This Horse Put a Trainer in the Hospital! 😳

And if I had to guess, this is the situation she was in when she got kicked, is trying to get him to circle. The first technique that I was using, that works like 95% of the time. But he was like pretty committed to like, no, I'm not going anywhere. That's about as sticky as I've ever seen it for a horse to try to not go off on a circle. There's a bit more to the story. Me and my daughter own him together, but he's at her house. And so she decided to send him to a trainer that has trained many horses, trained my horse, and just get some ground manners on. And so he was there last week. The next day, she got a text from the girl who's a good trainer. He ended up kind of pulling away his head and double barreled her, and she thought she broke her femur. So she got taken by ambulance. So she called my daughter and said, I can't really do anything with him right now, but if you want to bring him back. So that was like his first day there, second day there? Yeah, first day. Oh wow, okay. So he was already like halter broke and could lead around? Yeah, he's fine, like when he's with another horse, but when you take him away. All right, so you guys might want to kind of stand back a bit. Again, he seems fine. I just, I'd rather be prepared than lucky. Should be fine, but I don't know him. And since somebody else has already been kicked. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and turn him loose. There's a couple of things I'm going to try to accomplish. I'm going to go play a game that I call owning space. And it's combined with another game called find the herd, where I want him to connect with me as the herd, but you can see I turn him loose and he immediately is disconnected from me. And that's part of the, if he can learn that I'm his herd, that will solve a lot of issues. But then we also need some tools built in that if he gets upset while we're with him, that we can have some means to work with that. So yeah, let's jump into it here. So all I'm going to do is walk over to where he's at. I'm going to use this flag because it's a little more visual and I'm just, I drove him off of this spot and now I'm just going to notice what he does. So he wasn't too bothered by that. And I liked that he wanted to come towards me, but I don't want him to get too close. I'm going to respect the fact that he does kick. It's basically like when he's got his hind quarters towards me, that's when pressure comes on. Not that it really goes away, but there's no pressure on him when he's looking at me with two eyes. So like right now I would not run towards him because he's looking at me. When he's in this position, now I'll just go ahead and wander somewhere else. I'm just making myself become more important to him what I'm doing in here. And it's a very, it's, I mean, it's one of the most simple conversations you can have with a horse, but there's a lot of timing involved in this. So there he chose not to stay connected. He's kind of peeling off and angling away. And so I take my time and I pick my moment. So you see the moment he turned fully away. Also, do you notice, I like that he got out of there with more energy. That's like, again, if there was an alpha horse in here driving him around saying, you can't come into the herd yet, that's kind of what it would look like. And he just got a little more respect now for that alpha horse. So instead of being more afraid of me, I became more important to him where he's actually now coming and looking me up after I just drove him away. And you see how now he's hooking on. He turned his hind quarters away from me. He said, I better keep two eyes on this guy because he puts pressure on me when I don't. So I'm showing him equally where the relief is and where the pressure is. The pressure is when you're thinking away, hind quarters towards me, that's when there's the pressure. Here's where the relief is. But the fact that he also backs up instead of stepping forward, will make it a little harder to get him to hook on and follow me around. Because that's kind of what I'm waiting for now. Ah, so that's the first time he made that choice when we got into that position. And there's the starting to turn loose idea. So now I'd halter him right away. He made a good choice, you win the game. But what'll be really interesting is to see what it takes tomorrow to get him to hook on. But now is where he needs to know some more boundaries that he doesn't know yet. But it's like, I felt like just being able to start this at liberty. It's like this theoretically will just be a lot less of a dramatic session now that we've got that going for us. Because I can already walk around to his hind quarters. I just wanna see how afraid he is of the stick and string. He feels like it'd be pretty easy to overwhelm him with pressure. And so I want him to yield his hind quarters, but I also want him to take a step back away. And I can't drive him with the stick because that'd be too much pressure. He's a little too green for that. In other words, he's not quite tame yet. So he's not ready for training, he needs taming. So what I'm doing right now with him is more about taming than training him. And when you switch your mindset to that, to me, everything like slows down a little bit and makes more sense. But if you jump into like, well, we're gonna, we're gonna work on teaching him not to be buddy sour. It's like, well, no, he's not even accepting a human yet. Because you