my father had been a boat builder. The words to the song reminded me so of both of my parents. They seemed a fitting way to honor them and it made me happy to think of them together again. Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere waiting for me My lover stands on golden sands and watches the ships that go sailing Somewhere beyond the sea, he’s there watching for me If I could fly like birds on high, then straight to his arms I'd go sailing It's far beyond the stars, It's near beyond the moon I know beyond a doubt, my heart will lead me there soon We'll meet beyond the shore, we'll kiss just as before Happy we'll be beyond the sea, and never again I'll go sailing After Mom’s death, Lynn, Dan and Karole stayed with me for a week. We cleaned out the apartment and gave Mom’s clothes to Goodwill. We wrote thank you notes to the many people who sent flowers or donations in Mom’s memory. We looked at picture albums and talked about good times. We laughed and we cried. Then everyone went home and left me with the cats and my memories and my sadness and my regrets over not being more patient and understanding. Three months have passed since my mother’s death and I am still struggling to make sense of my “annus horribilis’. It was for me a year full of loss; loss of my mother, of my Parelli partner and for a time of my freedom. But it was also a year that caused me many times to recognize blessings. For twenty two years I was blessed to have my mother living with me as an adult. I was blessed to know her in a way that many children never know their parents. For seven years I was blessed to have Sonny as my Parelli partner and benefited from his forgiving nature as I struggled to move ahead in my horsemanship journey. For the entire time that my mother was sick, I was blessed with family and friends who helped me provide such loving care as she completed her journey on earth. I was humbled by love and support they provided both to me and Mom. So, whether I like it or not, whether I want to or not, I’m starting over. I have to figure out not only what I am going to do about my horsemanship journey but also what I am going to do with the rest of my life. This year of caring for my mother and of struggling to be selfless when all I wanted to do was return to the normality I knew before her illness has changed me in ways that I may not yet completely understand. I hope that the changes will enable me to be more supportive and understanding, to be more patient and thoughtful. And I am sincerely hoping that as I set off as a person who has experienced growth as a result of experiencing loss, in a new direction, 2014 will become the first of many ‘annus mirabilis’, or wonderful years in the years to come.

Soak Time

2014-02-13T12:30:00.000-05:00

I’ve known for a long time that my learning process is one that requires a good deal of soak time. I ponder things, turning an idea over again and again, examining it from all directions before reaching a conclusion. For me it’s never been blinding flashes of insight but rather small glimmers at a distance to be mulled over and meditated upon before being accepted or rejected in time. I thought this was a particularly human quality of learning but lately I’ve begun to realize that horses need soak time too. My first Parelli partner, Sonny, is a left brain introvert. Big, easy going and slightly dominant, Sonny has a well-developed opposition reflect. Many of our early sessions were consumed with Sonny resisting my efforts to get him to do what I wanted and me struggling to maintain my composure in the face of his stubbornness while trying to figure out how to make my idea his idea. Slowly I developed the patience and creativity that I needed to play with him and he developed more willingness and exuberance for the play. It wasn’t long into my Parelli journey before I realized that Sonny was smart. It was often frustrating for me that he applied his intelligence toward resistance but he did learn fast and once he had a skill, he really had it. Sonny’s learning process seemed to be one of serious resistance followed by a leap ahead. He seldom seemed to be confused about what I wanted him to do; he just didn’t seem to want to do it. He was so calm most of the time that in the beginning, I often missed the both subtle signs that he was worried and the subtle movements that indicated his slightest try. As I became more skilled in recognizing his try, our progress accelerated. Sonny didn’t seem to require any soak time once he had moved past his “I don’t want to” phase. When Sonny went lame at the end of 2013, I began working with a six year old Appaloosa gelding named Dillon. Dillon belonged to a friend of mine and because her work schedule was making it nearly impossible for her to spend much time with him, she asked if I would be willing to work with him. I’ve always been drawn to Dillon. He reminds me of my first horse, Max, also an appaloosa, with his sweet disposition and desire to please. But where my left brained Sonny was calm and mostly confident, right brained Dillon was twitchy and unconfident. I had no such problem recognizing when Dillon was unconfident because he became so emotional. Inherently a right brained introvert, he could go quickly and emotionally extroverted when pressured. Odd things seemed to bother him. He had boundless curiosity and would approach seemingly scary objects like large, noisy equipment but wouldn’t circle in the round pen because he was afraid to squeeze between my back and the round pen fence. He loaded easily into a trailer but it took me weeks of patient work to get him to walk by himself into the wash stall. It’s been a lot of fun to work with Dillon. Like Sonny, Dillon is very smart. But unlike Sonny, who always seemed to be trying to figure out how not to do what I wanted, Dillon really seems anxious to please. His tries were always so obvious that it was easy to recognize and reward him for his efforts. We made progress quickly, moving through level 2 skills both on line and under saddle. Dillon had a lovely trot and both on line and under saddle he had smooth, quiet transitions between halt, walk and trot in any combination. Canter transitions, on the other hand, had been problematic and I whenever I succeeded in pushing him up into a canter, the transition came with lots of emotion. It was a heads up, tail wringing affair, often with a crossfire or counter canter, particularly going to the left. He was unable to even take a canter on a 22’ line and I had been working him on the 45 to give him the room he seemed to need. Given the level of emotion he was displaying going into the canter on line, I’d been reluctant to ask for the canter under saddle and was beginning to lose hope that I would ever canter him I had finally stopped riding Dillon altogether to work on this transition issue. During one of my weekly lessons with Parelli instructor Jane Bartsch, I was working with Dillon on line. It was cold and he was having a problem focusing. To get him in a learning frame of mind, Jane placed a pole on the ground, oriented such that the center of the pole would lie just beyond the outer edge of his circle. She instructed me to circle Dillon for several laps and then disengage him as he was approaching the pole, and once he was disengaged and facing me, back him over the pole. It took several repetitions but he was finally able to focus on what I was asking him to do. Once we seemed to have Dillon’s full attention, Jane told me to ask Dillon to canter by putting a more definite feel on the line before asking with the stick and string. I turned with Dillon as he passed my shoulder, put a slight feel on the line and kissed to him twice. To my amazement, he stepped smoothly into the canter. His head was down. There was no head shaking or tail wringing, just a nice soft canter. We repeated the sequence a couple of times to the right, Dillon’s easier side and then moved to the left. He displayed more emotion to the left, both counter cantering and cross firing but there was a lot less tale wringing and head throwing. Still, both Jane and I were pleased with the progress. Recognizing that you are always training today for progress tomorrow, we stopped after a few repetitions. It has been a horrible winter in Delaware and a combination of sleet, snow and miserably cold weather prevented me from even reaching the barn for more than a week after that lesson. When I finally did get there I wondered where Dillon would be after our enforced layoff. I’ve learned to warm Dillon up slowly to reinforce our connection and make sure he is confident and in a learning frame of mind but this morning he was with me from the moment we entered the arena. When we finally began our circling game he seemed calm and focused. After a few walk trot transitions, I put a slight feel on the line and kissed twice. Dillon stepped into the canter, head down, and back rounded. After a few steps he actually looked in at me as if to say, “How was that?” We tried it again and again he had a smooth, unemotional transition. Then I tried the other direction with the same results. There was no crossfire only a nice soft transition. It was as if a light switch had been thrown in his brain that took him from “Oh my gosh!” to “This is easy!” In our next session, I had Dillon on the 22’ line for warm up and he seemed so calm and connected that I decided to see what his transitions would look like in a smaller circle. A week earlier he had needed almost the entire length of the 45 for his canter. This week, he trotted out to the end of the 22’ line and when I kissed twice to him, stepped smoothly into the canter, first going to the right and then to the left. I was amazed. It was as if he had spent our weather enforced layoff thinking about his canter transition issue, cogitating on the experience of his last lesson and deciding that this canter transition was no big deal. He certainly now seemed to have a “what me worry?” attitude about the transition. As our sessions progressed, his transitions remained calm and smooth and it occurred to me that maybe he was a horse that needed soak time. So I started experimenting with the idea. Whenever he was struggling with a skill but had shown some definite move forward on it, I would skip that particular skill in our next session and then pick it up in the following one. Low and behold, Dillon would display a dramatic difference in his confidence with the performance of that skill. I’ve always thought horses were such interesting animals, each with its own personality but through studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I have learned that each has its own unique learning process as well. Where Sonny needed motivation through creative play to make progress, Dillon needed soak time. I’m now on vacation in the Florida Keys for a few weeks, happy to be out of the snow and ice that seems to be a constant issue in Delaware this winter. Because of the extreme weather before I left, I never did get a chance to canter Dillon, and shortly after I return from vacation I will be attending a clinic with Carol Coppinger. So Dillon and I are both getting a chance for some additional soak time and I am hoping that it will translate into some brilliant canter transitions when I return.

2013-06-03T13:51:00.000-04:00

Such a Good Horse Earlier this spring, I invited my closest friend’s granddaughter over to meet my horse Sonny. I was planning to give her a pony ride, continuing a tradition that started many years ago when her father had ridden my first horse, Max. Max was pretty much the perfect horse for pony rides. An RBI who wanted to please, he would patiently plod around in a circle all day taking care of any child who was on his back. I once watched him stand quietly, head lowered for over five minutes while the daughter of a friend of mine tried to put his halter on upside down and backwards. Max never moved a muscle as the child tried repeatedly to slip the halter over his head. At one point she had the chin strap over his eyes but he stood patiently until she figured it out. When she finally had it on and clipped, he blew, shook his head and then followed her quietly into the barn. He was, by definition, a good horse. Sonny is something else again. He has a lot of good qualities. He is steady, friendly, calm and not easily alarmed but his personality is definitely LBI and he is not crazy about being told (as opposed to asked) what to do. Because I have been treating him for an ongoing lameness, I haven’t been riding him or even playing with him very much and I decided that it might be a good idea to do that before Elizabeth came down. It turned out to be a good thing that I did because Sonny was full of himself. He was fine until I asked him to circle and then he gave me that look and I knew he was going to take off. When I play with Sonny on line, I usually use a 22’ feather light and it isn’t a line you can grab hold of without losing the skin on your hands if your horse decides he’s outa there. After a couple of escapes, I went to a heavier line and we worked through our differences until I was pretty sure that Sonny had ‘partnered up’! The next morning before Elizabeth and her parents arrived at the barn, I cinched up Sonny’s bareback pad. Elizabeth is such a little mite of a six year old, barely 40 pounds, and I knew there wasn’t any sense trying to use my saddle. Besides the handle on the bareback pad would give her something to hold on to if she needed some extra security. I played with Sonny a bit to make sure I had a partner and not a prey animal on the other end of the line and then took him to the indoor arena. Elizabeth arrived with a bag full of carrots, making her Sonny’s new best friend. After introductions were completed, and several carrots had been consumed, I gave Elizabeth a quick tutorial on staying safe around horse and then taught her to back him away from her by wiggling the lead line. Sonny, being the trooper that he is, dutifully backed away, leaving Elizabeth giggling. After playing on the ground for a few minutes, she was eager to ride so I swung her up on Sonny’s back and off we went. My intention had been to do nothing more than lead Sonny around but after I watched Elizabeth sitting so fearlessly atop my big red horse as we negotiated poles on the ground, I thought perhaps she might be able to learn to guide him herself. So I looped the feather light line around for to make a set of reins, still leaving me 12’ or so of line for a lead. Then I started to show Elizabeth how to guide Sonny. Pretty soon, she was able to get him to go forward and stop, back up and turn by using the makeshift reins. After a few minutes, I looped the remaining line up, tied it to the handle on the bareback pad, turned Sonny loose and off they went, meandering around the indoor arena with Elizabeth looking like a natural. “What a good horse” cooed Elizabeth’s mother Trish, as she positioned herself to take some pictures, “He is such a good horse!” That got me to thinking about what makes a good horse. Before I began to study Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I actually thought there were good horses and bad horses. My first horse, Max, had been a good horse. My second horse, Ready, an off the track thoroughbred who was the grandson of Seattle Slew and just about put me off horses forever, was not such a good horse. He wasn’t mean or vicious, although he had bitten me several times, once rather badly, and I would never have put a child anywhere near him. He just wasn’t that kind of horse. Had I known anything about Horsenality when I was looking at Ready, I never would have brought him home. He was an extreme RBE and frightened of his own shadow. You could ride him past a barrel 10 times and on the 11th trip, he would practically jump out of his skin at the sight of it. He wasn’t a bad horse but he wasn’t the right horse for me. I was pretty down on him by the time I gave him away and I told anyone who asked me that he was just plain crazy. I guess at that point, I would have told you he was a bad horse. Happily, my outlook about horses has been transformed by understanding more about horsenality and horse psychology. I know now, there aren’t really any bad horses; there are just inappropriate matches between horse and human. A horse that would never make a good partner for me could be just fine for someone else. In the end, most any horse can become a better partner. Sonny is a good example. Although I always felt reasonably comfortable riding him, seven year ago when I bought him, I never would have put a six year old up on his back and turned him loose. He wasn’t the natural babysitter that my first horse, Max, was. But as our partnership has developed and we have gained confidence in each other, he has developed into a horse I can trust with my best friend’s grandchild. He is, after all, such a good horse!

2013-05-30T15:22:00.001-04:00

Sometimes All It Takes is a Look This is a story I wrote a couple of years ago while I was working at the rescue about one of the thoroughbreds we had at the time. I am not sure why I didn't post it then but it is a good story so I thought I would post it now. Well, my accident prone buddy, Jimmy N, has done it again. Honestly, I don’t know how one horse can get himself into so much trouble but this morning when I went out to feed I discovered that he had managed to cut his face. Actually I smelled the cut before I saw it because not only was he cut but the cut was already infected. Jimmy, right brain extrovert to the core, is not always cool with being doctored so I got him out of the field and into the round pen so I would have a better chance of cleaning him up. With a little soap, water, betadine and a lot of friendly game cajoling, I managed to clean and disinfect the wound. It wasn’t all that deep, so I applied a topical antibiotic, gave Jimmy an extra scope of feed with some ground antibiotic tablets to stave off any additional problems and went back to feeding. All was calm when I left Jimmy in the round pen but of course it didn’t stay that way. After the retirees had finished their morning meal, they began to amble out of the paddock to the pasture when a rather large herd of deer, startled by some unseen menace, choose that very moment to make a mad dash across the pasture. Seeing the fleeing deer, our retirees, mostly former race horses took off to join in the merry chase. Jimmy, seeing his buddies running helter skelter across the pasture and trapped in adjoining round pen, kicked into right brain high gear and started circling at high speed and whinnying for all he was worth. Figuring that I better get him back into the pasture before he slipped and fell, I dashed for the round pen myself but when I got inside, lead rope in hand, Jimmy was way too frenzied to approach safely. So there I was, standing in the middle of the pen with this crazed thoroughbred doing high speed laps around me wondering how to interrupt this pattern. I certainly wasn’t going to step into his path and I hadn’t grabbed a carrot stick in my hurry to get to the round pen. So I used the one tool I had with me, my ability to focus my energy on Jimmy. Every time he passed my shoulder, I bent slightly forward and looked with as much energy as I could muster at his butt. After about three laps, he had one ear cocked in my direction. After another couple laps, he was beginning to slow down just a bit. Finally, after another lap or two, he spun toward me and stopped, front legs planted, head up, ears forward, blowing hard and looking like he wanted to shout, “Oh for heavens sake, WHAT DO YOU WANT?!!!” But he had stopped running and focused his attention on me Rather than trying to approach him at that point, I raised my arm and offered him the back of my hand. He hesitated a moment and then walked over, touched my hand with his nose and let me clip the lead line to his halter. I wish I could tell you Jimmy walked calmly with me back to the pasture but he was still a bit fussed up. So we walked and stopped and backed up and changed directions all the way back to the gate and by the time we got there, Jimmy was willing to stand quietly with me for a few moments after I slipped the halter from his head and before he took off to join his buddies in the field. As I watched Jimmy canter off, I reflected once again on just how powerful a tool our focused energy can be. I had managed to interrupt Jimmy’s right brain pattern and get him to shift his attention to me with what essentially was just a very focused look. It was also a reminder to me of how much pressure we can put on our horses without even realizing that is what we are doing.

2013-02-09T12:53:00.002-05:00

Mr. Personality The first thing that popped into my head when I was introduced to Jack, a fifteen year old thoroughbred that had been purchased for the newly formed Delaware State Police mounted patrol was that this horse doesn’t have any personality. He didn’t look frightened, he was just all tucked up into himself, eyes dull and interested in nothing. He tolerated the attention he was given and he did as he was told but there just didn’t seem to be any spark to him. Even if I wasn’t a student of Parelli Natural Horsemanship I would have recognized this behavior pattern. He reminded me of my very first horse, Max. When I met Max, a nine year old appaloosa gelding that had been taken over in lieu of board payments; he was being used in a lesson program. I thought he was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen and he was a dream for a novice rider like me. Max had been professionally trained and if I could just approximate the correct aid, he would immediately respond. I was looking for a horse at the time and quickly arranged to purchase him for the princely sum of $1,750, which was a lot of money in 1981. I knew Max was a treasure but it didn’t seem to me that he had much of a personality. He was quiet and obedient to a fault, but didn’t seem to be interested in anything. He was always at the back of his stall, usually facing away from the door. He never fussed when I groomed him or went to tack him up but he always seemed to be mentally somewhere else. In 1981 I had never heard of natural horsemanship so I would not have recognized the traits of a right brain introvert or know what to do if I had, but by shear happenstance I took the right approach with him by spending hours of mostly undemanding time. He was my first horse and I loved to be with him. I brushed him until his coat was soft and shiny. I walked him to the best patches of grass and sat quietly while he grazed. I fed him endless carrots. Slowly but surely his personality emerged and he began to show interest in what was going on around him. He nickered to me when he heard my voice and he nosed my pockets for carrots. Everyone at the barn noticed the changes in Max and he became the barn favorite wherever he was stabled. I wish I had known something about natural horsemanship while I owned Max because I know that I made lots of mistakes with him. I wasn’t always sensitive to his fears. I pushed him past thresholds many times and sometimes when I put him out in the field after a lesson or trail ride he would wheel and run back to the herd. Still, even with my mistakes we had a wonderful relationship and for the 23 years that I owned him, he was a true partner. Now Jack was presenting me with a do-over, a chance to take what I had learned from studying Parelli, add it to what I had learned from Max and see if I could help this quiet horse’s natural personality to emerge without committing the mistakes I had made in the past. The first time I took Jack from the field, he didn’t even have the confidence to walk next to me. Because he is so obedient, he came, but he walked at the end of however much line I allowed him to take. I played lots of friendly game at first, acquainting Jack with the carrot stick and used a 22’ line so he could have as much drift as he needed. He seemed so mentally ‘somewhere else’ and had such a lack of curiosity that I decided to start with the ‘Touch It’ game. We walked all over the inside arena with me driving from zone 3. At first Jack didn’t have the confidence to touch anything. He would approach and stop right next to an object but couldn’t’ put his nose on anything. I just waited for a while before asking him to head off to something else. I didn’t force him to do anything, just asked and allowed. Before long he was beginning to sniff and then finally began to touch. After he touched the first object, a jump standard, he actually turned him head to me and asked a question! By the end of our first session when I took Jack back to his field, he was walking next to me and when I turned him out; he just stood with me and let me give him a good scratch on his neck. In our next session, I played a modified catching game with Jack out in his field. He came to me right away but before I could put the halter on he walked away. I followed him for a few steps but he when he went behind the run-in shed, I decided to stop and wait to see what would happened. After a few minutes, Jack’s head popped around the end of the shed. I could just see him processing the idea that there were actually humans wouldn’t chase him! I waited a few more moments and he came over to me but left again. So I waited again. This time he circumvented the run-in shed and came up to me from the other direction. I gave him a cookie and he dropped his head and let me put on the halter. By our third session I had already moved from the 22’ line to a feather-light line. With Max I am sure that there were many times my body language was shouting but with Jack I am determined to have my movements whisper. He is so sensitive that the slightest of signal could seem loud. We started playing the circle game and my send is quiet and subtle. He is already walking and trotting in a circle. He checks in and asks questions. I work hard to apply the lessons I have learned about working with a right brain introvert. I am rigorous about making sure Jack is looking at me before I ask him to do anything. I go slowly, at his pace. If he hesitates, I wait. If he looks unconfident, I wait. I use repetition until he is calm and confident. With Max, I often insisted he do what I asked, with Jack I allow. I find myself constantly monitoring my actions and his reactions. Cause and effect. By our sixth session he is chewing on the end of my carrot stick and picking up plastic flowers from the jump standards. He noses my pockets for cookies and draws toward me at a trot. He pushes the green ball and backs over a rail on the ground. His ears are pricked and his attention is on me. I see a flash of exuberance on the circle. It is fleeting but it is there and I am thrilled with our progress. Session by session I can see Jack turning into Mr. Personality. In my horsemanship journey, I am fortunate that Max was my first partner. He was so obedient and so well trained, that despite my shortcomings, I was able to build a relationship and learn the basics from him. But without the understanding of Horsenality that I have gotten from Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I would probably still be making the same mistakes, pushing Jack through thresholds and harming our relationship. I’ve accomplished as much in my first six hours working with Jack as I did in the first sixty working with Max. What a gift it is to have this chance at do-over. I am sure that Max is looking down from horse heaven and smiling.

