Despooking Your Horse

Sunshine, a cool breeze, low humidity. It is a perfect morning to ride. What more could any horse person ask for? You saddle your horse. He seems calm but ready to go. You mount up, do a warm up, and get ready to do some serious work. Only, when you start down the drive to the big arena, trails, indoor arena, or wherever it was you intended to go, your horse spots a dangerous situation and refuses to pass that spot. Someone moved a trashcan from one side of the drive to the other. This is the time to use the approach and retreat technique to despook your horse.

In order to see how this works among horses take the time to watch a horse confronted with something new and different. You will see approach and retreat in action. The horse will look at the new thing carefully, and then move towards it. Regardless of whether or not the thing does anything the horse will retreat to what it thinks is a safe distance. After several seconds, or moments, it will approach the object again, coming closer before retreating. The horse will continue this pattern until it finally convinces itself it isn't going to be attacked by whatever it regarded as a new and unknown threat.

This is exactly how you use approach and retreat to teach a horse about something that causes it to become worried and upset. You let the horse look at the object then, if it is something you are holding, retreat with the scary thing. If it is something you came upon then you ask the horse to retreat.

You repeat the exercise attempting to get a bit closer to the scary thing a before retreating. When the horse finally accepts the presence of the scary thing you move on to something else, hopefully the ride you started out on.

An example of this process is sacking out, using a saddle blanket the way the horse trainer on ranches used to do (and sometimes still do). You show the horse the saddle blanket from a safe distance. The horse focuses on the blanket. As you walk towards him you watch for the point where the horse decides it's had enough and has to retreat.

Only you retreat first.

When the horse has calmed down and is looking at you and the blanket again you approach again. This time, if all goes well, you may get a step or two closer before you have to back off. You continue this dance until the horse will allow you to actually bring the blanket up close enough for it to smell it. Then you begin touching him with the blanket and pulling it back before he gets upset and has to leave again.

You can get some real surprises with this exercise. A hyper horse that jitters and spooks at everything may work through the exercise in a matter of minutes. The calm horse you thought would spook at nothing may take hours to work through the stages. Be prepared when you start checking your horse with a new object for anything, from merely looking at it and giving an equine shrug, to having to spend your entire block of time on introduction of the "new" thing.

This is a delicate dance that done correctly will build trust between you and your horse. Done the wrong way it can destroy that trust. So remember this is another case where you need to make haste slowly.