I got this question posted and wanted to address it directly. Perhaps this will help anyone else with the same problem!
Dani Writes :
“I am currently exercising a very difficult horse. He is not vicious, but is very difficult to catch.
When i go into the field, I approach him quietly, give him a pat and slip the head collar on. He NEVER moves away from me when I do this. I can then calmly lead him towards the gate of the field. However, sometime before i get there he stops. He plants his feet and will not move forwards, or to either side. The more i pull on the lead rope, the more he walks backwards. If I stop, he stops. If I try to walk close to his side in order to flick his hindquarters with the end of the lead rope, he turns them away from me. He never appears scared, in fact he normally sighs a lot during this encounter, as if bored with my attempts! From that moment on, it is almost impossible to get him to move on, even with food. Eventually, if I persist, he turns and trots away. I can then walk up to him again, without him moving away, and can do the same as before, but he always stops again. The article above did not help my problem, but after reading the one about resistance, I believe he is demonstrating weight resistance. I can only go to him once a week, so can’t even lead him in and out a few times a day without riding him, so that he doesn’t link my catching him to him doing work. Any ideas how I can get him to walk all the way out? Any tips would be very helpful!”
Hi Dani,
I hope that I am understanding the question correctly, I got a little confused when you mention that if you persist at asking him to move, he eventually turns and trots away from you. I am wondering if you mean that you do not have him on a lead, but simply by the halter? Or perhaps he protests strongly enough to get out of your hands?
Horses are very patient creatures, they don’t live on the same kind of time clock that we do. They do not wear watches, but instead simply live in the moment rather than being caught up in the concerns of commitments, appointments, work and so on. Lucky them! We are a mismatched pair in comparison, when often our lives run by the time clock. We rush from one thing to the other based on the consequence of a minute’s passing. If we are two minutes late it were as if the world were coming to an end, there is no room for give. Many people live on a much more relaxed schedule, but it is rare when we live the same as the horse does, with no regard to time keeping track of the progress of our lives.
Because of this, it is very easy for the horse to take advantage of our time commitments to simply protest long enough that we either get too frustrated, get too late, are too tired, etc. If I were to tell you it will take 20 hours straight to fix the problem, you would probably throw your hands up in the air and consider it too great a task to be achieved, but if I were to say the same to the horse he would likely ask me what an hour was and why it mattered.
Weight resistance can play a part, but you have to keep in mind that anything that is expressed in the horse’s body first began in the mind. Weight resistance is easily overcome if you are able to find the original cause, which is the horse’s mind. Sometimes we are given horses to work with that we do not know their history, and not that it is any great help because we cannot change what has happened but only move forward from where we are now. Without understanding where the horse came from we get to wander through the dark at times guessing where the issue is, how it is related to the hurdles we are presently faced with and so on. At least with a history we get a small flashlight to probe around with possibilities and rule them out first.
Weight resistance is only a symptom and not the cause. Because of that we still have to address the cause before we can solve the symptom…
I’ve had a similar encounter with one of my horses, fully dedicated to the art of postponing work, leaving the pasture, going anywhere that I had determined, or otherwise complying with being led in any direction. First he would feign that he had to pee, so there he would stand all spread eagle, as I waited patiently for the inevitable.. only, it never arrived. He would have stood there for hours. Just dallying the day away. Initially it was quite unnerving and I was convinced something was wrong with him, and that he did in fact have to urinate but was somehow unable. After several vet checks, he was all clear, not one thing wrong with him. In fact he could have been the epitome of health at that point. Go figure. Back to square one. I could get him out of the stance if I asked him to step to the side in either direction, but then he would immediately resume it just one step later.
Jerry seemed to understand perfectly what he was doing. He never looked upset, and like you describe, almost gave an impression of being bored. Great, so now I have a horse who not only will not move, but he is consumed with boredom as a result of my efforts to alleviate the problem!
You have to remember, we tend to create areas of habit for our animals. The pasture is for eating, sleeping and otherwise relaxing. The barn is for grooming, graining, farrier and vet interaction. The arena or trail is for work (or play…). All the in-between areas tend to have little or no distinct meaning. Our own life is laid out like this. Home is where we eat, sleep, relax. Work is, well, where we work. The car is what transports us between the two, but the road we drive on doesn’t have much personal meaning to us. We haven’t interacted at every place along it and so we don’t have a negative or positive opinion of it. The same goes for the horse, he understands perfectly well where he is headed, and can choose to resist that, but the road to his work hasn’t been defined as work, play, rest, food, etc yet. For some horses it is very well defined as food, as demonstrated by the horse dragging his owner down for a bite of grass along the way.
The key to solving an issue such as this, is to break the line between where you work and where you play. Your ultimate destination, and the need to achieve it, has gotten in the way of a perfect opportunity. Remember, every interaction you have with the horse is a training session of some sort. It applies the same way with people, every interaction they learn what they can or cannot do. Your horse has at some point learned that he can get away with this, and you haven’t paid enough attention to the small signs leading up to it until they have finally planted their hooves in the dirt and refused to move! That is okay, let it be a lesson in paying closer attention to the small details. But now what does one do to correct it? That is very simple!
Take the chance to play with him. Don’t make it about getting him up from the field, that is already a battle he knows he can win, by doing absolutely nothing. Make your interaction about something much smaller that you can accomplish. For example, make it about getting him to shift his weight from side to side without moving a foot and on a light connection. That can then evolve into getting him to take a step to the side with one foot in one direction and then back into the other direction. Again, make sure you keep your connection light. You want to think of the connection like a phone, you want to be able to hear your horse as well as talk to him through it, and if you yell (use a lot of force or effort) he will be less inclined to listen and you won’t be able to hear what he is saying over the tone of your voice.
The key here is to make it a fun game, think about discovering something new in this. Be observant! What else can you learn from the exercise? All too often we get caught up in training the horse and we forget that he has a lot of wisdom to impart on us as well, if we only listen, if we allow ourselves to be curious. What would you do with him if you were only a kid still? When we become adults we understand the idea of work all too well and forget about playing.
Don’t make it about getting him to leave the pasture. Make it about the interaction between you two. When the relationship is solid between you two, in that you are listening to him and he is listening to you (the first part of that is the most important, we can focus on getting the horse to listen to us but it is a moot point if we aren’t listening ourselves, that has to come first!), everything comes easy. You don’t even have to think about working for it, you just think about it and it happens. Whether it is catching him or doing flying lead changes. That is the one trick that most instructors cannot teach, which is how to build a solid relationship with the horse, how to listen to the horse, and that is why instead they sell methods to training the horse. If you can listen to the horse everything comes as easy as breathing.
I hope this helps, would love to hear back about your progress!
Erica K. Frei
Author “Centered Self, Centered Horse : A Simple Guide To Horsemanship“