2013-01-12T22:17:00.002-05:00

The Unforeseen Consequences of a Small Decision Every day we make dozens of decisions. Some of them are important decisions that affect the direction of our lives, like whether to go to college or who to marry. But most of the decisions we make on a daily basis are small decisions, what to eat or what to wear, and we don’t expect these small decisions to have much of an impact on our lives. Two summers ago, however, I made one of these small decisions and the result blindsided me. This is the story of that decision and its unforeseen consequences. When I retired for DuPont at the end of 2006, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. 2006 had been a difficult year for me. My father had died at the end of the summer after a 2 year battle with throat cancer. My mother and I had taken care of him while he was sick and it took a lot out of me. I stopped working at the end of the year tired and emotionally bruised. I thought that I wanted to do some kind of volunteer work but wasn’t really attracted to any of the opportunities that crossed my path until I heard about a horse rescue nearby. Located on the Sassafras River in Warwick, Maryland, Greener Pastures was a 160 acre farm that had been donated by its owner to the State of Maryland for use as an equine sanctuary. The operation had recently been taken over by a young woman from Delaware who, in addition to running the rescue, wanted to run programs for youth at risk. I loved horses and with my corporate background in coaching and counseling, I thought this might be just the place for me. After meeting with the director, I began working at the sanctuary three or four days a week. I was insanely happy. The rescue property was beautiful. In addition to the horses, it was home to a blue heron rookery and a nesting pair of bald eagles. The environment was just what I needed to restore my spirit from the death of my father. Besides that, I had always loved horses and the rescue was home to a group of retired thoroughbreds. Although they had been well fed under the previous director, they’d had little human interaction so they were cautious but curious about the new humans who were taking care of them. The director introduced me to Parelli by loaning me a set of the old level 1 program tapes and I was fascinated by what I was learning. I was essentially living out my childhood dream. My own horse Sonny was boarded at that time at a small stable in Fair Hill, Maryland. I’d had him for about a year when I began at the rescue and soon found myself spending more time with the rescue horses than with my own horse. The rescue and the barn in Fair Hill were in opposite directions from my house and each located about half an hour drive from home. The rescue director offered to let me board Sonny at the rescue but I didn’t want to take advantage of my position there so for about a year I declined her offer. The barn in Fair Hill was a great location for trail riding but it had neither a riding ring nor a round pen. As I became more interested in Parelli, I realized that I would make a lot more progress with Sonny if he was at the rescue so in the summer of 2007, I moved him there. Things were great at the rescue for a couple of years. I loved working there and being part of the effort of rescuing and finding homes for a number of horses. In the summer we had programs for children at risk and we hosted groups interested in our mission. During this time, I pursued my study of natural horsemanship by attending clinics and using the skills I was developing with the rescue horses. I was working to become the rescue’s horse specialist, focused on developing ground manners using my on line skills. Sonny and I had progressed through level 2 and were working on level 3 skills. We made good progress during the spring, summer and fall but in the winter it was difficult to practice consistently because of the weather and the footing in the arena. Then came the winter of 2009-2010 and Delaware was hit by a succession of storms, four of which had snowfall totals over 12 inches. I didn’t get down to the rescue for weeks at a time and our progress pretty much came to an abrupt halt. I was beginning to think about moving Sonny to a barn with an indoor arena so we could continue our development without worrying about weather issues but, because this was just a thought, I never mentioned the idea to the rescue’s director. Spring finally came to Delaware and with it, the rescue agreed to allow the New Castle Mounted Police to retire one of their Clydesdales at Greener Pastures. Ben was an eight year old gelding who was so stressed by his job that he had ulcers. The mounted unit had nursed him back to health a couple of times before recognizing that he just wasn’t cut out for police work and they asked if the rescue would take him. Our director saw it as an opportunity for good publicity so she readily agreed. Unfortunately for us, Ben was a carrier of strangles and shortly after he arrived, strangles broke out on the farm. It was a horrible time for the rescue. Strangles swept through the farm despite our best efforts to contain the outbreak. Two of the older, more immune compromised horses had to be humanely destroyed and many other horses had to be nursed back to health. At the same time, the one field of horses that remained free from the strangles outbreak was affected by alsike clover poisoning. Although all of the horses in that field were sickened, my Sonny was the worst. For fifty four days, with the help of our wonderful vet, I nursed him through his illness. Because he couldn’t be exposed to sunlight during that time, he had to be confined to a stall. To prevent the rescue from incurring any additional cost as a result of his illness, I purchased all of his bedding and hay. Between the strangles outbreak and Sonny’s illness, I was at our local Tractor Supply several times a week. On day I noticed an advertisement for a boarding farm that was located in Middletown, Delaware. I scribbled down the number before returning to the rescue with the supplies I had purchased. That evening I called the number and arranged to visit the facility. Rowan Farm was a medium sized boarding operation. Besides a large indoor arena, Rowan had a round pen, a riding arena and a dressage arena. I was impressed by how nicely everything was kept. The stalls were large and the pastures were not overcrowded. But best of all, from my perspective, was the fact that Rowan was located on the route I took every day when I drove from my house to the rescue. That meant that I could stop and see Sonny either on my way to or my way home from the rescue. It seemed like the perfect solution. I could continue my lessons with Sonny without having to worry about disruptions due to weather and at the same time the location ensured that it wouldn’t disrupt my work at the rescue. The decision to move Sonny there was a simple one. The next morning the director and I were sitting in the tack room discussing the day’s priorities. In passing, I mentioned that I was going to move Sonny to Rowan at the end of the month. To my surprise, she burst into tears. After we talked for a few minutes it dawned on me that she thought I was taking Sonny from the rescue because he had been sickened on the clover and that it meant I wouldn’t be volunteering any more. I was quick to assure her that was not the case and that I just wanted to have Sonny at a barn with an indoor arena so that I could continue with my natural horsemanship lessons through the winter. I told her that I intended to continue volunteering at the rescue just as I had done when Sonny was stabled in Fair Hill. In my mind, Sonny’s location and my work at the rescue were two different issues. Apparently the director didn’t see it the way I did and immediately her behavior toward me changed. For three years we had been in almost daily communication about the rescue but once I told her I was moving Sonny, she stopped contacting me about anything. She behaved as if I was abandoning my work at the rescue, mentioning to me several times that she hoped my new barn would appreciate me as much as she had. It happened so often in the three weeks before I moved Sonny that I finally snapped at her about it one day, almost yelling at her that where Sonny was boarded had absolutely no connection to my volunteering at the rescue and asking her if she would please just drop it. After that, I continued to try and work as if nothing had happened but it was clear that she was annoyed with me and it was making me very uncomfortable. Shortly after I had moved Sonny to Rowan, I received an e-mail notifying me that I had been accepted to Fast Track and given a scholarship. I was beyond excited. The first person I called was Jane Bartsch, my local Parelli instructor, and the second was the director of the rescue. Jane was just as excited as I was but the director’s reaction was cool. Since she had been the one who had initially introduced me to Parelli and we had even talked about the possibility of attending a course at the Parelli farm in Florida, I had expected she would have been enthusiastic and her lack of support took me by surprise. I was beginning to understand that moving Sonny away from the rescue had somehow negatively impacted our relationship, although I was at a loss to understand why. I decided that perhaps it would be best to just give it a little space, figuring that if I behaved as if nothing had changed; she would eventually come around to that position also. That fall was a busy one and between attending a Carol Coppinger camp, going on a family cruise to New England and Canada and getting ready for Fast Track, I didn’t have much time to worry about relationships at the rescue. Before I knew it, I had loaded Sonny on to a Brook Ledge trailer for his trip to Florida and I was in my car headed down the highway myself. Despite everything I had done to get ready, I wasn’t really prepared for how physically and emotionally draining Fast Track was going to be and I returned to Delaware at the beginning of December, happy but exhausted and not at all prepared for the Christmas holidays. By spring, my relationship with the director had stabilized. Although I did not enjoy the closeness that I once had, at least things were reasonably cordial. I continued to do ground work with the rescued horses but I was no longer included in much of the planning. My suggestions, which had been welcomed until the previous summer, were now mostly ignored. This had unfortunate consequences when one of the horses I had been working with was shown to a potential adopter. Chip was a sensitive horse that had been rescued the previous winter. He was skeptical of people and would go quickly RBI when pressed too hard or too quickly. When the director told me that a prospective adopter was going to look at him when I couldn’t be at the rescue, I told her that I didn’t think he was ready. She disagreed so I warned both her and the barn manager that Chip needed to be thoroughly warmed up on the ground before anyone rode him. The next time I came to the rescue, all anyone was talking about was how Chip had thrown the instructor when she tried to mount. She had injured her back as a result. When I asked if Chip had been properly warmed up I was curtly told that “we didn’t have time”. The previous year the rescue’s director had become coach to a local college western competition team and had developed a successful lesson program for children. I had never been involved in the teaching of riding lessons but that spring I often observed the classes and began to be concerned about the lack of natural horsemanship techniques that were being used in the lessons. Most of the children taking lesson were young girls and they were being taught to ride with a concentrated rein before they had developed a good independent seat. As a result, most of them balanced using the reins. I could see how that was affecting the horses being used for lessons. Several times I brought that up to the director but she didn’t seem to be interested. At one point we had a fairly heated discussion about the welfare of the horses being used in the lesson program. Eventually after one of my suggestions, this one about teaching the one rein stop, she told me flatly that she didn’t think she “liked Parelli” any more. That really threw me for a loop and I began to question whether I could continue to uphold the Parelli principles while working at the rescue. After that exchange, our relationship began to disintegrate. The director often wouldn’t speak to me at all and when she did, she was short or even rude. I asked the barn manager if she knew what was going on and all she could offer was that the director thought I was too critical of her. When I learned that, I stopped making any suggestions but that didn’t help. Finally, one afternoon, the director accused me of encouraging one of the rescue’s boarders to move to the barn where I was boarding Sonny. I was stunned that she would have thought me capable of that kind of behavior. Over the four years that I had worked for the rescue I had donated hundreds of hours of my personal time and well over a thousand dollars in financial and material resources. I could not believe that she could possibly think I would do anything that would threaten the welfare of the organization. I went to the rescue a few times after that but I now no longer even felt welcome. I was scheduled to have foot surgery that fall and after I had recovered from the surgery, I didn’t return to the rescue. Although I probably shouldn’t have been, I was very hurt by the director’s behavior toward me. I had thought we were friends but apparently I was mistaken. Eventually I was able to write the director a letter explaining why I was no longer going to volunteer. I told her that I would always be grateful to her for introducing me to Parelli and that while I respected her decision to take the rescue in a different direction, I didn’t feel that I could continue to work there and uphold my principles at the same time. I told her that I only wanted the best for the rescue and I wished her the best of luck in the future. It has been a little over a year since I was last at the rescue and I have thought long and hard about the sequence of events that led to my leaving. While there are some decisions I made while working at the rescue that I wish I had not made, moving Sonny isn’t one of them. It was the right thing to do for me and it was the right thing to do for Sonny. I sincerely wish that the rescue’s director had not reacted the way she did but Sonny and I have made so much progress since moving that I know it was the right decision. It turned out that Rowan is Parelli friendly barn and while there are only a couple of official Parelli students at the farm, almost everyone seems interested in some aspect of natural horsemanship. Some of the boarders have commented on the things they have seen me do with Sonny and others have asked me why I do what I do. More exciting for me is the fact that there are now three members of the Delaware State Police’s new mounted unit housed at the farm and I have been given the opportunity to work with these horses. I never thought when I decided to move Sonny to Rowan from the rescue that it would change the focus of my efforts. In fact, when I made the decision, it never occurred to me that it might have any impact other than accelerating my personal development. In fact, it was a simple decision that had a number of consequences I am not sure I ever could have anticipated. I miss working at the rescue and perhaps, at some point in the future, I will find another opportunity to work with horses at risk. But for now, I am happy that I have found a supportive environment for the development of my natural horsemanship skills and that I have several horse to play with. You can be very sure, however, that if I ever decide to move Sonny to a new farm, I will consider carefully even the most unlikely implications of that decision before I make the move.

2013-01-05T11:35:00.000-05:00

The Walking Wounded My horse, Sonny, is pretty much of a disaster when it comes to injury and illness. I’ve had Sonny for seven years and so far he has cost me over $11,000 in vet bills. Now I know that owning a horse isn’t an inexpensive venture but I had my first horse, Max, for over 23 years and in all that time, I only had to call the vet out twice for something that wasn’t routine care. Sonny on the other hand, is good for some kind of a $500 vet visit about every six months and he is pretty inventive about his mishaps. Sonny’s first misadventure involved a puncture wound that was in such an odd spot, even the vet couldn’t figure out how he had managed to do it. I noticed some blood on Sonny’s front leg up near where his leg connects with his chest. After cleaning the blood, I discovered a puncture located on the inside of his right leg, in what would be our armpit. It was so deep that the vet was able to put her entire index finger inside the hole. She told me that if it had been a quarter inch further to the right, it would have punctured a major artery and he would have bled to death. Fortunately for me he didn’t but between vet visits and medicine, we’d had out first $500 event. Six months after that, he scratched his cornea, we think grazing in some tall grass, and ended up wearing an eye patch until it healed. That wasn’t his only eye injury. A few months after that, he was cantering inside of the round pen and somehow managed to get one hind leg over the lowest rail of the pen. During his struggle to get out, he permanently bent the pen and he whacked his head against the top rail. When he calmed down, I noticed he had cut himself below his right eye. The vet was called for that little adventure and we discovered another scratch on the cornea which resulted in a second stint in an eye patch. I was beginning to think I should be calling him “Pirate Pete”! Sonny’s next misadventure almost cost him his life. I was keeping him at the horse rescue where I was working at the time and he was pastured on a field that was fairly rich in clover. It had been a particularly wet spring and one day I noticed that his muzzle, which is white, was tinged orange. I didn’t think much of it at the time since the soil in these parts has a lot of red clay, but two days later, the rescue director called me and told me that Sonny’s nose was pretty sun burned. I went down to take a lot and what I saw shocked me. Although it was only May and it hadn’t been particularly hot, Sonny’s nose was burned and peeling. I call our vet, Dr. Cushing. He took one look at Sonny’s burnt and orange colored nose and thought right away that he looked a bit jaundiced. It turned out that Sonny had a case of alsike clover poisoning which had affected his liver function. Because the liver was compromised, he was no longer able to digest grass properly and photoactive chemicals were getting into his bloodstream. All of his white skin, where the blood vessels are close to the surface and there is little pigment to protect the skin, had suffered second degree burns. He was a mess. It took us 53 days of doctoring and confinement, during which time he wasn’t allowed to be in the sun. He was miserable (we both were) but he finally recovered. I moved Sonny to a new barn after that and the year after the alsike clover incident was relative trouble free. Then fourteen days before he was supposed to ship to Florida so I could attend the Fast Track course, I noticed a large lump on his sheath. Since shipping across state lines requires a clean bill of health, I called the vet. The lump turned out to be a pocket of infection, probably from a bug bite. Dr. Cushing opened the area and drained it. For days afterwards, I had to swab the opening with antiseptic , squeezing out some really vile looking gunk that gradually decreased until two days before we were scheduled to leave, he finally passed his vet check. For the seven years I have owned Sonny, he has had some on and off lameness problems. He is slightly crooked in the front and his right front foot is pretty upright. We’ve done multiple x-rays, which haven’t shown much in the way of navicular changes and managed the problem with supplements and occasional anti-inflammatory medicine. I have probably aggravated the problem as I progressed to level 3 work and spent more time with circling exercises both on line and when riding but the problem has always been manageable until 2012. I returned from vacation in March and discovered Sonny was lame. We treated, as usual, with Bute and he improved enough for me to attend a Carol Coppinger clinic but the problem proved to be persistent and in June, I finally had the vet come out to evaluate Sonny. Dr. Cushing blocked his right front foot and he immediately because sound so we proceeded with x-rays, which didn’t show much in the way of changes. A test for Lyme’s disease was negative so we assumed we were dealing with a soft tissue injury. With rest and a change in shoeing, Sonny was showing good improvement and I felt we were on the right track until I received a call from our barn manager one morning informing me that Sonny had come in from the field dead lame. When I say he was dead lame, I mean he didn’t want to walk. This was the kind of lameness that usually indicates an abscess. He was miserable. We treated him as if it was an abscess but when nothing developed in a couple of days, we called Dr. Cushing. Sonny didn’t show much sensitivity to the hoof tester and didn’t have much of a pronounced pulse in his hoof so Dr. Cushing put him on a course of Previcox and Recovery EQ. Slowly he began to improve and I thought we were out of the woods until I received another call from the barn manger to tell me that Sonny had ulcers all over his lips and inside his mouth. Really? I was beginning to wonder why I couldn’t catch a break with this horse. I was afraid that he was allergic to the medicine that seemed to be making him better so I called the vet. Dr. Cushing took one look at Sonny’s mouth and asked to see what kind of hay he was eating. The barn had recently taken delivery of some nice grass hay. Because Sonny had been confined either to his stall or the round pen while we were treating his foot injury, he had been eating a lot of this new hay and quite frankly, he loved it. Dr. Cushing looked at the hay and picked out some foxtail seed heads. He was pretty sure this was the culprit. Apparently some horses react to foxtail heads in just this way and of course, given Sonny’s predilection for unusual medical issues, he was sensitive. We changed Sonny’s hay, treated the ulcers with medicine and his mouth is now healed up. We are continuing to treat the lameness and new x-rays have revealed some arthritis so we have added injections to his regiment. I am hopeful that it will resolve enough for me to ride again at some point but have come to the conclusion that Sonny’s days as my levels horse have come to an end. I’ve been playing with him at liberty lately, not doing anything strenuous and he is feeling good enough that he offered to jump a fence the other day. I stopped him before he could but felt encouraged that he would offer. When you buy a horse, you don’t really know what the future will hold in terms of the animal’s health. With Sonny’s confirmation, I probably accelerated his arthritis when I started advancing in my Parelli work, but I am hopeful that by switching Sonny to trail riding, he and I can have many good years together. Given his history, I expect he will figure out some other original ways to injure himself so at this point, I have given the vet my credit card number. It is just easier that way!