think about if he was double barrel in the trainer, you think, oh, well, we need to like, kind of show him that he can yield his hind quarters and back up and give him some strong leadership. But really he needs to get more comfortable with people. So I think he did that out of defensiveness more than anything. The next thing is to go to steady pressure yields so we can get a hind quarter yield here. And someday, whoever puts the first ride on him, they're gonna be happy he learned this. And then he can learn to step his front end over off of steady pressure. Once you have that working on both sides, then you go, okay, now can I ask you with driving pressure, can you step your right foot over there? But without the backup steps. There's the right foot stepping over there. And so we got, he's learning two different ways to do the exact same thing. I want the pressure to be uncomfortable enough that they choose a different answer, but not so strong that they feel like I made them do it. Like, let's say you're rubbing his head and you want this to mean backup. This isn't gonna work because he's gonna learn to wear the pressure, which is actually what I'm trying to do right now. I want him to wear the pressure, but not be afraid of it, be comfortable with it. I could wave it around him here. It's like, he won't back up off of it. Well, no, there's not enough pressure here to make him uncomfortable if I wanted it to mean backup. I don't want this to mean backup. So it's the pressure level stays here. If I wanted this to mean backup, the pressure increases. Now I'm barely touching him. And then I started touching him a little firmer. He stepped off and then it goes away. And then I can go back to this. No different than if I look at you and I come like this, you're like, he's coming to say something to me. You know what I mean? Where if I just go like this, you know, or even if I'm like, does this feel like any pressure towards you? No, because my focus is over here. They have to learn the difference between intention and energy. He also, when he was a baby, learned to synchronize with his mom's intention. If her life comes up and she leaves off, he's gotta be ready to go off with the herd, right? My instincts of safety are not telling me to be concerned about this horse at all, rearing or striking or anything. I think what happened is it would have been easy to put too much pressure on him and have him feel defensive. And that's probably why he kicked out. And so what I'm saying is like, the trainer didn't even have to have made a mistake. Stuff just happens, you know? It could have been like, it could have happened here if one of the horses took off and got worried and I'm hanging on, haven't unhaltered him yet. And all of a sudden we're, you know, and it's like, I'm probably got to get back and just be safe. Like there's plenty of times where I just got to step away and just be in a safe position because I can tell emotionally the horse is not connected enough to think through anything. And that's why I wanted to start at Liberty because we're not close, he's far away. I can learn him and get to know him at a distance. But for me, I'd be really happy with that session to start us off. And then hopefully we can advance it a little bit more tomorrow. He's also a yearling, so their attention span is pretty short and he did quite a bit of thinking there. So I think I'm just going to finish with a little bit of rubbing and then we'll work our way back to the stall barn. All right, so today is our day two with Rudus. So I'm curious to see how the find the herd game goes today with him. And then he's been a little bit difficult to get his feet trimmed. So we're going to hopefully spend a little bit of time working on his feet too. All right, so a little more subtle today, a little more comfortable. So when he stops following me, I just circle back to his hind quarters. So there's, it's like very clear pressure's on here. I'll keep going here until the front feet start to follow. Pressure's still on. There's a front foot, so I'll spiral back out. No front foot, spiral in. You just play that little game right there. So we can mess with this a bit more, but I think I'm going to go ahead and halter him now. He's trying pretty hard to be connected. And so to me, again, what a place to start with a horse where they're already connecting with you, thinking, putting effort into your idea. But even today, like how quickly he got comfortable with the stick touching him. But you can see it just, doesn't he look so much quieter and gentler when he's in a good frame of mind? And all of a sudden it looks like, oh, everything would be easy to do here. It's not to say that I couldn't have had my hands full yesterday if I had taken a different approach towards him, but he still needs to see me as the leader. And that's where doing this yield, like yielding is four quarters and not just trying to build confidence with tools at all times. We still need to have a balance of building confidence and getting yields. So this is one of my first steps in starting to think about prepping for the legs, but you can see he's getting pretty good about reading my intention now, which to me is fascinating considering the number one thing I've done is run towards him and put pressure on this spot. But it's the timing of it, of when and how you do it. So there's a couple of ways to use the flag. One is to use it as an exposure tool, but in this, in his case, he's