TRAILER LOADING & MINDSET

DELETE ANYTHING THAT DIDN'T GO WELL AND DON'T TAKE FAILURE SO PERSONALLY

Focus on the positive.

Why is that so difficult for us humans to do? It’s like we have a built in ability to trip ourselves up by simply getting stuck on negative thoughts and taking everything that happens so personally. We are all guilty of this in one way or another. If you let them, horses can help you gain a lot of self awareness significantly decreasing this negative habit. However, having horses as your spiritual mentors is not a walk in the park.

The other day I was with one of my awesome clients who was having some difficulty trailer loading her thoroughbred.

The horse was used to loading often and has done so successfully many times. Sometimes immediately, other times taking up to 30 minutes to load but that wasn’t a huge problem in my clients mind.

**In my mind, we humans tolerate way too much from our horses. Waiting for 30 minutes for my horse to load is never an option!**

I don’t mean that in a “let’s rush and slam that ramp as soon as the scared horse makes the mistake of getting his butt in the trailer” kinda of way, on the contrary.

Anyone who has seen me trailer train horses knows, that I’m very methodical and compassionate towards what the horse is experiencing. The most important thing for me is that the horse learns to enjoy and relax in the trailer and that’s just not gonna happen if we rush, or give pressure at the wrong time or barricade the horse in the trailer the first time he tries to do what we want.

However, tolerating that a horse repeatedly won’t load (for any amount of time) is just teaching the horse that he doesn’t have to get in the trailer. It’s actually reinforcing his resistance towards the trailer the more times it is repeated.

This time, the horse didn't want to get back in the trailer after a trail ride and two hours had already gone by.

It’s easy to take this refusal personally. Especially because there are days where he gets right in. I’ve heard that sentence from so many other horse owners before: “He/she did it perfectly yesterday, why is my horse resisting or fighting this today? He/she should know this already!!!”

**If that were a true statement, it would be just so and the horse would load perfectly every time and love it.**

The problem is, it’s not true. What’s true is that the horse loads sometimes and not other times and feels ambivalent about the trailer. This is because he thinks the option of not loading is available. He's used to not having to go in straight away and he’s wondering why it seems like you're not sure what you want. if you don't want him to go in the trailer, that must mean there's something wrong with the trailer and now he definitely doesn't want to go in there.

If the horse notices that your energy and aids are inconsistent with your intentions, then he will roller coaster up and down until you get into alignment. Sometimes things will go well, other times not. The problem is that a horse doesn’t count minutes, so if he’s allowed to wait 30 minutes before loading, then why not two hours or two days or just never LOL

**Let me clarify, this behavior in the horse is caused entirely by the human and can be fixed 100%, but only if you change your approach 100%, not just 90% because that leaves the door open for confusion in the horse and random results 10% of the time.**

Of course my client took the two hour failure to load very personally. She believed she had done everything right. When you believe you’ve done everything right, then it does seem rather hopeless and sad that you didn’t succeed after all that effort and so as humans, we do the only rational thing we can think of. We blame ourselves.

Except, this is not a rational response. It's an emotional one. The rational response would be to realize that you are missing some specific data and without that data you are not having consistent results. There is always more data out there and there is always a solution. Don’t take it personally. Delete the bad experience in your mind. Blaming yourself won't accomplish anything anyway.

Example:

Would you take it personally if you failed at reaching a destination you didn't have the address for? Would you blame yourself, your car, the road or the universe? I hope not, it would be pretty darn impossible for you or anyone to succeed.

Sometimes you might have part of the address, and maybe you’ll arrive in the right town, but not on the right road. It still wouldn’t make sense to take it personally, would it?

Horse training is kinda like that. People have part of the answer and so they sometimes succeed and sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t mean anything personal about you or your horse. It just means you are lacking some important data. When you get that data and practice it, you will get it right. I guarantee it.

Instead of beating yourself up which is a pointless action, go looking for the data you are missing.

In this case I had to drive out to help my client. Once I got there, I changed a few minor things that allowed "aids and intentions" to be aligned, and the horse loaded within a couple of minutes.

Here are some of those changes that I bet you might recognize:

1. The horse was walking faster than my client on the way to the trailer. This shows a lack of respect and horses won’t follow anyone who they don’t respect into a trailer. To fix it, do groundwork and set personal space boundaries so the horse learns to allow you to lead.
2. When walking up to the trailer, my client would turn away and walk a small circle before then approaching the trailer again. This teaches the horse that he can turn away from the trailer and NOT load! To fix it, skip the circle and walk straight up to the ramp.
3. Once close to the ramp, my client would allow the horse to step across the ramp instead of facing into the trailer. Since this horse has been loaded many times before, this step is unnecessary and only teaches the horse to avoid going into the actual trailer.
4. When the horse refused to line up with the trailer opening (due to basically being trained not to) my client would walk down the ramp and try to realign the horse before asking him to load again. This process becomes a game for the horse, so he just keeps misaligning himself each time. This way you will keep stepping down and go through the whole process again and again and again and again. This one actually makes me laugh because horses are such funny evil geniuses! :-)
5. If the horse backed up and away from the trailer, my client would release the pressure on the rope, thereby accidentally rewarding the horse for going backwards away from the trailer.

All of the things above (and this is just a few of them) trains a horse NOT to go in the trailer. Therefore, it's no big surprise in my mind that horses sometimes don't load, it’s a much bigger miracle that they ever load.

• Trailer loading understood properly is annoyingly EASY, it takes no time at all. It’s a question of making the right thing easy and the wrong thing impossible or difficult.
• It’s a question of when to apply pressure and when to release it.
• Finally, it’s a question of teaching your horse to respect, trust and understand your aids. You can’t beat a scared horse into a trailer and expect him to trust you, respect you and love the trailer.

It makes no sense.

It also doesn't make sense to kick yourself when you fail due to lack of data, wrong data or lack of experience.

***The only thing that makes sense is to get the right data and try again. ***

Trailer loading your horse can become a safe, fun, easy and immediate thing when done correctly.

For more help with Easy Trailer loading feel free to email me at [email protected]

Ride with Lightness

Celie xo

Click on the links below to read my two prior articles:

Release the Why and Focus on the What and the How

6 Tips to Develop More Feel