2013-01-04T11:03:00.001-05:00

Noticing the Smallest Change November and December were challenging months for me as my mother has been recovering from a serious surgery. Trips to the barn were a low priority and I didn’t have time to do much when I was there other than check on Sonny’s supplements and clean him up a bit. But Mom is now well enough to be left alone so yesterday I was happy to get down to the barn with enough time to actually play with a horse. Sonny is recovering from an ankle injury that also happened in November (it really was a bad month) so he can’t do much at the moment. Fortunately our barn is now host to several horses that are being used in a new Delaware State Police mounted patrol and their owners have invited me to play with the horses. So yesterday, I played with Jack. Jack is the center horse in the picture and when I first met him last summer, he reminded me of my first horse, Max. Both Jack and Max are RBI, although I didn’t know that when I bought Max. Max had been professionally trained. He was very obedient and tried very hard to do what I asked but he had no personality. When I would go into his stall he would just stand there looking away from me and tolerating whatever I wanted to do. I hadn’t heard of natural horsemanship when I bought Max but fortunately, I gave him just what he needed, lots of Friendly Game. I spent lots of time grooming him and, because I was a novice rider, took things nice a slow. Gradually, Max’s personality started to emerge and we formed a bond that lasted 23 years, until Max died at the age of 32. Jack is the spitting image of Max and like Max he is very obedient but he lacks any exuberance so the few times I have played with him in the past, I have focused on building a relationship. Yesterday, when I led him from the field, I noticed that he trailed along behind me, not pulling on the lead but not walking up next to my shoulder like a partner so I decided that the focus of my session would be to see if I could get him to be a little bit more connected. Jack lives in a field so he was blanketed with a heavy rug and a Lycra® under blanket. I had taken him into the indoor arena to play and it took a few minutes to wrestle him out of his clothing. At one point, I had to take his halter off to remove the hood and he stood next to me without moving but I could tell from his body language that he was not really relaxed. I groomed him for a few minutes, looking for itchy spots and watching his reaction. After a few minutes he was licking and chewing and occasionally looking in my direction. Since Jack is so compliant, I thought I might focus on something to increase his curiosity and started with the touch it game, driving from zone 3. The arena was sent up with a number of jumps and Jack would approach the jumps but was hesitant to go up and touch them. Rather than forcing the issue, when Jack had reached his threshold and stopped, I would then ask him to squeeze between me and the object. After a few squeezes, when I got a good lick and chew, I would then send him to the jump once more and most of the time he touched it with his nose. It was very windy yesterday and our indoor arena makes lots of interesting noises in the wind. In the beginning of the session, Jack was very distracted by the wind noises and he would throw his head up and orient toward the noise. As our session progresses, he became more relaxed and more focused on me. After about 20 minutes, I took Jack over to the mounting block to play. The mounting block in our arena a three step monster that is about waist high on most people. I sent Jack over to the block and waited for him to touch it with his nose. Then I climbed up to the top step of the block. This put me quite a bit higher with than Jack’s head and he was clearly uncomfortable with that. Through approach and retreat, Jack was finally able to come and stand next to the block with me towering over him and he allowed me to stroke him all over while standing calmly. I played with Jack for about an hour before wrestling him back into his body liner and rug. There had been a lot of licking and chewing and by the end of our session, Jack had even given me a good blow out and a yawn or two, all good signs. But the best sign that I had made some progress was the difference in Jack’s position and body posture as I walked him back to his field. Rather than dragging along behind me as he had done coming in, Jack walked at my shoulder, ears pricked, stepping along at the same pace. When I stopped, he stopped at my shoulder and even gave me two eyes in a tiny bit of a question. And when I removed his halter in the field, he stayed right with me while I gave him a good scratch on the neck. Before I discovered natural horsemanship, I looked for big shifts in my horse’s performance to tell me I was making progress. I probably wouldn’t have noticed any of these little changes, the shifts in body position, the licking and chewing, the yawning or blowing. But when a RBI is as obedient and compliant as my Max was or as Jack, is it is these little changes that tell indicate you’re on the right track. It is these little changes that tell you the relationship is getting stronger and the horse is getting more confident. Building the skill to recognize these little changes is one of the things that makes me a better horseman, and I know by the way Jack stayed with me when I turned him out yesterday, that he recognized it too.

Bumps in the Road

2012-10-21T20:13:00.001-04:00

I have to admit that I came home pretty discouraged from the clinic I attended last week. After working hard all summer to improve my horsemanship, my confidence and my emotional fitness, things just didn’t go well for me and I found myself wondering just where I am headed on this journey toward becoming a better horsewoman. Actually, it has been a difficult year for me so far. Sonny, my levels horse (actually my only horse), has been lame on and off since April. After hundreds of dollars in vet and farrier bills, I have only managed to get him sound if he is going in a straight line and on firm ground. He cannot circle to the right without limping and he has difficulty when he is in any kind of sand arena. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that his Parelli journey is over and he is destined to become a trail horse. I’m sure that would be fine with Sonny. He is LBI and loves go to out on trails. Unfortunately, there are no trails to ride on at my current, relatively Parelli friendly barn and I can’t afford a truck and trailer so changing his career would mean moving him to another barn which is not a happy prospect for me. And being retired, I can’t afford a second horse. My wonderful, local Parelli instructor, Jane Bartsch, volunteered to allow me to ride her levels horse, Lynn, so I could continue my lessons this summer. I started riding Lynn six weeks after undergoing knee replacement surgery and after a bumpy beginning, began to make some real progress, particularly with bridleless riding at the canter. Although I was still having trouble consistently getting a right lead with Lynn, (my left leg is still somewhat weak as a result of knee replacement surgery in June) I was pretty consistently getting soft canter departures in both directions and I thought I had overcome my anxiety. Jane agreed to let me take Lynn to the clinic and I was hopeful that my new found confidence with the canter would translate into better performance in the clinic setting. I planned to meet Jane and Lynn at the clinic location on the evening before the beginning of the clinic in order to ride Lynn once in the arena before the clinic started. I was hoping to give myself a little confidence boost by practicing some canter departures and perhaps even some bowtie pattern. Things seemed to get off track immediately. I arrived at the arena in Fredericka, Delaware, only to discover that Carol Coppinger was doing some individual sessions with clinic participants on the evening before the first day of the clinic. Rather than being able to ride Lynn, I found myself in a private, on-line session with Carol, where she gave me a friendly reminder that everything I did with Jane’s horse could be teaching her bad habits. Don’t get me wrong. One of the things I like best about attending Carol Coppinger’s clinics is that you get private time with her to work on any issue you might have. Carol is a wonderful instructor and it has always struck me that she cares deeply about both her students and their horses. But her comment to me during my individual session set off alarms in my head, All summer I have had a concern in the back of my mind that through my inexperience, I might be in some way be doing Lynn harm. Now Carol had brought up that very issue. Had she seen something during my session that raised her concern? I had some nice moments during the three days of the clinic. My on line work with Lynn was spot on and during the liberty sessions, she stuck to me line a burr on a dog. But my riding left a lot to be desired. I was uncomfortable riding in the crowded arena and felt like I never got Lynn warmed up adequately. I never relaxed and neither did Lynn. As a result, I was overly dependent on using the neck string when we trotted and I felt completely uncomfortable at the canter. My worst moment came on the second day during my next private session with Carol. I wanted to work on my canter departures and I explained to Carol the problems I was having with the right lead. To show her where I was, I asked Lynn to canter off on the left lead, we got a smooth departure, cantered a circle and came back to the center of the arena. Then I asked Lynn to canter off to the right. I got a nice departure but it was still a left lead. Carol told me to take away the lead and then ask again. We worked on it for 20 minutes and I never once got the lead. Everyone was watching. Lynn and I were never in harmony. She needed to move her feet and I was trying to slow her down. I became increasingly frustrated which was upsetting Lynn. Finally I just quit and left the arena. I felt like a complete failure. By the end of the clinic, rather than feeling energized and excited about what came next, I was feeling completely dejected. I’ve been struggling with level 3 freestyle riding for several years and my issue has always been cantering bridleless. I don’t feel comfortable and at my age (going on 65) I wonder if it isn’t too much of a stretch for me. I’ve been trying so hard to achieve the goal of level 3 freestyle that riding has become work and I just don’t seem to be having fun anymore. It was in this frame of mind that I went out to see Sonny on the Tuesday after the clinic. He and his pasture mates were at the far end of the field and I almost didn’t have the energy to walk out to get him but I had driven all the way to the barn so I figured that I should probably at least check to see if he was OK. When I got most of the way out to the little group of horses pastured with Sonny, he disengaged from the herd and headed in my direction. Once he was haltered, I started back toward the barn with Sonny in tow, pushing at my pockets for treats. After my debacle at the clinic, I didn’t want to ride so I thought I might try to play with Sonny at liberty. It was windy and I was too cold to play in the round pen so I took him into the indoor arena and removed his halter. I’ve never had much success in the past keeping Sonny with me in a large arena so I wasn’t expecting much. I brought the green ball into the arena and started to walk with it. Sonny trailed along. Then I rolled it toward him and he pushed it with his nose, a promising start. Since Sonny seemed to be sticking to me, I played some yo-yo game walking and then trotting forward then stopping and backing up. Sonny stayed right with me. I thought I would try a figure 8 pattern. I put out two cones and positioned him between them. When I backed him away and tried to send him in a circle, he started to leave. Remembering something Carol had said during the clinic about not making the horse feel wrong, I just went with him. We trotted a circle together and ended up at a cone. Sonny picked up the cone and looked at me. I started to smile. I tried the figure 8 again. Instead of circling the cone and heading back in my direction, Sonny went sideways to the wall of the arena and then looked at me. I called him back and started again. This time he started to circle me at a trot. After a few circles I brought him in to me and gave him a cookie. By this time we had drifted away from the cones. When I started to trot back toward the cones, Sonny veered away from me, popped over a jump, turned to face me and then trotted right to me. By this time I was laughing out loud. I threw my arms around his neck and thanked him for giving me back the energy I had lost during the clinic. At Fast Track, head instructor John Barr often said that becoming a natural horseman was a journey and that at any time, each of us was exactly where we needed to be on the path. This year in my desire to reach level 3, I had lost sight of the ultimate goal and forgotten that there were bound to be some bumps in the road. It took the playful energy of my big red horse to remind me why I started on this journey. I may never be comfortable with bridleless riding and ultimately that is OK because with each lesson I take and each clinic I attend, I build a stronger relationship with my horse and I am more able to make the world a better place for both horses and people.

2012-09-17T16:58:00.000-04:00

Building a Relationship One Cookie at a Time My horse, Sonny, has been lame on an off all summer. It is a mysterious lameness, presenting with no heat or swelling and after hundreds of dollars in vet and farrier bills we seem to be no closer to resolving the issue. Sonny goes relatively sound in a straight line so he is OK for trail riding but the minute I put him on a circle he limps. Unfortunately this has put a big crimp in my progress toward passing my level 3 freestyle assessment so in order for me to continue making progress toward this goal, 2 Star Parelli instructor, Jane Bartsch, with whom I take a weekly lesson, offered to let me ride her levels horse, Lynn, for my lessons. Lynn, a 15 year old appaloosa mare, has a lot of good points as a lesson horse for me. She has lots of Parelli mileage on her and is well beyond the level 3 skills in her development. She is smaller than Sonny and has a nice rocking horse canter that Sonny lacks. She also has high obedience and I felt quite confident in riding her only six weeks after knee replacement surgery. In fact, the only drawback, from my perspective, was that she was a mare. I think it is important to explain here that I have a bit of prejudice against mares that comes from some early bad experiences. One of my very first horse riding experiences was on a mare owned by a classmate of mine in grade school. The mare was a pig eyed little bay that knew immediately I was a beginner. Almost as soon as my seat hit the saddle, she ran off with me, dumping me on the way back to the barn. Her owner was most apologetic, explaining to me that the mare was “in season”. I broke a wrist in the fall and while it didn’t put me off horses, it did sensitize me to mares and not in a good way. Through the years I’ve had more encounters that were less than pleasant. My first horse, Max, shared a pasture with a mare, who would charge me whenever I came in the field to get him. That was way before I had ever heard of Parelli and I took to carrying a lunge whip when I was around her. At the rescue where I worked, I was bitten several times by the director’s mare, an animal that seemed always to be trying to tell me there was only one head mare at the rescue and it wasn’t me! Maybe they sensed my prejudice as an uneasiness in my approach to them, but it had become clear to me that with mares, my relationship building skills were sorely lacking. So while I was extremely pleased that Jane offered to let me ride Lynn in lessons, I knew from the get go that if I was going to be successful, I would need to work really hard to build a positive relationship with her mare. Like Sonny, Lynn is LBI so at least I knew I had lots of experience working with the LBI horsenality. At our first lesson, Jane had Lynn all saddled and ready to go when I arrived. “You better get some cookies,” Jane said, indicating a bucket of treats inside of the tack room door. “Lynn also likes to be scratched, particularly on her belly and around her teats.” When I approached Lynn and offered her the back of my hand, she didn’t turn her head in my direction but just looked at me out of the side of her eye. I waited for her to sniff my hand before giving her a scratch on the neck and withers. She tolerated me but I could tell she wasn’t really pleased. I fed her a cookie. That resulted in a slight softening of her eye. It wasn’t much but it was something. Jane is always telling me what a beautiful expression Sonny has and after my first lesson with Lynn, I understood why. Sonny is a true LBI. He is argumentative and stubborn and easily bored but he has a sunny personality and when you are playing with him he almost always comes in to you with his ears forward, looking pleased, as if he had just spotted a long lost friend. Lynn on the other hand, reminded me of a crabby, spinster librarian, whose expression of disapproval was sure to silence the most boisterous of library patrons. Coming toward me, her ears weren’t pinned but they were back and the message was clear. You’re not the boss of me! After our first lesson, I decided that if I was going to build a relationship with Lynn, then I would need a strategy. I started carrying horse cookies in the car so that my pockets could be full for every lesson. I came to lessons early, so I could be the one to curry Lynn before she was saddled. I concentrated on finding all of those itchy spots where she loved to be scratched. I started each lesson by warming her up on line and I tried to be really pleased with her. I smiled at her. Remembering that it pays to have a sense of humor with an LBI, I laughed when she was doing something a little bit dominant or defiant. I made sure to let her rest occasionally. I tried never to let her come to me with her ears back. As the weeks went on, Lynn began to respond. She was having trouble maintaining her standoffish attitude when there were so many cookies involved. She actually began looking for a cookie after she had done something particularly difficult or clever. She let me hold her head and pet her muzzle whenever I switched her from halter to bridle. She began to lean into me when I stopped to give her a scratch. Most of the time, when I turned her out after our lesson, she would stand with me for a few moments before walking off to say hello to Jane’s half Arabian gelding with whom she shares a fence line. After one recent lesson I remarked to Jane that I was beginning to think maybe mares weren’t so bad after all! Jane tells me that she thinks I am doing really well in developing my relationship with Lynn, so well in fact, that she offered to let me take Lynn to Carol Coppinger’s upcoming clinic this October in Frederica, Delaware. I’m excited to have the opportunity and I’m looking forward to seeing what Carol thinks of our budding relationship. Horses, like people, are individuals and just like there is something to be learned from each person we meet, each horse also has the potential to provide a lesson if we are only receptive enough to perceive it. But the prejudices we hold cripple us by reducing our receptivity to these potentials in both horses and people. I had some early bad experiences with mares and I had used those experiences to paint all mares with the same message. Mares are difficult. I’ve even often told people that I would never own a mare. And yet this summer’s experiences with Lynn have finally opened my eyes to their potential. If, and I hope it is not the case, I cannot resolve Sonny’s lameness issues, I will need to look for a new horse with which to continue my Parelli journey. This time my search criteria will not exclude mares.

2012-09-10T15:08:00.002-04:00

The Value of a Great Instructor I’m a learning junkie. So naturally, when I was introduced four years ago to Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I was attracted to Pat’s principle of never ending self-improvement. In the beginning I watched every video and read every article I could get my hands on and I have been fortunate along this journey to have attended Fast Track at the Parelli Center in Florida and to have taken clinics with such wonderful professionals as 6 Star Master Instructor Carol Coppinger, 5 Star Master Instructor John Barr and his wife 4 Star Senior Instructor Kathy. But lately, as I have been reflecting on my progress, I’ve come to realize that the person who has been most valuable in helping me along the way is my local Parelli professional, 2 Star Junior Instructor Jane Bartsch. Like many fortunate coincidences, Jane came into my life at exactly the right time. I had been introduced to Parelli by the director of the horse rescue where I was volunteering my time and with the help of a set of tapes, I was working my way through the old level one program. While I had lots of chances to practice horse handling with the rescue horses, I was using my own horse, Sonny, a big, easy going LBI paint gelding as my levels horse and he was proving to be a challenging subject for me. I had recently retired from a 28 year career in corporate America, spending much of that time in supervisory positions, and I was used to having people do what I told them to do. I was now working with a clever but stubborn, easily bored, food oriented, argumentative 1200 pound animal who seemed to understand how to press my buttons in a way that no human subordinate ever had. To make matters worse, unlike my previous horse, a RBI who actually seemed happy to see me when I arrived at the barn, Sonny could have cared less whether I was there or not. I was the food lady, good for a treat now and then but generally not all that interesting. There were many times that I wasn’t sure if I should be laughing or crying with frustration. Because I had done a fair amount of organizational development during my corporate days, I prided myself on my ability to self-observe my mental and emotional state and self-correct during interactions. And while I had grown pretty skilled at interpreting non-verbal feedback from my peers and subordinates at work, reading Sonny was another matter altogether after making some early progress with him, I was pretty well stuck. Fortunately this is where Jane entered the picture. I first met Jane when she came to the rescue to do a horse handling demonstration with her levels horse, Lynn. Watching her working in such harmony with her horse was a revelation to me and I sidled over to the fence to ask her some questions. When I found out that Lynn, who was responding to Jane’s slightest suggestions, was also a LBI, I knew immediately that Jane was the perfect person to help me with Sonny. Jane and I are polar opposites in personality, where I am talkative and outgoing, she is more reserved, but we meshed immediately when I began taking a weekly lesson. I had made good progress with Sonny playing the seven games on line but my skills were not at all refined. Rather than providing a lot of up front instruction, Jane observed and then suggested small refinements in technique that led to big improvements in results. In a typical lesson, she would sit on the fence and suggest an exercise. Then she would watch me play with Sonny, suggest a change and watch me play again. Through her suggestions, I began to develop a sense of feel and to get much lighter and more subtle in my communication with Sonny. Slowly my ability to read horse behavior and to communicate through body language improved. I had much less confidence in my skills riding Sonny and Jane was always able to recognize and respect my thresholds. She was really good at walking the fine line between pushing me forward while not sending me so far out into my comfort zone that I became frightened. She helped me recognize how my nervousness was affecting Sonny’s ability to relax, and how to adjust what I was doing to reduce the resultant brace between us. As my skills developed, Jane allowed me to self-direct my lessons. She provided constant encouragement and when I got discouraged, she would remind me how far I both Sonny and I had come in our development. Her support reached me even when I was attending Fast Track. After the first week I was so tired and sore I didn’t think I could continue but Jane’s e-mail pep talks kept me focused on my goals and helped me look past my discomfort. One of Pat Parelli’s keys to success is support. The program has wonderful tools to help students with their development, but there is only so much you can gain from going to the occasional clinic, watching DVD’s and reading articles. In my opinion, the best possible support is a knowledgeable instructor you can see on a regular basis, someone who understands your goals and recognizes your progress, someone who encourages you to test your limits and provides you with instant feedback. This spring I passed level 3 liberty audition with Sonny and I just recently submitted my level 3 on line audition. Jane is now helping me refine my bridleless riding and I hope to submit my level 3 freestyle audition soon. I know that without Jane’s help, I wouldn’t have made it this fare so I want to say publically, “Thank you, Jane Bartsch”. You have certainly proved to me the value of having a great instructor right here in Delaware.

