Clarification

Hello again,
I wanted to clarify and add to my last post that I talked about desensitizing.  I could have replied to the comments, but I wanted to make sure that I was understood and I wanted to make sure that someone that may have read my post and not commented also got my clarification. 

When I am working with a horse, like Zoe and Betsy do, I actually ALLOW a horse to move his feet while I am "scaring" him with the bag on the whip (or whatever).  When the horse STOPS moving his feet, the scary thing (bag on the whip) is removed.  If I am waving it around where the horse can see it and react to it, when he stops moving his feet I quietly and quickly remove the bag, putting it behind me.  These actions and reactions can be very big at first, but that is okay!  Once the horse understands what I am doing, they quickly learn to stop moving their feet and hold their position - this is my ultimate goal.  I find that once I do this with a bag on a whip (this is pretty scary for most horses), they can quickly be shown any number of other things that might be scary to them and if I have done my work correctly, they will quickly understand that the same concepts apply to all other things too.

Here is an example, I brought my three year old Curly/Arab gelding out yesterday to do some desensitizing with him - did the approach and retreat with the bag, I didn't get a lot of reaction, but still enough that I was satisfied that he was understanding what we were doing.  I did some other stuff with him and then I decided to clip his bridle path with electric clippers.  Now, if I had tried this "first", I would have probably had a bit more reaction from him!  But, since he understood that the noisy clippers would retreat when he held his position, he soon got pretty comfortable with them. 

It is all about timing and softness and once you can get a handle on that, it is pretty easy - pretty much all horses are the same, some will learn faster, some slower, some will react a LOT and some not very much.  Actually the ones that do not react, I have to really try sometimes to teach them this concept, as I MUST get a reaction from them in order to show them what to do.   The thing is that ALL horses will react to something eventually and like I said in my earlier post, it is just that I want them to know what to do when they are scared.

I hope this clarifies my thoughts on this.  I did not want to be misunderstood.  In particular, I wanted to reply about the milk jugs - I would NEVER tie this to my saddle.  I would drag it by hand.  Then, if the horse really does run away, I can drop the rope, if it was tied to anything IMO that is a big wreck waiting to happen. 

Okay - here are a couple of photos of Cruise from the other day (these are before I clipped him) - he was truly such a good boy yesterday - what a doll!  For those of you who know our horses, Bijou is Cruise's dam!  That great mare has definitely put her stamp on this boy!

Shelly in Summerland, BC Canada
http://www.curlystandardplace.com