not ready for that. He's just learning. And so one of the best things I could do with him right now is just present it to him and see if he gets afraid of it or gets curious about it. And he's getting curious, so we'll take it away. And then the next stage would be to eventually kind of rub towards his withers with it. And so you can see this could be a bit of a harder step, especially if I went quickly with it, but this will be good preparation for bringing our life back down to handle his feet. This does get a little tricky when you're doing it outdoors and the wind grabs it when you're not expecting it to. But this is what I say, he's kind of a sensitive horse. You can see where it doesn't take a lot to bring his life up. So essentially when it's done well, it's like watching paint dry. It's kind of boring and not exciting. I can make this a lot more exciting and get him rearing up and kicking and doing lots of things. And someday I need to expose him and challenge him in his comfort zone. But right now we're in the teaching stage. And so whenever you're in the teaching stage, you gotta think, how would you wanna introduce, say a young child to water, who's afraid of water? Do you throw them into the deep end of the pool and say, good luck? No, you just, you slowly build them up to it. And so here's a little bit of exposure. So he got a little worried, he backed away. And then I stopped and took the pressure away from him. I got a little lick and chew there. But you just do it in these little bite-sized pieces. You can see this is just outside of his comfort zone. Someday I would test it and try to go a little further out of their comfort zone and get a little bigger energy. And that's where I'm trying to build emotional fitness. But I'm not trying to build emotional fitness in him right now. I'm trying to teach him to read my intention versus the energy of the flag. So again, there he got bothered and then he got himself settled again. So he's learning to recover on his own. But essentially there's nothing safe about riding horses. And so you just build in as many of these safety nets as you can. I want him to know that I'll challenge him, but without over facing him or flooding him with anything. All right, so we'll take that. That's pretty good. So I think what I'm gonna do now is just get his life up a little bit and let's see how that goes. So I'm gonna teach him to kind of send out on a circle here. So I'm gonna point and I'll kind of lift the stick, swing it at him. He didn't go, so I'll touch him with it. Now here's the key. Then I'm gonna reset. So I went to max pressure there and he didn't go. So I want him to learn this sequence that I point, I lift up the stick, I swing it towards him and then I touch him with it. And the touch is designed to be just enough that it makes him a little bit uncomfortable, but not so much that it scares him. But pretty soon he's gonna figure out this pattern that this happens, then this happens. And he's gonna start looking for a different response. So you see he's starting to get a little more uncomfortable. He's starting to know something's coming. And then there he made a different choice. So that was his first try. And a lot of people would just go run right past that and go like, well, nothing, hardly anything happened. He took two steps over there. But he took two steps over there, you know? But you can see it's about teaching him this sequence. And then this is what I call, let the pattern do the work. So instead of just sitting here and spanking him until he finally goes somewhere, I'm just gonna keep presenting this idea to him. And you can see, if you just keep the pressure on, like I've kind of changed what I'm doing here. And you can see that he thinks about rearing. To me, there's nothing wrong with getting him to think through pressure a little bit, because he's not trying very hard to understand the idea. But you can see that's just him going to his pranimal instincts to respond. But what I don't like is he's not making any effort to step off of pressure. And so you can see, this is where somebody could get in a pickle with him. And I'm trying to make it as easy as possible. There, he finally made a good choice. I kept trying to adjust my position. Again, you can see where, if it's like, if you keep going with something, then he gets pretty committed to his idea. There's a step off again. And again, that's again, it's going into it, like the rearing didn't work. So he's going into a prey animal position. And if I had to guess, this is the situation she was in when she got kicked, is trying to get him to circle. The first technique that I was using, that works like 95% of the time. But he was like pretty committed to like, no, I'm not going anywhere. But this is, again, this is where he was yesterday, where he gets a little locked up and is like, I'm not really going to try anything different. I'm just going to stick to these, what I'm doing here. I've shown him the answer several times, where he's stepped off over here to the right, but he'll go back to this and kind of get a little locked up. A little baby step right there. So we'll give him a little relief. So this is just a super hard answer for him to arrive at, but this will also be super meaningful to him when he finally steps off the pressure. See, it's interesting that he'll push into it instead of just trying to leave out this way. There we go. To me, he needs to be able to think his way through things