2012-09-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

Calm in the Eye of the Storm I’m a take charge kind of person and have always been good in a crisis. I think quickly on my feet, am not afraid to give orders and expect that people will respond appropriately when I do. That being said, I have been known to lose my temper when the people around me are being more hindrance than help and can bark out commands with enough authority to bring most grown men quickly to heel. This tendency has served me well in any number of situations. At the first University of Delaware football game after 9/11, an argument broke out between the Delaware fans sitting in front of me and some fans of the opposing team sitting two rows down. Fueled by too much beer and the tension everyone was feeling, the situation quickly got out of hand and was about to erupt into a fight. I jumped into the fray and pulling myself up to my full 5’6’’hight, grabbed and practically lifted a burly 6 footer off his feet. “We are not doing this. Not today”, I growled. “Now sit down! All of you!” The fans around me came to a complete stop and the fellow who had started the brouhaha dropped his head and mumbled “I’m sorry man. I wasn’t thinking.” Years of working with horses, however, has taught me that what works well with people in a crisis seldom works well with horses. Getting angry and growling will send most horses running, either physical or mentally, for cover and I’ve had to work hard on myself to develop the ability to maintain an inner calm when things around me are going to hell in a hand basket. This was put to the test last week by a horse in our barn named Rafalco. Rafalco, or Ralphie as we all call him, is the one horse at our barn training to be a big time show horse. A chestnut Adonis of a horse, Ralph is a 17.2 hand Hanoverian that reminds me of Linda Parelli’s late horse West Point. Ralph shares a pasture with my horse, Sonny, and I have developed a great fondness for him. Raised mostly by hand after his mother died when he was young, Ralph has a playful disposition and is people oriented. He is always the first horse to greet me when I come into the field and will follow me around like a puppy. Because he is so big (when he puts his head on my chest it covers me from chin to crotch) I have spent some time playing with him at liberty in the field teaching him to respect my space and can get him to back away from me by wagging my finger. But I always carry a cookie for him and never fail to stop and give him a good scratch, so we have developed a pretty good relationship. The last couple of months have been tough ones for Ralph. He was shipped off to the New Bolton Center to have two benign tumors removed from his neck. The tumors were more extensive than were anticipated and although the surgery was a success, the wound opened up after surgery leaving a puckered and unsightly scar along his beautiful neck. Then he came up with a mysterious and difficult to diagnose lameness. Between the operation and the lameness, Ralph has been relegated to stall rest for the past six weeks and the only time he gets out of his stall is if someone hand grazes him while his stall is being cleaned. Because I felt bad that Ralph has been so confined, I had taken to arriving at the barn in the morning just as stalls were being cleaned so I could give him a little break. Despite that fact that he has been stuck in his stall day after day, he’s never tried to break away from me, being much more interested in getting a few mouthfuls of grass. I don’t have a rope halter big enough to fit Ralph’s huge head and I usually grab my 12 foot line before I take him out of his stall but last Tuesday, I was in a bit of a hurry and I just used the line attached to his leather halter. Almost as soon as we were out of the barn, I realized I had made a mistake. The line was very short and also very rough so it was difficult for me to allow Ralph any drift as he was grazing. Rather than drag him back into the barn so that I could retrieve my 12 foot line, I decided to let him graze toward the other end of the barn since Sonny’s stall is by the far door. Unfortunately, just as we rounded the corner, Bree, our barn manager, rounded the other corner dragging the manure wagon, startling Ralph. Ralph’s horsenality is definitely extroverted, and although I think it is mostly LBE he can go right brained pretty quickly. With incredible athletic ability and the reflexes of a cat, he launched himself into the air, twisted 90 degrees and landed on his hind feet. Faced with this display of airs above the ground and holding only the shortest and roughest of leads, I had no choice by to release the line. Ralph took off running and my heart sank into my stomach. All I could think of at that point was that he would hurt himself and it would be my fault. Fortunately, he ran directly toward our back fence that boarders on the thoroughbred farm next door and he came to a stop right in front of the open gate to a long narrow paddock that we use for isolating new horses. By this time Bree and I, along with a half dozen young thoroughbreds from the farm next door, were all sprinting in Ralph’s direction. As the thoroughbreds flashed by, Ralph dashed through the paddock gate and chased them down the fence line to the end of the paddock, where he pulled up short, wild eyed and snorting. Then he started back toward us, head up, tail in a classic “j”, ripping along in an elevated, extended trot that would make most Grand Prix dressage riders drool. He looked to me like Alexander the Great’s massive stallion, Bucephalas, charging into battle. I took a deep breath, stepped into the paddock and closed the gate as he thundered toward me. “Do you really want to be in there with him?” Bree asked as this fire breathing dragon of a horse bore down on me. “I’ll be OK”, I answered, and staying close to the fence, I walked a little further out into the paddock. It was clear to both of us that Ralph’s adrenaline was flowing. He skidded to a stop at the fence and whirled around and called to the young thoroughbreds. He didn’t even look at me when I offered him the back of my hand, then he took off again for the far end of the paddock. “I better go get a bucket of grain”, Bree said turning toward the barn, “or we are never going to catch him.” “Wait a minute” I called after her. “I think he’ll come to me”. I was breathing deeply and trying to center myself into a calm space. I was sure that if I could project calm energy, Ralph would feel it and come to me. He thundered back toward me and stopped, head up, blowing hard. This time, when I extended the back of my hand, he stretched his nose toward me. He was still a couple of body lengths away from me but his ears were pinned forward toward me, so holding my hand out, I took three steps in his direction, muttering to him softly, “It’s OK, Bub, you’re OK.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly in a sigh. He stretched his beautiful, long neck, touched his nose to my hand and then he sighed. The thoroughbreds in our neighbor’s field continued to race around but despite Ralph’s energy still being up, he chose to stay with me. He dropped his head and started to graze but ever four or five bites he would pick up his head and touch me with his nose. It was like he was saying, “Hey, not sure what came over me there a minute ago, but I’m back in our herd of two.” He continue to blow and shake his head, but I as I stroked his neck and back, I could feel the excitement drain out of him. By the time Bree was finished cleaning and rebedding his stall, Ralph walked quietly back to the barn none the worse for wear. There are any number of lessons to be learned from this little adventure. For example, it is yet another demonstration of how important it is to have the right tools (rope halter and appropriate line) for the job even when the job is something as insignificant as hand grazing a horse. I’m sure that I would have been able to allow Ralph enough drift and not lost the line when first launched himself into the air. It also reminded me of the responsibility you take on when you touch someone else’s horse. Fortunately, Ralph wasn’t injured during his bid for freedom but he could have been and it would have been my fault. I think the most important lesson, however, is one about emotional fitness or how important it is to keep your head in the game when all about you are losing theirs. If I had panicked when Ralph took off, I would never have gotten him to come to me. Right brained as he was at that moment, Ralph needed calm in the eye of his mental storm. Because I was able to take myself to a calm place inside of me, he was able to see me as a safe port and I was able to catch him before he aggravated this mysterious injury that has kept him stall bound for the past 6 weeks. Ralph has an appointment for an MRI this week and hopefully his owner will finally discover the cause of his lameness. In the meantime, I’m happy to be able to give him a little break each morning. It’s doing us both a world of good.

Finding The Teachable Moment

2012-09-02T15:20:00.005-04:00

I’m the only Parelli student at my barn and from the beginning my behavior was considered somewhat eccentric. Nevertheless everyone was friendly and no one seemed to criticize my odd ways so I felt accepted into the barn fellowship quickly after arriving with Sonny two summers ago. Despite feeling strongly that natural horsemanship was the best way to develop both a rider and a horse, I was careful in the beginning not to offer suggestions or proselytize to other boarders. I was hoping that eventually the progress I made with Sonny would elicit enough interest that at least a few of my fellow boarders would begin to ask questions, giving me the opportunity to explain how a more natural approach can build a stronger horse/rider partnership. I try always to stay alert to that “teachable moment” when someone stops asking the ‘what’ question and moves on to the ‘why’. I have one specific behavior in working with Sonny that has generated a lot of ‘what’ questions in the past two years. Sonny is a LBI and he has a lot of opposition reflect that has to be overcome before he is willing to play. As a result, I am very sensitive to making sure that he chooses to come to me when we first start out a session. It doesn’t matter if he is in his stall or out in the field, I never just walk up to him and throw a halter on him. When he is in his stall, I open the door and wait at the doorway for him to come over to me. Sometimes he comes right away, sometimes it takes a few moments and sometimes he’ll stand ignoring me for several minutes until he is ready to amble over in the hopes of scoring a cookie. If he is out in the pasture and doesn’t start toward the gate when I open it, I will often mosey about halfway to where he is grazing and then sit down along the fence and wait for him to come over. This has created so funny moments at the farm when more than one of the other girls has spotted something odd in the field and come running, only to figure out it is just me sitting by the fence waiting for Sonny to come over and greet me. It was this behavior that led to a recent ‘teachable moment’. I was planning a liberty session with Sonny but when I turned him loose in the round pen, he immediately turned his back on me and walked to the opposite side of the pen to graze. Since that was a pretty clear signal that he wasn’t ready to play, I left him there for a few minutes while I went and did some barn chores. When I returned 10 minutes later, he was still grazing and he didn’t even lift his head as I opened the gate. It was not an encouraging sign. So I went inside, shut the gate. Like most of the country, we’ve had a miserably hot summer, and being that I live in Delaware, it has also been incredibly humid. It was late morning and the temperature was already above 90 degrees. The humidity was so high that I had started sweating the minute I stepped from the car. Our round pen is in full sun and about the last thing I wanted to be doing at that moment was sitting there. But six years of experience with Sonny had taught me that neither of us was going to have much fun if I started this liberty session before he was ready so I planted my back against the pen and slid to the ground to wait. The blacksmith was at the barn that morning and one of the boarders was grazing her horse outside the barn waiting her turn with him. After a few minutes, I sensed that I had become an object of curiosity. I sat quietly, occasionally wiping sweat from my face, ignoring my horse. He was still grazing on the opposite side of the round pen, but his butt was no longer pointing directly at me. He had turned slightly and I knew he was watching me. I continued to ignore him. The girl waiting for the blacksmith dragged her horse closer to the round pen and called out to me. “What are you doing sitting there?” she asked. “I’m just waiting,” I called back. “Why?” she asked. There it was, the ‘why’ question, the ‘teachable moment’ had arrived. By this time, Sonny was facing me and grazing in my direction. I knew that in a moment he would lift up his head and look at me. Then he would let out a big sigh, amble over, put his nose in my lap looking for a cookie, and he would be mine! “Sonny wasn’t ready to play when I brought him into the round pen. He was more interested in grazing than in being with me. I’m waiting for me to tell me when he is ready”, I answered. “How will he do that?” she asked. “Well, he’ll come over here’, I said, “and ask for a cookie.” She looked skeptical but before she had a chance to say anything, Sonny picked up his head and let out a big sigh. “I think he is about ready” I said and as I reached into my pocket for a cookie, Sonny started toward me. “Being prey animals, all horses have a natural opposition reflex. It helps to keep them alive in the wild. But with Sonny, who is naturally more dominant, it is really well developed. Sonny has a ‘what’s in it for me?’ personality. If I were to try and force him into doing what I want him to do, he takes a ‘you and what army are going to make me do this’ stance and we get into a fight. I’ve just learned over the years that, with Sonny, it is better if I wait for him to be ready.” “I don’t think my horse if like that,’ she answered. “He comes right to me most of the time.” “Like people, horses can have different personalities. Some horses, like Sonny, are more dominant. They aren’t looking for leaders. But not all horses are like that. Parelli Natural Horsemanship™ has a concept called “Horsenality™” that is based on observable behavior traits. Different horsenalities benefit from different approaches so your horse might need a different approach than what Sonny needs.” By that point I was on my feet and beginning to play with Sonny at liberty. As I continued to discuss concept of “Horsenality™”, I set up two cones and sent Sonny into the figure 8 pattern. As he trotted a couple of figure 8s, I could see his play drive coming up so I sent him into a canter. When he made the next figure 8, he threw a flying change so I disengaged him and cantered back to me and stopped. “That was pretty cool” she said. “I wish I could get my horse to do something like that.” “I’m sure you could”, I told her. “When I first got Sonny, I couldn’t even get him to back up. It’s just a matter of recognizing your horse’s personality and then leaning some natural techniques. If you are interested, you should look up the Parelli website. “ We continued to talk for a bit and I told her about Parelli Connect. She admitted to me that she thought the way I dealt with Sonny was kind of strange but she really envied my relationship and how connected we seemed to be when I was playing with him. “Maybe there is something to this natural horsemanship” she said as she led her horse into the barn for the blacksmith. By that time, I was completely soaked with sweat but rather than feeling all washed out, I was feeling pretty energized. While sitting and waiting, I had found a teachable moment and perhaps Sonny and I had intrigued one of my barn mates enough about natural horsemanship that she would pursue it more. And wouldn’t that make the world just a little bit better for at least one horse and one human?

A Horse of a Different Color

2012-03-23T23:52:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday I returned from a relaxing vacation in the Florida Keys and was looking forward to getting back to work on my horsemanship. So I hurried out to the barn only to discover that Sonny was limping. The timing could not have been any worse since we are scheduled to attend a clinic with Parelli 6 Star Master Instructor Carol Coppinger during the second week in April and I had been in Florida for the past month. Hoping that the problem was nothing more serious than Sonny having toes that were a little too long (the blacksmith was scheduled for Friday), I called Jane Bartsch, my regular Parelli instructor and asked if I could take my next scheduled lesson on one of her horses.
Switching horses for a lesson might not seem like much of a challenge to most people but for me it is kind of a big deal. I’ve been riding for more than three decades but during that time have not ridden more than a handful of horses. I didn’t start riding until I was almost 30 and have never been a particularly bold rider. When I finally was ready to buy my first horse, I found Max, a 9 year old appaloosa gelding, with smooth gaits and the personality of a puppy. Max lived to be 32 and while he was alive, he was my only mount.
Sonny arrived about a year after Max died. I struggled along for a few years with Sonny before discovering Parelli, but now we have a good partnership and although I still have some confidence issues at the canter, we are making progress toward our level three requirements with the help of weekly lessons with 2 Star Instructor Jane Bartsch.
When I talked to Jane on the phone about the lesson arrangement, she was quick to agree and suggested I ride her levels horse, Lynn, an appaloosa mare. She asked if I wanted to bring my own saddle since I ride in an English saddle but I had wanted to try Jane’s western Parelli saddle and I thought Lynn would be more comfortable with her own saddle. So Thursday morning I arrived at Jane’s farm, riding hat in hand, for my lesson with Lynn.
I was happy that Lynn was an LBI because I thought it would be easier for me to work with a horse that had the same horsenality as Sonny but I’ve never owned a mare and the first thing I noticed about Lynn was that she didn't seem particularly pleased to see me. Jane slipped me a couple of horse cookies and I spent a few minutes trying to establish a relationship with Lynn by finding her special scratchy places and slipping her a couple of treats. Jane is always telling me what a lovely expression Sonny has and after working with Lynn for a few minutes I began to understand how easy he was to please.
After doing some preliminary ground work, where Lynn and I were feeling each other out, I felt confident enough to climb aboard. Lynn is several inches shorter than Sonny so I was able to step up on Jane’s pedestal and swing up in the saddle. Because I have a bad left knee, I mount on the right side and that didn’t seem to bother her at all. I asked Jane to hand me my carrot stick, looped the reins around the saddle horn and asked Lynn to step off at a walk.
I have been putting a lot of effort in during the past year on my carrot stick riding. Like many people who came from the hunt seat school of riding, I had learned to be over dependent on using the reins and wasn’t confident in my seat connection to my horse. As a result, I tended to brace in my stirrups and that would cause Sonny to brace. Because he is such an easy going horse I interpreted his calm manner for relaxation and then complained about his choppy gaits. When I finally figured out that he wasn’t relaxed because I wasn’t relaxed, I made a concerted effort to reduce both my dependence on using the reins and the brace in my riding. Getting on Lynn was going to be a test of my progress.
Things were great at the walk. Jane has really developed Lynn and she is very responsive. When I asked her to yield her hindquarters and then her forehand, she went so briskly it almost felt like a spin. I could stop her just by sitting back and sighing and she would back up with only the slightest movement of my legs. She side passed over a log when I asked and I could get her to change direction by using only my leg and the slightest pressure of my hand on her neck. After 15 or so minutes at the walk, during which I never touched the reins, I was thinking that we really had it going and I was feeling pretty good about the fact that I was on this strange horse, riding in a different saddle and was feeling pretty confident. We were the picture of harmony. Then I asked Lynn to trot.
I guess I had expected her to step off it a little jog trot but as soon as I squeezed with my legs she scooted off in a fast, bouncy trot and after quarter of a lap broke into a canter. Feeling a bit of panic, I grabbed the reins, braced in the stirrups, pulled her to a stop, and then turned in my saddle to apologize to Jane. It was at that point, I realized that Lynn was telling me that perhaps I wasn’t as relaxed I had thought I was.
From that point it became very clear to me that Lynn was telling me a story about bracing. Despite the fact that I was trying very hard not to pressure her with my legs, I clearly was. To make matters worse, Jane’s arena is not completely level so on one long side we were traveling slightly downhill and the other slightly up hill. Every time Lynn started downhill, it felt like she was speeding up and my anxiety increased. Rather than just going along with her pace or sighing and using my body to slow her down, I would snatch up the reins and insist that she stop.
Despite the fact that I was getting a little bit rattled, Jane was maintaining her usual calm and reminding me to breath. In an attempt to manage my anxiety by using approach and retreat, I started playing the corner’s game, walking Lynn halfway down the long side of the arena before asking her to trot to the fence. That yielded a little bit of improvement but I was still bouncing around to Lynn’s choppy trot. Then Jane suggested that I pick a corner of the arena and have Lynn circle at the trot. This allowed both of us to relax a bit more and took some of the speed out of Lynn’s pace.
It was while we were circling the tree in Jane’s arena that it occurred to me while I felt like I was really bouncing along to Lynn’s quick trot, my butt wasn’t actually coming out of the saddle at all and Lynn wasn’t trying to run off with me so I didn’t really need to be snatching her in the mouth. What I needed to be doing at that point was to just go along with her pace. So I eased up on the reins, sat deep in the saddle and tried my best to relax my shoulders, legs and back. Almost immediately Lynn’s trot slowed into a more rhythmic pace. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement.
Lynn and I kept working at improving our harmony at the trot. Each time I glanced at my watch (I was worried about going over my allotted hour) Jane told me not to worry about the time. She understood, perhaps even better than I, how important this was for me. As I recognized and tried to release my brace, I began seeing changes that indicated Lynn was also releasing tension. As I relaxed, she yawned repeatedly, something that Jane told me she seldom did.
I’m not sure how long we worked but eventually, Lynn and I were maintaining a steady, mostly relaxed pace while trotting serpentines in the arena. At that point, rather than move on to the canter, I chose to end the session. I felt pretty good at what I had accomplished. Riding a new horse in a new saddle, I had worked through my anxiety and reached a good stopping point. I was so encouraged with my progress that I asked Jane if I could ride my next lesson on Lynn.
Pat Parelli says that people teach horses and horses teach people. Riding Lynn helped me to recognize that although I have eliminated some of the brace in my riding, I have a long way to go before I am brace free. This fact was really brought home to me this morning when I woke to discover sore muscles in my neck, shoulders and core! In reflecting on my experience riding Lynn, I realized that many of the riding issues which I have attributed to Sonny are actually more issues of my confidence than of his gaits. But I also realized after riding Lynn, how important it is for my development as a horseman to broaden my experience by riding different horses.
So I want to say “Thank you Lynn”. You’ve given me the courage to search out other partners and from now on, I am going to look forward to more opportunities to ride a horse of a different color!

Strength of Bond

2012-02-19T19:17:00.002-05:00

Like many older Parelli students I discovered natural horsemanship after years of more conventional training where horses were often treated as if they had no capacity to think and methods were often based on force or coercion. I was intrigued by the Parelli promise to put the relationship first and attracted by the bond it created between horse and human. Little did I know in the beginning that the simple task of taking off a blanket would someday serve as a test of the strength of the bond I developed with Jody, one of the most skeptical horses at our rescue.
Jody was one of the first horses I noticed when I began volunteering at the rescue because unlike the other retirees, who sought attention and begged for treats, he remained always just out of reach. A bay thoroughbred with an upside down white tear drop shaped spot on his forehead, and a thick black mane and tail that hung in dreadlocks, Jody refused to allow himself to be caught for any reason.
Every day after I fed the horses I took a curry comb and brush and entered the paddock to groom any horse that would stand quietly for me. Jody often would stand on the far side of a horse I was grooming but if I moved toward him he would walk off. After many days of working quietly around the retirees, Jody finally allowed me to touch him on his neck. I never tried to restrain him, allowing him to choose when he wanted to leave, and slowly he began to allow me to spend more time standing next to him, stroking, brushing and sometimes even working my fingers through his dreadlocks to untangle them.
Because I always allowed Jody to make the decision about if he wished to stay with me and for how long, he eventually began to trust me enough to allow himself to be haltered and held for he blacksmith. I worked with him for an entire year before he would look at me directly with both eyes and it was another few months before he actually approached me when I walked out into his pasture. He had learned to trust me enough that I was able to hold him while the vet cleaned out infected lymph nodes under his chin when he came down with the strangles that swept through the rescue herd.
Despite the trust that had developed between us, Jody remained skeptical of other volunteers at the rescue and often would not allow anyone else to handle him so I wasn't surprised when I returned from a vacation in Florida last spring to discover that Jody was the only horse at the rescue still wearing his winter blanket. The Delaware spring weather had become pretty warm and all the other blankets had been removed by no one had been able to catch Jody to remove his so as soon as I stepped out of my car, the rescue's barn manager approached me and asked if I could please catch Jody and take his blanket off.
Jody was off by himself at the far end of the pasture so I picked up a halter and lead line and headed out to get him. On the way, I stopped to greet each retiree, scratching necks and slipping treats out of my pockets for each horse I passed. Jody occasionally interrupted his grazing by lifting up his head to follow my progress and he didn't move off as I got nearer to him so I didn't anticipate any problems haltering and leading him back to the paddock. When I reached him, he gazed at me with his big brown eyes and leaned into me as I scratched his neck. He was already beginning to shed his winter coat and when I slipped my hand under the edge of his heavy blanket I could feel that he was sweating so I was anxious to remove it. But when I tried to slip the halter on, he moved away a few steps and returned to his grazing. I waited a few moments and approached him. Again he stood quietly with me until I tried to halter him, but as soon as I lifted the halter up he stepped away.
I had never forced Jody to do anything he didn't want to do and I wasn't about to ruin his trust by starting now so I put the halter and lead line on the ground and gave his neck another good scratch. I knew I needed to get the heavy blanket off of him and I didn't seem to have a good option other than to try and remove it out in the field where he stood. I wouldn't worry at all about removing a blanked from my own horse Sonny if he were loose in a field but I was a very worried about trying this with Jody. I was worried because he really didn't like people working around his hind end and I was afraid that if he spooked when I was back there and ran off while the blanket was only partially unhooked, he could get him self tangled up in it, fall and hurt himself. But he seemed relaxed enough with me being out there with him even if he didn't want to be haltered so I thought I would give it a try.
Normally when I remove a blanket, I unhook the leg straps first, then the belly straps and finally the chest buckles, but I was standing at Jody's head and he had always been most comfortable with me in zone one so I decided to start there. His blanket had buckles instead of snaps at it chest closure so while he continued to graze, I slowly worked the buckles until they were undone. Then I spoke softly to him as I ran my hand along his neck and down his back, moving down his side to unhook the belly straps and unhook the leg strap on that side. Jody lifted his head to watch me as I worked at his side, but made no attempt to move off. So far, I thought to myself, so good.
Jody has always been uncomfortable when anyone is standing in zone four or five so rather than go around behind him, I walked back to his head and slipped a treat out of my pocket for him. Then running my hand along the other his body, I stepped around and reached for the other leg strap. That was when I realized that rather than being hooked normally to the rings on his blanket, the leg strap on this side seemed to be tangled with the other leg strap. I bent lower to get a good look at the problem and discovered to my horror that one of the legs straps had broken and someone had tried to fix the problem by knotting them together. There was no way to get the straps untangled from Jody's legs other than untying the knots, but the knots were crusted with manure dried mud and didn't want to budge. To make matters even worse, the tangle of knots keeping the two straps tied to each other was fairly tight against his belly and close to his sheath, requiring me to work in a sensitive area and at a spot where I knew he did not like to have anyone stay very long.
By this time Jody had stopped grazing and had craned his neck around to see what I was doing back there in zone 4. I had dropped to one knee to give myself some stability while I was desperately trying to work the stiffened knots loose and was praying that he wouldn't panic and take off. I don't know how long I knelt there working on that knot but it seemed like an eternity and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I knew that if Jody startled and chose to leave suddenly, I was in a vulnerable position and the blanket could easily be jerked off and become tangled around his back legs. He continued to stand with neck bent around watching while slowly the stiff material began to loosen and finally the knots were undone freeing Jody's legs.
Breathing an enormous sigh of relief, I lurched up to my feet and slid the blanket across Jody's back. When it was off, Jody blew and shook himself like a dog before dropping his head to the new green grass at his feet. For a few minutes I stood at his side, using my fingers as a curry comb and groomed great tufts of hair from his withers and back while he grazed. Then he reached around with his head and touched my hand with his nose before walking purposefully away, letting me know that this session, at least from his perspective, was finished.
Put the relationship first - it is such a simple idea but with our direct line, predator thinking, it is not always easy to do. And yet, it is often the little things, the quiet things, that we do every day when we are with our horses that builds the bonds of trust that allow us to become partners. I will never ride Jody and never play the seven games with him. He has earned his retirement. But by putting our relationship first, by allowing Jody the freedom to choose whether or not he wanted to stay with me every time I went out in his paddock or field with him, we developed a strength of bond that has allowed us each to be vulnerable in the presence of the other. And that, I think, is the mark of a true partnership.

The Potential In Feeling Pleased

2012-02-17T00:15:00.002-05:00

While I have been on my Parelli journey, I have been constantly amazed at how often a lesson I first learn while working with my horse turns into a life lesson that I can use with my family and friends. Most recently this happened with something I learned in one of my first clinics with Carol Coppinger about the potential that comes from feeling pleased.
We had been playing in the clinic with the circle game and trying to improve the elements, particularly the send and allow. Like many of the other participants, I was feeling the "clinic effect" of not being able to get my horse to do the things there that seemed to be easy when we were playing at home. I was getting a reasonably good send but no matter what I did, I couldn't get Sonny to maintain gait. He would wander around me at a walk but if I asked him to trot, he either broke gait back to the walk or he stopped altogether when he was behind me.
My horse Sonny and I are both LBIs which makes for some interesting sessions. I can get pretty focused and when I do, his opposition reflex springs into action so I try to maintain my sense of humor when playing with him. I was acutely aware of both Carol and Jane Bartsch, my local Parelli instructor, watching us and I really wanted to show them how much progress Sonny and I had made since the last clinic, but the harder I tried to get him to maintain gait, the worse things got. I was beginning to feel embarrassed by how bad we looked and them more frustrated I felt, the less cooperative Sonny became. Looking around me, I could see that many of the other clinic participants weren't having any better luck than I was and I could sense the frustration level rising.
Finally Carol told us to circle up around her and asked one of the other clinic participants who had been having trouble if she would be willing to volunteer for a demonstration. As the rest of us watched, the woman backed her horse away and tried to send it off on a circle. The horse's response was lackluster at best. It circled half a lap and stopped. The woman tried to resend the horse but he just stood there looking disinterested. Carol suggested she bring the horse back to her and start over which she did but without much improvement in response from her horse. As the woman struggled on, we could all see that her frustration growing and her horse's response becoming duller and less motivated. Standing in the circle watching, I could understand the pressure she must be feeling and could identify with her frustration. I was thinking of the hundreds of time during my journey with Sonny when I had been faced with a similar situation and how hard it was in those moments to maintain a positive outlook when my horse either didn't understand or didn't want to do what I was asking.
Finally Carol had her stop what she was doing and asked her what she was feeling. When the woman replied that she was really frustrated, Carol asked her how she thought that affected the horse. The woman turned and looked at her horse and the horse immediately looked away. It was apparent to all of us that there wasn't much of a connection between them at that moment.
That was when Carol told us that she wanted each of us to stand in front of our horses and to look directly at them and feel unhappy with them. I turned to face Sonny, and thinking about how our session had been going, didn't have to stretch far to feel unhappy. Almost instantly Sonny turned his head away from me and when I continued to focus my unhappy thoughts on him, actually stepped away from me.
"Now," Carol said, "I want you to feel pleased with your horse."
I thought about what a neat horse Sonny is an how much I enjoyed being with him. I couldn't help but smile and almost as soon as I did, Sonny turned his head and looked at me. I thought about much I loved going to Carol's clinics and started to grin. Sonny stepped toward me and started to push at my pocket for a carrot. For the rest of the clinic, whenever I felt myself becoming frustrated or a little too intense I practiced feeling pleased with Sonny. Whenever I felt pleased, Sonny became a little more focused on me and a little more responsive. I noticed that when I was feeling pleased, it was almost impossible for me to become worried about how I was doing or to feel embarrassed by my perceived lack of progress. When I was feeling pleased with Sonny I was happier and more positive and more relaxed.
While Carol's message about feeling pleased was a powerful lesson in the potential for positive thinking to improve my relationship with my horse, I recently used it to help my mother. My mother is almost 89 years old and suffers from some serious back problems. For the past five winters, I have taken her to the Florida Keys for a month so she can enjoy a break from the Delaware winters, which can be pretty miserable for someone who suffers from arthritis. She has always looked forward to these trips but this year I noticed that she was having some real anxiety about our upcoming travel.
My mother is a worrier and worries about things over which she has no control. As Mom has gotten older, it has become more uncomfortable for her to travel long distances in the car and she was so worried that she wouldn't be able to make the 7 hour drive from Orlando to the Keys that she actually considered not going to Florida at all this year. I planned our trip so it would involve only 2 hour segments in the car but by the time we left she had gotten herself pretty worked up and the strain was really visible in her face.
The first day involved a drive from our house to Amtrak's Auto train. She made the drive without any significant back pain and when we got settled on the train and I asked her how she was, she told me that she was surprised she had done so well but she was worried about the next days drive. I told her that instead of worrying about the next segment, I wanted her to feel pleased about how well she had done on the first leg. With some encouragement, I had her smiling and laughing about how good she felt. I could almost see the tension draining out of her.
For the next few days, any time she started to express a worry about something I would suggest that she "feel pleased" about something else. Pretty soon all I had to do to get her to smile was to ask her if she felt pleased. I am happy to say we are almost to the Keys and my mother is relaxed and enjoying herself. For a woman who has spent her life worrying about almost everything, and who has had to live with almost constant pain for the past few years, this has been a pretty remarkable transformation.
It is just one more reason why I love Parelli Natural Horsemanship. It really is a way to make the world a better place for both horses and humans!

Crossing Thresholds

2012-01-24T11:37:00.002-05:00

Recently I’ve been thinking about thresholds and reflecting on how my ideas about thresholds have changed since I began studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship four years ago. When I was younger, I pretty much considered thresholds to be something that brides were carried over on their wedding day. Later, as I pursued my studies in chemistry, I expanded my thinking about thresholds to include the limit below which a chemical substance could not be detected. I never considered a threshold as something that had a psychological meaning and when I first heard Linda Parelli talking about not pushing your horse past thresholds, I was still thinking about them in more physical terms. It wasn’t until I met a young quarter horse by the name of Hershey’s American Hero that the light bulb finally turned on in my mind.
Hero was a four month old cremello colt that had been rescued from the Camelot kill pens in New Jersey. He arrived at the rescue, thin, sickly and shy and had to be doctored back to health by a combination of good food, good care from our veterinarian and lots of love from the volunteers. Assisting in Hero’s rehabilitation was our director’s mare, Bugsy. Bugsy is an aged quarter horse with a strong mothering instinct and she has fostered every foal brought to the rescue. She immediately became Hero’s protector and he followed her around as if she was his own mother. She stayed by his side as he fought his way through a nasty respiratory infection even sharing his runny nose for some time.
Because Hero was so cute, he received lots of attention from the volunteer staff and after a few months at the rescue he was well on his way to being tamed. He would allow himself to be haltered and groomed and his ground manners were admirable considering how much he was fussed over on a daily basis but he would not allow himself to be led. This hadn’t really posed a problem for the volunteers so far because if anyone wanted to move Hero from place to place, all they had to do was to lead Bugsy and he would follow along. But Hero was growing quickly and the rescue’s director knew that so we would need to be able to lead him independently of his foster mother.
Teaching Hero to lead became my summer project. Because he was so tame, catching him was not an issue and he would allow me to slip the halter on his head, even turning his nose in my direction as I positioned it and tied the knot. I started by making sure my friendly game was solid and then would ask him to take just a step or two away from Bugsy. He quickly learned what the pressure from the halter meant and soon I was able to lead him in circle around Bugsy. I kept our sessions short, gradually increasing the distance I asked him to walk and although I hadn’t tried to lead him completely away from the herd, I felt I was making good progress.
One afternoon, as I was headed out to the field for another session with Hero, our barn manager Meredith called to me. “If you’re going to get Hero,” she said, “Could you bring him back to the barn? The vet is coming to see him.”
Hero and Bugsy were in the front field. It was separated from the field around the barn by a double fence. In the daytime, we opened both gates between the two fields, forming a chute the horses passed through on their way out. Because the horses preferred the grass in the front pasture, they were always in that field whenever the gates were opened. While it was only perhaps a couple of hundred yards from the front pasture to the barn, I would have to lead Hero away from Bugsy and the herd, through the chute and then through another gate and I knew that might be a challenge for the little fellow.
I slipped Hero a treat as I put the halter on and then gave him a good scratch before starting away from Bugsy. Standing at his side, I asked him to go forward with a slight pressure on the halter and a kiss. Hero took a few steps and then stopped, looking around for Bugsy. I scratched his neck, waited for him to look back at me and then asked him to more forward again. He took a few more steps and stopped so I repeated the wait and the scratch and in this way we walked out of the front field and through the chute into the barn field. It was slow going and although I could see that Hero was a bit concerned about being asked to move so far away from his herd, he wasn’t really agitated. When he would stop, I would stop and I waited to make sure he was with me before I asked him to move forward again. I was trying to be really careful about not forcing him forward but I wasn’t really thinking in terms of thresholds.
We made it all the way to the next gate before we hit the wall. Hero walked through gates all the time at the rescue and although I knew gates presented a squeeze, I wasn’t all that concerned. When I opened the gate and asked Hero to move forward, he actually planted his feet and pulled back against the halter. “This is different,” I thought to myself and I quickly let up on the pressure and studied the situation. That was when I recognized the first threshold, a physical one.
Some of our horses are fed at buckets that hang on the fence adjoining this gate, so the ground is pretty bare in that spot and is the rich red color of the dominant clay in the soil. On the other side of the gate in that spot, there is a thick, green carpet of grass and right at the gate, there is a small, 2 to 3 inch difference in the ground so that a horse has to step up slightly when going from field to grass. Because horses notice changes, I could see how this could present a problem to Hero. While he walked through gates all the time, he seldom faced this particular situation. I was asking him to “squeeze” through this gate and go across this physical threshold all at once.
Figuring that approach and retreat would probably be appropriate in this situation, I led Hero away and waited for him to relax. When he finally dropped his head, I turned him around and approached the gate again. This time he came a little closer. We repeated this a few times but when I finally tried to encourage him with a slight increase in pressure on the lead line, instead of moving forward he reared straight up. He was well and truly stuck and I was beginning to think there was more to this threshold then just the physical line in the clay that the color change presented.
I was standing at the gate scratching Hero’s neck and trying to figure out what to do next when Hannah, one of our younger volunteers, walked up. Wondering if a little pressure from behind might encourage Hero forward, I asked Hannah to take a spare lead line, go behind Hero and twirl it. Because I didn’t want Hero to feel too much pressure, I told Hannah to stand well away from Hero and I also asked her not to face him. She started twirling the line and Hero craned his neck around to see what was going on behind him. Then I asked Hero to step forward. He hesitated but he didn’t rear up. That was a good sign. He swiveled his head around again to look at Hannah. The next time I asked him to step forward he popped through gate with a small jump and came to rest at the other side, first looking back at where he had just come from and then looking directly at me. He gave himself a shake and began licking and chewing, nodding his head up and down a couple of times while he did.
I stood next to Hero, scratching his neck and giving him all the time he needed to process what had just happened. Finally his breathing became regular and he dropped his head for a bite of grass. When I finally asked Hero to walk forward with me he stepped off immediately and he walked quietly at my shoulder the rest of the way back to the barn. He led beautifully, making no attempt to stop again for the remainder of our journey and walking through the next gate without any hesitation. I handed him over to Meredith and as I watched her lead him away toward a stall, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just a physical threshold that Hero had encountered at that other gate, it was a psychological threshold as well.
For the entire walk in from the front pasture, I think Hero had been experiencing a series of psychological thresholds that had to do with leaving his herd. Each time he stopped, he had reached a threshold and each time I asked him to go forward, I was causing him to cross the threshold. I think the pressure was building up for him until we finally reached the gate. At that point, the combination of the squeeze at the gate, the physical threshold between the clay and the grass and the psychological threshold of leaving the herd built up to the point that Hero became stuck. When he finally crossed through the gate without anything bad happening, it was a significant moment to him. I think at that point, he truly accepted me as a leader and therefore it became OK to move away from the horse herd because he finally understood that we were a herd of two and that I wasn’t going to let anything bad happened to him. That was the moment when Hero really learned how to be led and I learned that psychological thresholds can be every bit as real as physical ones.
Since that time, I have become a lot more sensitive to the idea of psychological thresholds for my own horse Sonny. Because he is a calm and relatively brave LBI, his reactions are a lot more subtle than Hero’s were so it has not always been easy to recognize when he has reached a threshold but I have been working hard to understand them and that has helped continue to strengthen our bond. I have also experienced my own psychological thresholds as I’ve begun to ride my horse Sonny bareback and because I can recognize them for what they are, I am able to use approach and retreat as a way to help myself across.