instead of just getting that defensive about it. All that just to get that little step off. And that time he stepped off without trying to kick me in the process. That's about as sticky as I've ever seen it for a horse to try to not go off on a circle, especially after I'd already taught him this. Like I'd kind of had it fixed up where it was pretty easy answer for him and he just was not taking me up on it. A little better. This is one of the things I appreciate about you guys is you seemingly understand I felt it necessary to continue there and work through that brace because otherwise that was going to be a huge challenge for somebody. Somebody was going to have to work through that spot. We see how compliant he is now. There we go. But stepping into him with a strong feel on the rope and getting him to step off is going to be a key element to it. Because I just, I set it up where there was absolutely all the information available to him to know, go that way. I tried the normal like teaching approach of set it up and then I right away, I'm like, this isn't working. He's not even, there was nothing about him thinking about going that way whatsoever. So I would have been there for an hour and like with nothing changing. And so when I present it to him in this way, where I point and there's a connection to the rope and then I step in and step that shoulder off, now he's got the memo. You're going to have to just be really clear about that with him. But if he goes to turn his hip towards you, you're going to be ready to get out of the way and then spank. But again, this is why I'd like, you can see how compliant he is now. Like over and over again, he's just saying, yes, no problem. Hey, I'm Ryan Rose. And for over 20 years, I've been helping people improve their communication with their horses. Whether you're wanting to fine tune advanced skills or help solve common behavioral issues. My Patreon page is a great place to get some help. Post a new video there every week. I answer your questions regularly and there's a great community support. So if you want to start your free trial, click the link below and let's get back to the video. But it's tough for people to see that they can't understand why I would go from being so soft and fuzzy wuzzy with him yesterday to being as firm as I was with him today. It's like, well, this is where we're at because he already learned to wear pressure and he's an eight or nine out of 10 committed to not going to my left. And so I got to be at a eight, nine, 10 level of intensity to convince him that that is the option. I just got to keep setting it up in the right way. All right, let's check out the feets. So I just put a feel on this rope and then I can back it up with the halter if I need to. But this isn't like teaching him to hold his foot up for the farrier. What this is doing is testing what his reaction or resistance is. See how he let me have it? Then that's like, you're kind of good to go at that point. And then it's just the basic hoof handling. Part of the issue is we're out of time. Not by my watch, but by his watch. This is now going into the next stage where it's apt to get worse. And then you got to work through and get them back with you again. Because now before I can, I had him in a frame of mind to go to his feet. And now I don't. Does that make sense? You can see that? Yeah. But essentially the main idea with the feet is, step one is can you just rub them up and down their legs and have them leave their feet on the ground and not be afraid of that. Then you go to where you're picking the foot up. And if he were to take his foot away, let him have his foot, step away from him and now make it uncomfortable. Now he's on hot lava. And then you release him back to picking up his feet. So now my energy is up. I'm swinging the rope at him a little bit. Pressure's on. Okay, now watch. Pressure comes down. I soften everything. I take my time here again and re-approach to pick up his foot again. But you see how that changed? And I did put some pressure on and get bigger, but I didn't do it when I was anywhere near being underneath him with his foot in the air. I want him to find relief in that position. But I personally would like to kind of quit him here because I think he's in a... Yeah. And it'll have more meaning about where we left him. Let me just check it one more time. Be sure we're sure. I don't have a stick and string now. And so we'll just see. We're not in any sort of good position here. We're just going to give it a try and see if he understands this. Hey, I like him, kind of who he is innately. You just had that spot in there, but it feels a lot better now. Well, I'm glad we found something to help you out with. We found the spot today. I was told that by multiple people when we got here. So we ran the thing and you did. Yeah, again, I think he's good-minded. I think he's just, a lot of the things, young horse, yearling, he just had that one spot kind of sending off to the left. It wasn't even to the right. It was just to my left. And I think we worked through that and saw how smooth that got. So yeah, I think that was kind of the only spot that he got stuck in. So I think we worked through it, yeah. Smooth sailing from here. No, I think if you go home and do the groundwork fundamentals, you'll be in really good shape. Awesome. It was a pleasure working with you. I'm making a mess. Thanks. Is the lion hungry? Don't bite me, please. I'm not going. You can't make me.