The Pygmalion Effect

2011-11-19T10:44:00.002-05:00

Faith is a powerful thing. What we believe we can do or not do, and what is believed by those around us can greatly impact what we will ultimately accomplish in our lives. I know this is true for me and since studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship, I have learned it is also true for my horse Sonny. But recently I learned just how powerful it can be when my faith in someone else was combined with my faith in the principles taught by Parelli.
My belief in the power of faith began with a lesson from my parents. Even though I was a girl, growing up at a time when opportunities for girls were limited, my parents raised me to believe that I could do anything I wanted to do. They believed in me and expected that I would be successful. No matter what I told them I wanted to be; a veterinarian, a dolphin biologist, an Olympic swim coach, a geochemist, they told me I would be great at it.
The lesson was reinforced many times during my careers, first as a swim coach and science teacher and then as a manager for the DuPont Company. I never forgot the time a supervisor asked me with all sincerity one morning, “Well, what miracles are you going to perform today?” I would have moved mountains for that man and when I became a manager, I tried to believe in the people who worked for me as much as that man had believed in me. Because I held high expectations of my swimmers, my students and my employees at DuPont, they often performed better for me than they did for other people. I treated them as if they were capable of great things and because of that, often they were.
While I held high expectations for the people in my sphere of influence, before I began to study Parelli Natural Horsemanship, chauvinism keep me from according my horses the same respect. I loved my first horse, Max, but I didn’t think he was very smart. Fortunately for both of us he was very well trained and very athletic. Riding him was like driving a high performance sports car. Sonny came along 23 years later. He was bigger, more stubborn and, I thought at the time, kind of clumsy. If I didn’t walk him straight out of his stall, he would bump into the wall. He wasn’t particularly careful with his feet, stepping on me more times in the first month that I had him than Max did in the previous 23 years. Sonny was rock solid on the trails but riding him was like trying to muscle around a RV. I didn’t know anything about horsenality and didn’t understand his left brain introvert nature so I quickly came to the conclusion he was a nice horse but he wasn’t particularly athletic.
I would like to say that my expectations began to change as soon as I discovered Parelli but it would be almost 2 years I before I realized how much my lack of faith in Sonny was affecting our progress. I was in my first clinic with Carol Coppinger and we were playing with the circling game. Sonny was having trouble maintaining gait through the change of direction and Carol had come over to help us. I was fumbling my way through the exercise and making my usual excuses for Sonny. It was bad on so many levels.
“He has trouble with circles all the time,” I told Carol. “He’s so big and he just isn’t very athletic.”
“Can I try?” she asked, reaching for the lead line.
I handed her the line and retreated to the edge of the arena. Carol walked up to Sonny and stroked his neck. “You are a big fellow,” she said to him. Then she looked over at me. “I bet he’s way more athletic than you are giving him credit for.” With that, she backed him away from her and sent him off in a circle. Before long she had him changing direction at a trot without breaking gait. When she asked him to change at the canter he pivoted alertly and threw in a flying change. Clearly I had been underestimating his potential!
That clinic was a turning point in my relationship with Sonny and it also had impact on the way I approached The SummerWinds Stable horse rescue, where I worked with rescued horses. Where others saw problems, I saw potential. I expected the horses to respond positively to the Parelli method and they did. Working mostly on the ground with new horses coming into the sanctuary, I improved ground manners, solved catching problems and eased horses into a new way to relate to the humans in their lives.
It was an experience with a young girl at the rescue that helped me see the power of combining positive expectations with the Parelli principles. Besides rescuing horses, The SummerWinds runs programs for children and this spring was hosting a home school group for a series of beginner riding lessons. Being the horse specialist at the rescue, I seldom became involved with the children’s programs but that morning I was sitting in the barn while the instructors were having their meeting before the sixth and final week of the program. I overheard them discussing the difficultly they were having with one little girl who was very fearful. It sounded to me like they didn’t think she was capable of overcoming her fear and they didn’t know what else to try with her.
Without thinking, I spoke up. “Do you want me to give it a try?” I asked.
Everyone turned in my direction and I could read the skepticism on their faces. “Sure, if you want to” the head instructor replied. “Have at it.”
There were six little girls in the lesson and each one had her own instructor. My little girl was about 8 years old and I could see right away that she was nervous. Although she was big for her age, she was assigned to ride Holliday, a large red and white paint whose size must have been intimidating for her.
Holliday originally had been purchased by the rescue’s director as a Christmas present for her daughter. When Holliday arrived at the rescue, he didn’t pass his vet check because of a problem with his eyes. Rather than sending him back to his former owner, who hadn’t even recognized the problem with his eyes, the rescue shipped him up to the New Bolton Center for surgery to correct the eye problem. Although the director felt he wasn’t suitable for her daughter to show, she felt he was a nice horse so the rescue kept him as a lesson horse. He was a big boy with a quiet disposition, ideal for someone with confidence problems.
After the horses had been tacked up, I introduced myself to my student for the day, helped her onto Holliday’s back and started to lead her around the arena. Walking beside her, holding Holliday’s lead line, I could see that despite her apprehension, she was embarrassed to be the only student who was not riding independently. My years of experience coaching swimming and teaching told me that this was a child who really needed someone to believe in her.
I led Holliday back to the center of the arena, asked him to stop and then stepping back to his side looked up at the child on his back. “Did you know that there are only four things you need to be able to do to ride a horse by yourself” I asked her.
She looked down at me, eyes wide, face solemn, and shook her head.
“Yep” I said. “All you need to be able to do is to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?”
Again she shook her head and then added in an anxious voice. “You won’t let go of him, will you?”
“Nope, I got him” I said. “Now, let’s work on getting Holliday to go forward. Here’s what I want you to do. First I want you to squeeze him with your legs. Don’t kick him, just squeeze. If he doesn’t move then I want you to cluck to him like a chicken.” When I put my tongue against the top of my mouth and made the clucking sound she gave me a tiny smile. “Can you do that?” I asked.
“I don’t think so” she said.
“How about making a kissing sound?” I asked. “Like this.” When I puckered up my lips in an exaggerated kiss she laughed.
“Like this?” she asked and then she smooched.
“Yep, just like that and if he doesn’t move then, I want you to take the reins and just swing them back and forth on his shoulders until he moves.” I demonstrated with the reins and then let her try it. After a few swings she seemed to have the hang of it. “OK, here we go.”
Holding on to the very end of the lead line, I waited for her to begin. I had never done this with Holliday before but I had confidence it would work and I needed it to work for the sake of this little girl. She sat up straight and pushed her legs into Holliday’s sides, then she smooched to him loudly. Holliday stepped forward. I was careful not to move until Holliday took a step, then I walked along side for a few steps. I looked up at the little girl on his back. There was just the slightest smile on her face. I stopped Holliday and let her try asking him to go several times. Each time Holliday moved forward on her smooch.
“OK” I said to her as we walked along the rail, “now you have to learn how to stop him.” I looked right at her and asked, “Who do you think is stronger, you or Holliday?”
“Holliday is stronger” she answered.
“So, can you stop him by pulling back on both reins if he doesn’t want to stop?” I asked. When she shook her head I said. “So here is what you do when you want him to stop. You just lift up one rein and hold it until he stops.”
“Like this?” she asked, lifting her right hand up and pulling the rein to her chest.
“Keep your arm straight,” I said. Just lift it straight up like this. With that, I used my hand to straighten her elbow and lift her arm straight up in the air. Holliday took two steps and stopped. Silently I thanked this quiet horse for being such a quick study.
We tried starting and stopping until she seemed to have the hang of it and then I taught her to turn by holding her arm straight out to the side using a direct rein. She turned Holliday left and right. Finally I showed her how to back him up. We were 30 minutes into a one hour lesson and she had the basics.
“OK,” I said, “now I am going to unhook the lead line so you can do this by yourself.” A look of panic began to creep into her eyes. Before she could protest, I said. “I’m going to walk here right next to you, just like I was when I was leading. I know you can do this by yourself but I’ll stay right here just in case. So ask Holliday to walk forward.”
I smiled at her and nodded my encouragement. She took a big breath, kissed to him loudly and he stepped forward. I walked right along with her, encouraging all the way. At my direction she had Holliday walk forward, stop and turn. Then she backed him up. I moved a little further away from Holliday’s side and asked her to do it again. Then I asked her to walk Holliday around one of the barrels and over a pole on the ground. Each time she did something new, I moved a little further away from her and the horse. Finally I was standing about 10 feet away.
“Can you take ask Holliday to go down to that barrel,” I said as I pointed at a barrel on the other side of the ring. “Then go around the barrel and bring Holliday back to me?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know,” she answered.
“Well, with as good as you have been doing, I’m sure you can do this” I said. “How about you give it a try?”
“OK,” she said and she smooched to Holliday. He ambled off in the direction of the barrel. When he got there, she pushed him into a big right hand turn with her direct rein and walked him back to me.
“Now can you walk him over there to the fence?” I pointed in the other direction and off she went. By the time we had done this several times, she was clearly riding with more confidence.
“Would you like to try a trot?” I asked.
She looked a little doubtful.
“You’re doing so well, I think you’re ready” I said to her. “You can put one hand down here on the saddle and push. That will help you stay put. I’ll stay right next to you and we will only do a few steps at a time. We’ll count together, one, two, three, four and then stop.”
Planting her hand on the saddle, she nodded her OK. I chirped to Holliday and trotted forward. He jogged next to me and we both counted out loud to four. When Holliday stopped I looked up to see how she was doing. She was smiling.
“How about six steps this time?” I asked. She nodded again. We jogged off a second time and when we stopped she was giggling.
When I glanced at my watch I realized that the hour was up. “So,” I asked, “how was your lesson today?” But I didn’t really need an answer because her smile told me everything I needed to know. As we left the ring, we walked Holliday past the picnic table where the mothers had been sitting to watch the riding lesson. One mother turned to me and silently mouthed ‘thank you’. There were tears in her eyes.
The hour I spent with this young girl was a demonstration both of the power of positive expectations and the power of Parelli. Years of coaching and teaching children had given me the confidence to work positively with this child I had just met, while years of studying Parelli gave me the confident that Holliday would respond positively and without fear to the signals he was being given.
Despite her lack of success in previous lessons, I was able to go into this lesson with the expectation that on this day, with this horse, this child could learn the four simple things she needed to do to independently ride a horse at a walk. My belief in her gave her the confidence she needed to learn how to go forward, to stop, to back up and to turn. Her success at doing this while I was walking beside her gave her the confidence to try it alone. Her confidence grew every time Holliday responded correctly to her signals.
There is nothing more powerful than belief. Pat Parelli tells us to ‘expect a lot, accept a little, and reward often’. Each time we do this with ourselves and our horses, we build a stronger relationship and further our journey toward becoming a true horseman. When we do this with the people around us, we give them the gift of recognizing and realizing their true potential.

What I Learned at Fast Track

2011-11-15T17:15:00.002-05:00

It’s been almost a year since I returned from the Fast Track program at Parelli’s Florida Campus last November and I have been thinking this week about something head instructor John Barr told the class on our first day. He said that we would learn a lot during our four weeks at the program but we might not realize all of what we had learned until well after we returned home. So after reflecting this week on my experiences both in Florida and here in Delaware since I returned home, I’m going to try and summarize what I learned at Fast Track.
Probably the most important lesson I learned while in Florida was that I had been confusing ‘calm’ with ‘relaxed’. My horse Sonny is an easy going guy and there isn’t much that gets him excited, so I thought that most of the time, he was pretty relaxed. When I got to Florida and watched all of the instructors and many of the other students work with their horses, I began to notice how often the horse would blow and how infrequently Sonny blew, especially when I was riding. I began to ask questions about the signs of relaxation in introverted horses and to watch Sonny really closely when I was working with him. It was then that I began to realize how very subtle the signs were that could tell me the difference between Sonny just being calm and being truly relaxed. His head might be an inch or two lower in carriage, his breathing might slow ever so slightly, his lick and chew would become a little less secretive, his mouth might relax slightly, his gait might become slightly more rhythmic. The signs were very subtle and only if I was paying close attention could I see the signs for what they were. Once began paying close attention, I discovered that often I wasn’t giving him enough time with a particular exercise to become truly relaxed.
When I returned from Florida, I gave Sonny a week off and then I did an experiment aimed at getting true relaxation. I decided I was going to go into the arena, and using the pattern of ‘follow the rail’, see just how low I would have to stay on that pattern to get Sonny to relax enough to blow. I put Sonny on the rail and began to walk. We walked for 30 minutes before he blew. During that entire time, he walked calmly around the arena. He wasn’t upset but it took him a very long time to give that sign of relaxation. Clearly there was something going on here and that brings me to the second lesson I learned at Fast Track.
My second important insight from Fast Track was that there was a lot of brace going on when I was riding Sonny. Clearly some of the brace was Sonny but I started to recognize in Florida just how much brace I had in my riding. Often this came when I wasn’t feeling particularly confident. I would brace in the stirrups and then Sonny would brace in response. Another situation that often caused brace would be when Sonny would have a stiff and bouncy trot. Sonny was capable of a nice jog trot but often, as a result of a lack of rhythm and relaxation, his trot would get very large and hard to ride. That would cause me to brace in my stirrups which in turn caused his trot to stiffen further. It was a vicious circle.
This brings me to my third insight from Florida, that despite my best attempts at shimming, my saddle, a saddle in which I was very comfortable, was causing problems for Sonny. When I got home, I bought a new saddle. The change had an immediate, positive impact on Sonny. The first day I rode in the new saddle, Sonny blew within five minutes of me mounting. The second day he blew in less than two minutes. The third day he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. Sonny’s gaits also changed almost immediately. His head lowered. His stride became long, smoother and at the trot, much easier to ride. Because of the change in his trot, I found I braced much less which also had a positive impact on our fluidity. Of course this change resulted in some other issues but I have worked through most of them. (See the post “Fear of Flying”)
The fourth insight I had at Fast Track, and this one has probably been as important to our progress as the ‘calm vs. relaxed’ realization, is that I developed a whole new understanding of the meaning of ‘neutral’. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the concept of ‘neutral’ when playing the seven games on the ground but I had very little understanding of what ‘neutral’ meant when I was riding. I realized while I was in Florida just how much I was fiddling with the reins when I was riding. My hands were in almost constant motion. They didn’t make big movements. I didn’t jerk on Sonny’s mouth or make exaggerated corrections but I was playing with the reins all of the time when I was riding. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for Sonny. He must have thought I was nagging at him all the time. No wonder he didn’t move as well as I wanted off my leg and seat, he must have been consumed by the micromanaging I was doing with my hands. Poor boy!
When I came home from Fast Track I made a concerted effort to plant my hand on his withers when I was riding and just leave it there until I needed to make an actual correction. By letting Sonny make mistakes rather than prevent him for making them, I took a leap forward in creating a better connection between Sonny and my seat. Who would have known that the finger bones are connected to the seat bones?
Fast Track is a very individual experience. There were 45 students in my Fast Track class and we were all over the board in terms of our skills and our relationship with our horses. I went to Florida worried that I would be the oldest, least experienced, least physical fit and least skilled person there but I learned that I wasn’t; a fact that was a great relief to me. I put a lot of pressure on myself while I was in Florida and to a certain extent, that pressure tested my mental, emotional and physical fitness.
Physically I did better than I expected I would. I have really bad knees. One of my knees has been bone on bone since I was 22 years old (I was 62 when I arrived in Florida). I seldom work more than three or four hours a day with horses. In Florida we were going from 7 AM to 7 PM and often we rode for three or four hours in the afternoon. Sonny’s pen was a long way from anything and I walked more than I have since I was in college. The first week was agony and I hurt all over. I went back to my rented apartment each evening and took enough Advil to stop a truck. I didn’t sleep well and I can’t remember ever being so tired but I soldiered on and by the second week, I felt better. Eventually my knees did get the better of me and I didn’t ride for part of the fourth week but I was thrilled with how well I kept up with the pace.
Emotionally, I didn’t do as well as I had expected. For 28 years I worked for EI duPont de Nemours, a major chemical company. Much of that time I held high pressure management jobs. I figured spending a month with my horse in Florida among supportive, like-minded people would be a snap but it was harder than I imagined. I found that I often felt quite emotional, particularly when being exposed to something new. At least part of the emotion was due to being so tired all the time. I had a good friend who once said that “Fatigue makes cowards of us all,” and certainly the lack of sleep didn’t help. But I also think that I set high standards for myself and trying to live to those personal expectations created a mental and emotional stress that I hadn’t anticipated.
I was helped by something that head instructor John Barr told us. He said that each of us was on his or her own journey and that we each were “exactly where we were supposed to be” on that journey. Accepting that idea helped me deal with the emotional stress and also allowed me to give myself permission to stop riding during the last week when my knees really began to hurt. Without that permission, I might have tried to push through and keep riding, only to find that I had damaged my knees beyond repair.
Spending the month in Florida at the Parelli Center was about the best present I ever gave myself. Sonny and I came home with a better relationship and I came home with a greatly enhanced understanding of the principles and the tools that embody Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I also came home with a better understanding of what I need to do to keep growing as a horseman and the determination to continue on this journey so I can help accomplish the mission of making the world a better place for people and horses.

Fear of Flying

2011-11-12T15:35:00.003-05:00

I’ve spent the last year trying to overcome a fear of flying. I’m not talking about the kind of flying that charges you extra when your luggage weighs too much, although I must admit I don’t find that kind of flying much fun anymore. I’m talking about the kind of flying that finds you galloping through a pasture or up a hill with wind whipping your horse’s mane into your face and every muscle in your body alive with the feel of connection between you and your horse. This is the story of how I developed that fear and how Two Star Parelli Instructor Jane Bartsch is helping me conquer it.
I wasn’t always afraid of flying. There was a time when I liked nothing better than to take my first horse Max for long rides through the 6000 acres of Maryland’s Fair Hill resource area, galloping up every hill I could find, jumping logs along the way. But I learned to ride as an adult and I never really developed the sense of balance that seems to come so naturally to people who learned to ride as children. Besides that, I’m a bit of a buttoned up type of person who has never thrived on that feeling of being right at the edge of control.
After taking riding lessons for about 3 years, I bought my first horse, Max. I was 30 years old and he was almost 10, but he had been professionally trained and was the kind of horse people refer to as a “school master”. Max had wonderful, smooth gaits and if I could even approximate the correct aid, he would do whatever I asked. This gave me great confidence when I was riding and I wasn’t even afraid to hop on him bareback with only a halter and lead line and ride him though a pasture full of horses back to the barn.
Max lived to be almost 33 years old and during that time I seldom rode any other horse. In his last few years, I didn’t ride often and when I did, we mostly took long walks in the fields around the farm. He was bothered by navicular changes as he got older but when I put the saddle on him, he walked away from the barn with his head up and his ears pricked, looking forward to the adventure at hand.
I was devastated when Max died but I wanted to get back into riding so I adopted a 12 year old thoroughbred gelding from a local horse rescue and set about trying to get myself back into shape. It was a bad match from the beginning. The horse was a RBE with some serious post racing mental issues. At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concepts of natural horsemanship and I had no idea how to help him through his issues. After 9 months of frustration I admitted to myself that I was actually afraid of this horse and I donated him back to the rescue before I got hurt. Then I started searching again for my next horse and found Sonny.
Sonny was a 6 year old paint with an easy going disposition. He had been a husband’s horse, used mostly for trail riding and while he was solid as a rock on trails, he could hardly trot in a circle without tripping all over himself. Unlike my original horse, Sonny didn’t have particularly smooth gaits, although he could produce a nice little jog trot when he wanted, so for the first couple years of our partnership, I mostly used him for trail riding and I seldom pushed him into a canter. We might canter up the occasional hill but mostly we walked and trotted and I felt pretty comfortable riding him.
Sonny and I got along pretty well most of the time. He was very easy going, which I liked, but his attitude toward me seemed pretty indifferent. Unlike my first horse Max, he wasn’t crazy about being groomed and while he didn’t seem to mind being ridden, he could be stubborn and argumentative. I’d had Sonny for a couple of years when I began working at a local horse rescue and was introduced to Parelli Natural Horsemanship. I was so intrigued by the concepts that I barrowed a set of the original level one program video tapes and started practicing on Sonny. From the first day the change in Sonny’s attitude and behavior was remarkable. It was as if he had been deaf and suddenly he could hear me, although now I know what really going on was that I had been speaking gibberish for two years and now I was beginning to speak horse.
I was hooked and we progressed quickly on the ground but when I started to ride I ran into problems. I rode English style and only rode on a loose rein at a walk. At a trot or a canter, I had been taught to ride with contact and I found that if I tried to trot Sonny on a loose rein, I felt very uncomfortable. More disconcerting to me was the idea of riding with a hackamore but according to the Parelli method that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at this point. I bought a hackamore to ride in it but whenever Sonny started trotting, I gathered up the reins as if he still had a bit in his mouth and he clearly didn’t like that.
I slowly worked through my anxieties at the trot and after several months was trotting on a loose rein but the canter was another story. It took me a long time to admit it to myself, but even the thought of cantering Sonny made me anxious. He was a big horse with a big stride and he didn’t have a smooth canter departure. Most of the time when I asked him to canter he would just trot bigger and faster until I was bouncing all over the place. By the time he did canter, I had a knot in the pit of my stomach and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
This is where Jane Bartsch enters our story. Fortunately for me, Jane lived close and had recently become a Parelli Instructor. I began taking weekly lessons and Jane helped me refine my balance point riding. She also helped me develop a smoother canter departure from a walk. Finally I gained enough confidence where I could canter Sonny in the arena on a loose rein. I still had some slight anxiety but I thought I had the problem licked. I didn’t realize that things were about to get much worse.
With Jane’s help, I progressed to the point where I was accepted into a three day clinic with Six Star Parelli Master Instructor Carol Coppinger. Sonny and I did so well at the clinic that we passed our level 2 freestyle test. I was thrilled and thinking that we would soon be riding easily at level 3 but at the end of the clinic, Carol did something in passing that had the unintended consequence of putting my riding into a downward spiral. She came over to Sonny and tried to slip her hand between his saddle and his shoulder.
“I think this saddle is pinching your horse,” she said. “See how I can’t get my hand in here. There isn’t any clearance. Have you thought about getting a Theraflex® saddle pad for him?”
Since I began studying Parelli, I had been slowly changing out Sonny’s equipment. I had changed the bit I was using, added a chin strap and had taken off his breast plate. None of these changes had resulted in anything dramatic so it didn’t occur to me that changing the saddle pad would so I purchased a new Therafex® pad. Clearly the saddle had been pinching his shoulders because the first time I put the new pad on, his stride was noticeably freer.
While Sonny liked the new pad, I was struggling with it. At first I felt like I was tipping forward in the saddle. Jane helped me shim it properly but I had trouble placing the pad consistently in the same position under the saddle. Each time I mounted, I felt like I was sitting a little differently and this created some anxiety. Sonny’s longer stride was also making me nervous but I was trying to push through my nerves at each lesson so I could continue to make progress.
I had been riding with the Theraflex® pad for a couple of months when I took Sonny down to the Parelli Florida campus to attend the Fast Track course. I must admit that I was nervous about being at Fast Track and nervous about riding Sonny in such an unfamiliar environment. Early on, one of the instructors came up to me, stuck his hand under the edge of Sonny’s saddle pad and told me that he thought the saddle was still pinching his shoulders. Over the month that I was there, I realized that when I was riding Sonny, he seldom relaxed enough to blow. While some of that was probably a reflection of my lack of relaxation, I came to the conclusion that Sonny needed a different saddle.
While I would like to have ordered a Parelli saddle for Sonny, my budget wouldn’t accommodate that large of a purchase so after trying several saddles, I settled for a new Wintec wide. The effect of the new saddle on Sonny was immediate and intense. Freed of the restriction on his shoulders, his stride was huge. I could feel it in the walk and trot but in the canter it was dramatic. It felt to me like he was leaping into the canter and the thrust pushed me forward in the saddle, throwing me off balance. To make matters worse, I couldn’t seem to get the shimming correct. Pretty soon I had 4 shims in the Theraflex® pad.
Sonny seemed to love the new saddle. The first time I rode him in it he blew inside of five minutes. The second time it took only two minutes. The third time he blew almost as soon as my butt hit the saddle. His stride was free. He relaxed more quickly. His trot became smoother and less bumpy to ride. There were all good things and I should have been pleased but I hated the new saddle. I didn’t feel comfortable in it. The saddle was deeper than my old one and I felt like I was sitting too far forward in it. With all the shims, the saddle was perched on the Therafelx® pad like a turtle on a mossy log, slipping this way and that depending on where I put my weight and I didn’t feel stable. I was relatively OK at the walk and the trot but even the thought of cantering put me in a panic. Sonny would leap into a canter and I would grab the reins as if they were my only lifeline.
Jane did her best to help me work though my discomfort. She was patient with me in lessons and we practiced a lot of approach and retreat, cantering only a few strides and then stopping. She respected my thresholds and when I said that was enough in any lesson she let me stop. But as the winter progressed, things got worse for me. Whenever Sonny cantered, I felt completely out of control. I knew my emotional fitness was going to hell in a hand basket because I had gotten to the point where I was so worried about cantering that I didn’t even want to go out to the barn anymore. I would bargain with myself by telling myself that I didn’t have to ride or if I did ride, I didn’t have to canter. It finally got so bad that even if I was only thinking about going to the barn, I could feel a knot growing in my stomach and I was worried that if I didn’t do something to reverse this trend soon, I would stop riding altogether.
One night I was lying in bed thinking about my first horse, Max and I remembered the first time I had taken a lesson on Max. The instructor had wanted me to ride without stirrups. When I told her that I hadn’t ever done that before and I was a little worried about riding without stirrups, she put Max on a lunge line and had me ride him while he moved around her in a circle. She told me I could hold onto the saddle if I felt like I needed that for balance. Pretty soon she had him cantering. Pushing on the saddle, I had gripped him with my legs and ridden his rocking chair canter around and around. I remembered how it felt like I was flying but connected to the instructor by the lunge line, I didn’t feel out of control. I felt safe.
“That’s it!” I thought to myself. “I need to get the feel again of flying without feeling like I have lost all control.”
I was excited at my next lesson and I told Jane that I wanted her to put Sonny on a 45 foot line so when we cantered I wouldn’t have to worry about anything except getting comfortable with the feel of the canter. She agreed that would be a good idea and after we’d had a good warm up, she clipped the 45’ to the halter I had left on under his bridle.
“OK.” Jane said as she played out the 45’. “Ask him up into the canter with your body. Try not to hit him with your heels”
I brought the energy up in my body and Sonny leaped into his canter. Reflexively I planted on hand on the front of the saddle and pressed myself onto my balance point. He cantered a lap and a half around Jane before dropping into a trot.
“You need to breath” she told me.
I smiled weakly in her direction and walked for a couple of laps until I felt a little calmer. Then I brought my energy up again and asked Sonny to canter. This time the departure was a little softer. I still had my hand on my saddle but I felt a little more relaxed. We repeated this pattern for about 20 minutes, alternating walking with one or two laps of canter; until I had done all that I felt I could do for the day. I was pleased with the result and even though I was still nervous about cantering, with Jane holding onto Sonny, I no longer felt completely out of control.
Jane and I repeated this on line lesson for several weeks. I could feel myself slowly becoming more confident with
Sonny’s canter and also more comfortable in the new Wintec saddle. An added benefit of these lessons was the refinement that it was creating in Sonny’s canter departures. I was learning just how little I had to do with my body to get Sonny to step off into a canter. I no longer felt like he was leaping out from under me.
One day I asked Jane if I could try just cantering around her in a circle, as if she still had the 45’ line in her hand. I walked Sonny around her until I felt we were both calm and relaxed. Then I asked him to canter. He stepped into a nice canter. I put my outside leg on him and took a tiny feel on the inside rein to keep him moving in a circle but I basically had him on a casual rein. His canter felt almost like a lope, slow and balanced and we circled Jane twice before I asked him to stop. I was grinning from ear to ear. The war might not be over but I had just won a major battle.
Jane continued to help me work my way thought my anxieties. After I mastered cantering in a circle, my next big step was to get comfortable when Sonny cantered down the long line of the arena. This was a problem for me because when he came off the corner and began moving down the line, his stride would begin to lengthen and I would begin to panic. My left brain knew he wasn’t running away with me by my right brain would begin screaming loudly and I would tighten up and pull him down into a slower gait.
“The next time he begins to lengthen on you,” Jane told me, “I want you to sit down on him and sigh. He knows what that means and it will slow him down. He might even stop.”
I asked Sonny to canter in a circle and then headed down the long line of the arena. Sonny’s stride began to lengthen. I sat deep in the saddle and sighed. Sonny almost skidded into a trot and I pitched forward laughing.
“See,” said Jane, “He listens to you. He responds to your body. It’s like a cruise control. You can use it to adjust his gait.”
We worked through the spring and the summer, Jane encouraging at each lesson. Gradually I stopped feeling anxious when I thought about going down to the barn. Some days when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t relaxed enough to canter but that no longer stopped me from riding. I began doing more carrot stick riding and for short distances was even able to canter Sonny without holding on to the reins. I felt like I was finally developing some of the mental and emotional fitness I needed to conquer this fear.
My fitness was finally put to the test in September when I attended another three day clinic with Carol Coppinger. I had worked really hard in preparation for the clinic and I knew that I would be reasonably comfortable when we were asked to canter. On the first afternoon of the clinic, Carol had us following the rail in the indoor arena. She had us count off in pairs.
“OK, here’s what we are going to do now,” she announced. “While the group keeps following the rail, one pair at a time is going to come into the center of the arena and using only your carrot sticks, canter your horses in a figure 8.”
My stomach immediately started to tighten into a knot. I had expected to be asked to canter Sonny but not without reins, using only a carrot stick. My right brain began to whisper urgently that I was not ready to do this and I knew that Carol wouldn’t think any less of me if I used my reins. But my left brain said ‘wait a minute’. You have done this before and you can do it now. Just breathe and stay relaxed.
I was in the 3rd pair. While I watched the two pairs before me go with some measure of success, I focused on breathing and staying relaxed and positive. When our turn came, I walked Sonny into the center of the arena, dropped the reins, looked in toward the center of the circle I wanted him to canter and brought the life up in my body. Sonny stepped into a canter and we cantered a circle. When he broke into a trot, I slowed him to a walk and asked again. We didn’t make the figure 8 exactly (Sonny has trouble with his right lead) but I did canter two circles without touching the reins. I glanced over at Jane who was assisting with the clinic. Now we were both smiling ear to ear.
I’d like to say I’ve completely conquered my fear but I know that isn’t true. I still sometimes get nervous before I canter my horse and there are even some days when I know I’m not in the right mental state for trying. But I also know that I am making progress and that someday soon, I’m going to take Sonny back to Fair Hill and have him galloping cross country, with his mane blowing in my face and we are going to be flying.

The Importance of Doing the Unexpected

2011-11-06T16:25:00.000-05:00

Before I began studying Parelli Natural Horsemanship I never thought much about the fact that I was a predator or that my beloved first horse, Max, was a prey animal. In fact the very term predator, rather than evoking in my mind the natural image of lion or a wolf, carried instead the negative connotations associated with that sub-human group of people who prey on those who can’t defend themselves, children, animals and the elderly. As a result, I seldom critically examined the effect of my own behavior on my horse. That’s not to say I was completely ignorant about how I influenced the people and animals around me. Years of working in the chemical industry managing people had taught me that the only behavior I could predictably change was my own and that the fastest way to rescue a situation that was falling apart around me was to shift what I was doing that was contributing to the mayhem.
Still, it was quite an eye opener for me when I first heard Pat Parelli talk about horse behavior as prey animal behavior and I began thinking about my relationship with horses in terms of a ‘predator – prey animal’ relationship. Suddenly everything I did when I was with my current horse became more significant. I started paying more attention to how the little, everyday things I did without thinking, like walking directly up to Sonny in his pasture or entering his stall without waiting for his permission or grooming the front of his chest between his front legs seemed to annoy him. Often his reactions weren’t large, perhaps only the turning away of his head or a swish of his tail, but the reactions were definitely there, signaling to me that the predator in my nature was emerging, affecting the development of our partnership. As a result, I have tried over the past several years to become more conscious of my behavior when I am working with horses and to act less predictably like a predator.
Being conscious of my predatory behavior has really helped me at the horse rescue where some of our horses come from situations of neglect or abuse. This spring the rescue took in three horses from a serious neglect situation. The horses had been left in a field without food and water and were in poor physical condition when they arrived. One was so significantly compromised that despite everything we could do, she had to be euthanized, but the others came to Greener Pastures in the hope that good care and good pasture could restore their health.
I had been in Florida when the horses were rescued and when I returned, the director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked if I could evaluate them. One, a Welsh pony mix, had behavior problems and the other, a quarter horse son of Zip’s Chocolate Chip, was very difficult to catch.
The first time I saw the quarter horse, Chip, he was standing in a stall. He was a tall, thin bay with a white blaze, a dull, muddy coat and a listless look in his eye. Standing at his stall door, I tried to look past his shabby appearance for the potential that must be hidden in this well bred gelding. When I opened his door, Chip turned his head away from me and retreated into the far corner of the stall. Although he was a good sized horse, he gave the impression of trying to make himself as small as possible. Realizing that just by standing there I was putting a lot of pressure on the horse, I opened the stall door as wide as it would go and turned away from Chip. After what seemed like an eternity, Chip stepped toward the fresh hay piled in the corner and began to eat. When I offered him the back of my hand, he looked nervously in my direction but couldn’t seem to bring himself to smell or touch it. Because he seemed so hesitant to make contact, I tracked the rescue’s director to get some additional background on Chip.
“Well,” Elena told me, “we don’t have a lot of information. I know that he’s 8 years old and broken to ride. I was told that he was actually used for one of the local college equestrian teams at one point, but beyond that, I only know what we’ve seen since he’s been here. He seems very apprehensive around people and he’s very hard to catch.”
Armed with that information I returned to Chip’s stall. This time he didn’t retreat when I opened the door so I snapped a lead line on his halter and led him out of the corral and onto the grass to graze. In the sunlight he looked a little less shabby but no less apprehensive. When I kissed to him after a few moments to get him to step forward he actually leaped sideways at the sound.
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “This guy is really sensitive. I better make our friendly game is solid.”
While Chip grazed, I started to brush the dried mud out of his coat. Noticing that he flinched whenever I touched him suddenly, I slowed my approach way down. I showed him the brushes and used long, soft strokes. I softly asked him to yield his head and his hindquarters. Even the slightest pressure caused him to freeze and look away from me. I quickly realized that convincing Chip I wasn’t like all the other humans he’d met was essential but it was not going to be easy.
My chance came the next day. Chip was out in the lower pasture by the river and when I entered the pasture he immediately turned and walked away. I paid no attention to him, wandering from one horse to the next, offering the back of my hand and stopping to give each horse a good scratch. I could see that Chip was watching me as I walked around, but I made no attempt to move purposefully in his direction. Before long, he was standing on the far side of a horse I was petting. Reaching my arm under the horse’s chin, I asked him to yield his front end and change sides. This put me between Chip and the horse I had been petting. Chip didn’t move. Without looking at him, I held out the back of my hand and waited until I felt whiskers tickle my skin. We had contact.
Normally at this point with any other horse, I would probably have tried to press my advantage, but I didn’t want Chip to think I was like other humans so I just walked away from him and continued to make my rounds of the herd. I was concentrating on pulling some tangles out of Beau’s mane when I caught a glimpse of Chip out of the corner of my eye. He had taken several steps in my direction and was now standing less than an arm’s length away. When I reached over to scratch his withers he didn’t pull away, so I moved to his side and began to rub his neck with the rope halter in my hand. Chip was standing stock still but his eyes were wide open and he wasn’t blinking. He looked to me like he might bolt at any second. I continued to rub his neck slowly, taking deep, slow breaths at the same time. After what seemed like an eternity, he started to blink and his head lowered a couple of inches. I stopped rubbing and waited. He signed. When I touched his neck again, he turned his head toward me ever so slightly and I was able to slip the halter over his nose.
I was anxious to begin playing with Chip so I started to turn and lead him toward the gate but then a thought came to me. I bet this is exactly what Chip expected me to do. Probably every time a human put a halter on him, he was taken out of his field and put to work. So I untied the halter, rubbed him on the neck, offered him and cookie and when he took it, I walked away. Reaching the gate, I turned to look at Chip. He had been standing facing away from the gate when I left him. He was still standing in the same position but he had craned his neck around and was watching me as I opened the gate and left the pasture.
I walked to the tack room and went in to hang up the halter and lead line. While inside, I picked up some lines that had fallen to the floor and generally tidied things up. It was several minutes before I left the building but when I stepped outside, I saw Chip standing in the same position that I had last seen him, head craned around looking toward the spot where I had disappeared a few minutes earlier. It was as if he was still trying to figure out what had just happened.
Somewhere in Chip’s past, he’d developed some serious trust issues with humans. I don’t know exactly what happened but I suspect that with his sensitive nature, he’d been worked too hard or pushed through thresholds before he was ready. I was determined not to let that happen to him again, at least not while I had anything to say about it and walking away from him had been the first step. For the next few weeks, I continued to play the catching game with Chip, often only taking him for a walk to a good patch of grass outside of his pasture and sometimes not doing anything at all with him after he caught me. I practiced doing the unexpected with Chip and it paid off. Chip slowly relaxed and became easier for other volunteers to catch and handle. Eventually the director of our rescue found Chip a good home as a companion horse and while I was sad to see him leave, I knew it was best for him. At his new home, there would be no pressure on him to perform and he could live out his life just being a horse.
The relationship we can build with a horse can be a beautiful thing but it also can be very fragile. Without meaning to we can damage that relationship simply by being ourselves and that is why understanding a horse’s nature as a prey animal and our own as a predator is so very important. With each new horse at the rescue that touches my life, I am reminded of the tremendous advantage that we human predators have because we are conscious of the choices we make. Every interaction with a new horse is a chance for me to live out my number one responsibility to act less like a predator and more like a partner. And every time I make that conscious choice, I am making the world a better place for horses and humans alike.

The Gift of Curiosity

2011-11-05T18:20:00.000-04:00

The Gift of Curiosity
Horses come to our rescue from all kinds of situations and even when we have a reasonably complete history of a new horse, we seldom know exactly what to expect. While many horses arrive malnourished or with injuries that require veterinary care, it is often the horses with emotional issues that are the most difficult to diagnose and rehabilitate. This was the case with Elvis.
Before Elvis came to our rescue, he was being used for pony rides and according to the information our director had been given, he had never been mistreated or neglected. He was a good looking black pony with four while stockings, a large white blaze and two blue eyes and other than a slight lameness due to poor foot care, he seemed to be in good physical condition when he arrived at Greener Pastures. .
The first time I saw Elvis, he was standing inside the corral that encircles our round pen. New horses at the rescue are always segregated when they arrive and this corral is a convenient holding spot. Standing at the fence, I watched the pony for several minutes before entering the enclosure and noticed that unlike most new horses, he wasn’t showing much interest in anything around him, including the horses in the adjoining pasture. I thought this behavior was odd.
When I opened the gate to the corral, the pony immediately began walking away from me. Since our round pen sits like a donut hole in the center of this particular corral, the catching game can turn into an exercise of endless circles. Rather than precipitating a situation where the pony felt pursued, I went to corner of the corral with the best grass and sat down on the fence. The pony stopped walking as soon as I sat down but he didn’t seem very interested in coming over to me and when he did look at me, his ears were folded back against his head. The ears didn’t appear to be pinned in anger and the pony didn’t look aggressive. As I watched him, it struck me that his expression was apprehensive, like he wasn’t exactly sure what I was up to but I wasn’t to be trusted. I gave the pony plenty of space and eventually grazed his way over to lush grass where I was sitting. He wouldn’t approach any closer when I offered my hand but he didn’t move away. Eventually I was able to move to his side and stroke his neck but the pony certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying the contact.
If eyes are the window to the soul, this pony’s eyes were telling a sad story. When I tried to play with him on line, his expression was worried and his behavior depressed. He had a hard time looking in my direction and when he did look at me; his ears were rotated back and pressed against his head. I had the impression that he was trying really hard to be compliant but there was no interest or enthusiasm. I brought obstacles into the round pen; a ball, cones, a tarp. Most horses would have had some reaction to the introduction of these objects even if it was only to snort and retreat to the opposite side of the pen but Elvis had no reaction. He stood stoically, head down, ears folded back, breathing fast.
When the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, asked me later what I thought of the new pony, I wasn’t exactly sure what to tell her. “I don’t know what people were doing with him before he got here,” I said, “but somewhere, somehow, this little fellow has really had the curiosity knocked out of him.”
At that point, I set a simple goal for my work with Elvis. All I wanted to do was to get him curious enough about something that he would put his ear forward toward it. Rather than playing with him in the round pen and running him through the 7 games, I started to take him for long walks around the property, driving him from zone 3 and playing the ‘touch it’ game. At first he was reluctant to step out in front of me. I smooched to him, then tapped him gently and rhythmically on his back with the carrot stick. I tried to release instantly even if he just rocked forward. Before long he would step forward at my smooch. I walked Elvis down to the river so he could put his front feet in the water. I walked him past tractors, horse trailers and lawn mowers. I asked him to touch large black pipes and overturned kayaks but I never forced the issue. I sat on the retaining wall to the healing garden and let him graze. I carried horse cookies in my pockets and gave him one any time he checked in with me.
Whenever a volunteer wanted to play with the pony, I suggested they take Elvis for a walk. He was such a good looking pony that he got a lot of attention. He was groomed so often that he coat took on a special shine. One day Elena came to me and said she was going to change the pony’s name. “He’s such a nice looking pony” She said. “He needs a classier name than Elvis. I think I’m going to call him Black Tye Affair.”
It took several weeks, but finally the pony had become more confident. He was swiveling his ears forward whenever he saw me. His expression had softened and he looked less worried. He no longer flinched when someone touched him unexpectedly and he had become much easier to catch. But best of all, his curiosity had returned. When he approached something new, he investigated with his nose and sometimes his feet. He pushed the blue exercise ball around the round pen and I even saw him pick up a cone in his mouth one afternoon. When I started to play the 7 games with Tye, he progress quickly. He was finally able to look at me and soon he began asking questions.
Tye became a favorite of some of the younger volunteers. When his lameness resolved, some of the smaller volunteers began riding him. Eventually he found a family that wanted to take him home. We were all sad to see him leave but we knew that this more confident and engaging pony had a much brighter future than the timid little Elvis who had stepped off the trailer in Greener Pastures several months before.
I once heard Pat Parelli tell a story about how one of his mentors told him to never knock the curiosity out of a colt. That made a lot of sense to me at the time but I hadn’t given much thought to what I would do if I ever met a horse that already had the curiosity knocked out of him. Then I met Elvis. Curiosity is a gift. It keeps our minds active rather than passive. It opens us and our horses to the possibility of learning something new and it can bring excitement and adventure into our lives. I’d like to think that because I needed to help Elvis rediscover his curiosity, I also had to sharpen my own. Rather than follow my usual plan with a new horse, I had to open myself to other possibilities to investigate the power of patterns in order to find a way to build confidence and develop curiosity. It is interesting that not long after I began taking Elvis for walks and using the ‘touch it’ pattern to help encourage his curiosity, I received the Savvy Club DVD featuring that pattern. How reinforcing was that?

The Trouble with Labels

2011-11-02T15:05:00.002-04:00

The Trouble with Labels

I’ve learned a lot of important lessons during my Parelli journey but perhaps one of the most important is how my attitude can help or hinder my relationship with a horse. Pat Parelli teaches us that chauvinistic, autocratic, anthropomorphic and direct line thinking are four attitudes that can break up a potential partnership before it ever has a chance to get started. This year at the horse rescue where I work, I also observed how, when that kind of thinking results in labels being attached to a horse, it can pretty much destroy a rescue horse’s chance of finding a permanent, loving home.
This story starts in the spring, when the rescue took in three horses from a situation of neglect. The horses, a Welsh mix pony gelding, a quarter gelding and a mare of indeterminate breeding had been left out in a field with little food or water. The horses were very thin and after some negotiations with the owner, they were surrendered to the rescue. The mare’s condition was grave and she was sent to the rescue’s Hartly, Delaware site where she could be stabled and closely monitored. The other two, which were in slightly better condition, were sent to the Greener Pasture’s facility in Warwick, Maryland.
I was on vacation in Florida when the horses were rescued. The first day I returned to work, the rescue’s director, Elena DiSilvestro, approached me and asked if I would evaluate the pony.
“We are really having a problem with him and I’m afraid that we are going to have to put him down” she said. “The little bugger is mean”
“Mean?” I asked. “What’s he doing?”
“You name it.” Elena answered. “He’s biting, kicking, striking. No one wants to go near him.”
I thought about that for a moment. Mean isn’t a word I usually use to describe a horse. Horses can be dominant or aggressive or defensive but mean indicates a malicious intent that is more of a human characteristic.
“OK, I’ll take a look.” I answered Elena. “Where is he?”
Elena pointed to the upper pasture and when I looked, I saw and small, bay pony alone in the field, pacing restlessly along the fence.
“Is he still in quarantine?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, “We had to separate him from the other horses because he was being mean to them too.”
Since I was nursing a sore foot, a potential stress fracture, I asked if someone could bring the pony up to the round pen so I could take a look at him. Elena sent Meredith to get him and I watched her as she entered the field. The pony came right up to her with his ears forward. I could see nothing aggressive in his posture. He didn’t appear to be afraid or nervous when she put on his halter and he followed her quietly to the round pen. As the passed by me, I asked Meredith the pony’s name.
“We’ve been calling him ‘#*&%head’”, she answered. “Be careful around him. He bites.”
Meredith let the pony loose in the round pen. He trotted around, his attention fixed on the horses in the next field. He whinnied to them and paced back and forth while I watched but as soon as I opened the round pen door, he turned to face me from the opposite side of the pen. He was a nice looking bay pony with two small white socks and the kind of bushy main and tail found on Thelwell ponies. I was holding a rope halter in one hand and having been warned that the pony was “mean” I was trying to decide exactly how to proceed when one of our volunteers, Mary Burgholzer, wandered over.
“Is this one of the new rescues?” Mary asked?
“Yep. Elena asked me to see what I thought about him. She seems to think he might be too dangerous for people to be around but I don’t see anything particularly aggressive in the way he looks.”
I had turned to talk to Mary. I could still see the pony out of the corner of my eye. I seemed to have his attention and while his ears were swiveling around a bit, his posture was relaxed. As I continue to talk to Mary, the pony began to close the distance between us until he was standing out of my field of vision.
“You have company” she told me. “He’s right behind you.”
“Does he look like he wants to take a piece out of me?” I asked.
“No, he looks curious.”
Right then I felt a soft touch in the middle of my back. I turned slowly toward the pony and extended the back of I hand in which I was holding the rope halter. The pony lowered his muzzle to my hand and then immediately took the end of the halter into his mouth. He chewed on it softly as I reached over to scratch his neck. His ears were forward and his big, brown eyes were soft. He tugged on the rope halter and I could have sworn that I saw a twinkle in his eyes.
I continued to let him chew on the halter as I started to stroke him all over. He let me rub his legs and run my hand under his belly. After a few minutes he started to push into me so I waved my hands at him to back him off and he dropped the halter and retreated a few steps. After a moment he came back and grabbed the halter again.
“He sure doesn’t seem to be afraid of you.” Mary commented.
“Nope, he isn’t afraid and he doesn’t seem to be aggressive but he is a mouthy little bugger. Mary, can you get the blue exercise ball. Let’s see what he thinks of that.”
Mary retrieved the large exercise ball from the tack room and tossed it over the top of the round pen. The ball bounced a few times and then rolled to a stop against one of the panels. That would have been scary enough to put many of our horses into a panic but the pony watched with interest and after a few moments walked cautiously over to the ball and poked it with his nose. The ball skittered away from him and he followed after it, pawing at it and trying to bite it. Mary and I were both laughing until I realized that he was actually starting to get a grip on the underinflated ball with his teeth and afraid that he might pop it, I ran to rescue it. The pony actually looked disappointed when I tossed the ball over the panels to safety so I grabbed a rubber cone and set it down in the center of the pen. Instantly the pony came over and picked the cone up in his mouth. What a play drive this little guy had, I thought to myself.
I continued to play with the pony at liberty, using my hands and the rope halter, which I was still holding to have him back up, yield his front end and yield his hindquarters. He would occasionally get pushy but he never pinned his ears and his behavior was more dominant than aggressive. After 90 minutes in the round pen, I had yet to see him do anything that I would consider even remotely hostile or dangerous. While he had taken almost every object he could, including at one point the front of my shirt, into his mouth, he had made no attempt to bite me. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that this horse wasn’t “mean” or dangerous; he was a left brain extrovert who wasn’t very respectful of people.
At the end of our session while I was returning the pony to his field, he pushed against me causing me to stumble on the uneven turf. Down I went, falling directly in front of him in a heap. He stopped dead in his tracks and lowered his head to look me directly in the eye. Then he started to graze. Clearly this wasn’t the man eating pony I had been warned about. As soon as I let him loose in his field he started to trot along the fence, calling to the horses in the adjacent field. If this little guy was a left brain extrovert, it was probably torture for him to be isolated from the other horses. He needed to play.
“I don’t think that pony is mean.” I told Elena when I found her. “I was in the round pen with him for 90 minutes and not once did he pin his ears or do anything threatening. He doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything, including people and he isn’t very respectful. He actually knocked me off my feet at one point and I fell right in front of him but all he did was take a mouthful of grass.”
“Can you work with him?” she asked.
“I think so.” I said. “But we need to give him a name. I was thinking maybe we should call him Rango.”
I continued to play with Rango over the next few weeks. He was a quick learner and bored easily so I had to make sure our sessions had variety. He also didn’t like to be bossed around so I tried really hard to make sure I was letting him adopt my ideas as his ideas. He quickly learned the Seven Games and I incorporated lots of obstacles in our sessions to give him new challenges. Everyone remarked how much his attitude had changed and no one complained about him his behavior so I was really pleased with his progress.
One day Elena came to me and told me that Jess, a member of the Washington College Equestrian Team, wanted to take Rango home for the summer. She had ridden him a couple of times and thought he would make a good summer project.
“She’s here today.” Elena said. “Can you watch her ride Rango?
Jess had gotten Rango from his field and was tacking him up. When she had finished, I followed her up to the riding arena and climbed up onto the fence to see how they got along. Jess mounted Rango and was trying to get him to walk him around the arena. She was kicking him to get him to move forward and she had a tight hold on the reins. He was shaking his head and swishing his tail with annoyance at the restraint. Neither of them looked very relaxed. I called Jess over to where I was sitting.
“This pony is very dominant. He’ll argue with you all day if you give him any reason to.” I told her. “I’m going to see if I can help you work better together but I’ll be asking you to do some things you might not have done before. Are you game to try something new?”
Jess said she would try so first I told her to give Rango his head. Then I explained to her that to get Rango to move forward, I wanted her to just squeeze with her legs and cluck to him once. “If he doesn’t take a step when you cluck, then try taking the end of your reins and gently, with rhythm, swinging it back and forth along your body, like this.” I said as I demonstrated with a lead line. “If he still isn’t moving, then gently, with rhythm, tap him on either side of his butt. Whatever you do, don’t kick him with your heels, and the moment he takes a step forward, relax and let him go. You don’t have to keep urging once he moves.”
It took Jess a few of attempts but pretty soon she had the hang of it. Rango was walking forward but she was struggling to keep the pony walking along the rail.
“He wants to turn all the time,” she said. “He won’t go straight.”
“Don’t worry about that right now, Jess. Remember how I said Rango was dominant. He is just looking for something to argue about. Rather than trying to keep him straight, when he wants to turn, just think about how you can help him do what he wants to do. Ask him for a bigger turn,” I told her. “Encourage his ideas.”
Jess looked skeptical but she followed my instructions and pretty soon she had Rango trotting along and even jumping a small cross rail. They seemed to be hitting it off pretty well and by the end of the session, the pony was looking more relaxed and rider was looking rather pleased with herself.
I was hopeful that this would be a good match and that it would be good for Rango to have just one person working with him for the summer. But I was also worried that if Rango was pushed too hard, his left brain introvert nature would kick in and he would rebel so I offered to continue to help with the pony after he had moved.
I wish I could say this story had a happy ending and that Jess and Rango got along beautifully after she took him home for the summer but unfortunately things didn’t work out that way. They did alright for a while but eventually the pony became harder for her to deal with. I’m not sure exactly what happened because I was never invited over to see how there were doing but eventually Elena received an e-mail from Jess reporting that Rango had become so aggressive that he chased her out of his enclosure. Her parents now thought the pony was ‘a dangerous animal” and would eventually hurt someone.
This happened in August and Elena took Rango back immediately but I wasn’t able to go see what was going on with the pony because I was recovering from foot surgery.
“I’m not sure what I am going to do at this point,” Elena told me over the phone. “I can’t really adopt this pony out to anyone now because if I did and someone got hurt, the rescue would be libel.”
I knew Elena had a point but I couldn’t square up in my mind the experience I had with the bright and curious pony and this new report of an animal that was chasing people out of his enclosure. I didn’t think Rango was dangerous, but he was now wearing that label and in many ways, it was worse than being thought of as ‘mean’.
Elena eventually did find a solution for Rango that would not put either the rescue or the pony at risk. She got him accepted into a study at the New Bolton Center in Pennsylvania where the researchers were looking at the long term neurological effects of starvation on horses. She knew that Rango would be well cared for by the researchers there and they accepted him into the study knowing his history.
It is always a hazard when working with rescue horses that there will be some trauma in their background that is so extreme, the rescuers will not have the knowledge or savvy to overcome. And this may have been the case with our Rango, but I don’t think it was. I think Rango’s left brain extrovert nature was misunderstood by most of the people who interacted with him. I think he was labeled as ‘mean’, when he was actually being dominant and disrespectful. I think he was labeled ‘dangerous’ when he was actually defending his dignity. I think if he had been placed with someone who had understood his horsenality and been able to interpret his behavior differently, they could have had a long and productive partnership.
I try not to get too attached to the rescue horses because I know that our job is to find homes for them and most of them will eventually leave the rescue. But somehow I let Rango get under my skin. I think the reaction he evoked in people represented to me every time I had been labeled or misunderstood by someone. Labels can hurt, and I hope that my experience with this little, bay pony can remind me to take both people and horses as they are and to never attach a label to man or beast again.

Recognizing the Slightest Try

2011-10-28T17:25:00.002-04:00

During my natural horsemanship journey I have often had instructors tell me to reward the slightest try and I have worked hard to do that with my partner, Sonny. But this summer during a clinic with John and Kathy Barr I gained a new appreciation of just how subtle the slightest try might actually be.
The clinic was being held at Willow Brook, Peter Fuller’s magnificent facility near Bethlehem, PA. Willow Brook is a wonderful place to play with your horse. There is a large, Parelli friendly playground with a variety of obstacles, including various bridges, a teeter-totter and a car wash that I don’t have access to at home. There are also two large arenas, one indoor and one outdoor and a lovely pond where the horses can enjoy a swim. The staff is both friendly and helpful and everyone does their best to make you feel welcome and comfortable.
John Barr had been my instructor when I attended Fast Track at the Parelli Center in Florida during November of 2010. I had really enjoyed his teaching style when I was in Florida, but with 45 students and 6 other instructors at Fast Track, I didn’t have many opportunities to work with him individually. I had been excited when I learned he was coming to Willow Brook and looking forward to the opportunities presented by the smaller class. John’s wife, Kathy had also been in Florida but she spent less time with the Fast Track students because she was teaching another course. The two presentations she had made to us in Florida had been both informative and entertaining and I was looking forward to spending more time with her.
Unfortunately it was mid July and it was almost unbearably hot and humid, even in the Lehigh Valley which is usually a few degrees cooler than Delaware in the summer. There is not much shade on the Willow Brook playground so after a morning of playing with our horses on line, everyone was happy to head for the picnic grove where we could have lunch under the tall evergreen trees and enjoy the shade and slight breeze. After lunch each day, John and Kathy would let us sit in the shade and ask any questions that might have come up from our morning activities. The second day, the conversation turned to the idea of rewarding the slightest try and someone asked Kathy what she looked for to tell her a horse was trying.
“Well,” Kathy answered, “it depends a lot on your horse’s horsenality. With an extroverted horse, you might see more than with an introverted horse and if your horse is a left brain introvert, you might not see much at all to begin with.”
At this point, Kathy really had my attention. Sonny is inherently a left brain introvert. He is much more dominant than my previous horse, a right brain introvert, and when I first purchased him, I was surprised by some of his behavior. For example, whenever I had treats, he would come at me with his ears back and an expression that generally communicated, “Give me the carrot and no one gets hurt!” He also was very stubborn and when I was asking him to do something he often had an expression on his face that I came to think of as the “You and what army are going to make me do this!” expression.
“Let me demonstrate. I’ll be the horse. John how about if you are ask me to yield his front end,” Kathy said,
John took the carrot stick and wiggled it toward Kathy’s nose. .Kathy crossed her arms over her chest, hunched her shoulders, wrinkled her face into a frown and stared directly forward.
. I knew that expression instantly. It was Sonny’s “you and what army” face.
Kathy shifted her eyes to the right and then back forward, maintaining the frown. “I might reward that the first time,” she told us. “But the second time I would expect a little more.”
John wiggled the stick at Kathy again. This time she turned her head the slightest bit to the right and then back forward. “That would be a good second try” she told us.
On the third try, her head turned a little more and this time her expression began to soften toward John. Finally, on the fourth try, she took a step sideways.
A low hum broke out among the students. I don’t think any of us would have thought of a shifting of the eyes as a try and that was what one of the students said out loud.
“With an introvert, sometime the first or second try will be very slight and subtle.” Kathy reiterated. “You really need to learn to read your horse. You may not think you are putting much pressure on your horse but many times you are almost yelling at them with your body language and expecting way too much.”
This little demo had given me a lot to think about and I was anxious to get it a try. When I saddled Sonny for the afternoon riding session, I was determined to see if I could apply what Kathy had showed us during our warm up. I took him out on the play ground on line, positioned myself in front of him and asked him to yield his nose. As soon as he began to move his nose away a fraction of an inch, I stopped asking and went back to neutral. Sonny stared at me. I rubbed his nose and then asked again. As soon as Sonny flexed his nose away a tiny bit more than the first time, I stopped asking. He lowered his head a bit; ears pinned forward at me and very slowly gave a secretive little chew. I waited a moment and asked again. This time he turned his head away to the side and I immediately stopped. Sonny’s focus instantly came back to me and this time he blew and then really started to chew in earnest.
“Wow!” I though to myself, “Kathy is really on to something. I think I have been wanting way too much as the slightest try.”
For the rest of the clinic I continued to experiment with just how little Sonny’s slightest try might be. By the end of the clinic he was showing more exuberance than I had ever seen from him before. He was giving me traveling circles and jumping the largest logs on the playground with hardly any encouragement from me. This small adjustment in my expectations had made a huge difference in our relationship in a very short period of time.
Since attending John and Kathy’s clinic at Willow Brook, I’ve continued to experiment with this idea of how small the slightest try might be. I’ve become much better at reading Sonny’s expression and rewarding his slightest efforts and as a result, our progress has really accelerated. But I don’t think we would be where we are today, if I hadn’t had Kathy Barr’s help in refining my idea of just how small the slightest try could be when dealing with a left brain introvert like Sonny.

Savoring an "Ah-Ha" Moment

2011-10-27T16:49:00.001-04:00

I had an “ah-ha” moment in my riding lesson this week and I want to savor it. You see I am not much of an “ah-ha” moment learner. My learning progress is one more of reflection than instant flashes of insight. I’ll do something and then I will go home and think about what happened. I mull things over, replay them in my mind and eventually insight might dawn on me. But to have that exciting flash where everything is suddenly clear, well that just doesn’t happen too often.
That isn’t to say that I have never had an “ah-ha” moment with my riding. The earliest one I can recall happened long ago when I was first learning to ride. It was long before I had ever heard of natural horsemanship or Pat Parelli. I was taking riding lessons at the Carousel Park Equestrian Center in Delaware and at 28, I was the oldest student in the class by at least 15 years and generally embarrassed by that.
Most weeks I rode a chunky, evil tempered bay mare named Gracie. She was a ‘been there, done that’ kind of lesson horse and she was committed to doing as little as possible during our lessons. I didn’t have too much trouble when at the walk or the trot but the canter was a problem. I usually could get Gracie into a canter if I worked hard enough at it but I couldn’t keep her cantering.
The instructor was a rail thin, middle-aged woman who was always impeccably turned out in riding breeches that looked like they had never seen the back of a horse. She was clearly more comfortable teaching students younger than I and never seemed to be paying attention to what I was doing. She rarely spoke to me except when Gracie dropped out of a canter and then she would turn and bark “Keep your leg on that horse!”
This annoyed me no end because it was obvious to me at least that my leg, in fact both of my legs, were on the horse. So I would urge Gracie back into a canter by digging my heels into her sides and then try to maintain the gait once more with some enthusiastic clucking and flapping of my legs. Most of the time it was to no avail as Gracie would canter perhaps half a lap before dropping back into an incredibly fast and hard to ride trot. It was frustrating for me and probably not much fun for Gracie either.
This went on for the better part of a year. Weather permitting, I rode twice a week, taking one evening lesson and coming out on the weekends for a trail ride. My body was getting used to the rigors of riding and by early spring, my legs were no longer sore after each lesson. Other students in the class progressed to more advanced horses, that were more athletic and willing partners but I was stuck with Gracie.
Then one Wednesday evening in April, a miracle happened. The instructor gave the command to canter our horses and I pushed Gracie up into the faster gait. My legs were wrapped around her ample barrel and after half a lap when I felt her start to break into a trot I tightened my grip with my legs. Gracie maintained the canter; in fact she increased her speed slightly. As we lapped the arena, once, twice, three times, sustaining gait the entire way, I could feel my legs maintaining a steady pressure on her sides. “Oh my God!” I thought to myself, “This is what she’s been talking about all these months when she told me to put my leg on the horse.” I wanted to shout to the instructor, “Hey, look at me! My leg is on this horse!” When I glanced in her direction, she was busy looking elsewhere but it didn’t spoil the moment because in that instant, I had understood what she had been trying to tell me for the past eight months.
Over the years I have had other flashes of insight but they have generally been few and far between, which is why what happened in my lesson this week was something to celebrate.
I’ve had my current horse, Sonny, for six years. He was six when I bought him and before I owned him, he was a “husband’s horse”. He had been used primarily for trail riding and was rock solid on trails but he wasn’t overly flexible and he has never had a consistent right lead when cantering. Two Star Parelli Instructor Jane Bartsch has been helping me with this problem. Occasionally I have been able to get him to take the correct lead when circling to the right but it has been far from consistent and despite Jane’s best efforts, I’ve been having a hard time trying to visualize what I needed to do with my body and what Sonny needed to do with his body in order to make it easier for him to take this lead. To make matters worse, as Sonny has become more supple and athletic, it has become harder for me to determine if he is on the correct lead or if he is counter cantering, making it difficult to work on the problem when I was along. It was become very frustrating.
I was working Sonny in a circle to make it easier for him to pick up the correct lead. Jane had been trying to explain to me where Sonny’s ribs and back feet needed to be in order for him to pick up his right lead. “His ribs are pointing to the inside of the circle,” she told me. “That makes it hard for him to pick up the lead. You need to stay out of his way. Your weight is too far forward.”
I repositioned my body and mentally reviewed the litany of instructions she had been giving me.
. “Sit back. Lead with your right hand. Now reach around with you left hand and tickle him on his butt with the mecate.”
Sonny popped immediately into the canter. As we cantered around the end of the arena I looked over at Jane and asked if he was on his right lead.
“No.” Jane answered, “He’s on the left lead.”
I slowed him into the trot but before I could circle him for another try, Jane instructed me to trot down the long side of the arena and ask him for the canter when I came to the next corner.
Trotting down the rail I noticed that Sonny’s neck and nose were flexed away from the inside of the circle. If he was going to canter properly, I knew that I needed to correct that. When we reached the corner, just as sat back and chirped at him to ask for the canter, I pushed on Sonny’s right side with my inside leg. I saw Sonny’s neck and nose flex toward the center of the arena just as his ribs moved away from my leg, putting a bend in his body. He popped into the canter and this time I knew immediately he was on the correct lead. Cantering down the long side of the arena I whooped at Jane. “That was right, wasn’t it?” I asked her.
When I reached the other end, I stopped Sonny and gave him a cookie. Then I asked for the canter again, making sure to apply my leg to move his ribs out of the way. He took the correct lead a second time. We stopped and tried it again, and for a third time he took the correct lead. By this time I was smiling from ear to ear, because, in a flash, I had finally understood what Jane had meant about just getting out of Sonny’s way. For some reason, seeing Sonny’s ribs move away from my leg had been the key to understanding all of Jane’s earlier explanations and I was thrilled with the outcome.
I know that my goal to become a skilled horsewoman is actually a journey and I know that despite today’s success, Sonny and I have a long way to go before his right lead is as solid as his left lead. I expect that most of what I learn along the way will come from hard work and reflection but there will also be those rare occasions when a flash insight hits me and I intend to savor those ah-ha moments.