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FEBRUARY 2006 • VOLUME 6 • HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
My "Ah-ha" Moment
Genevieve Mckay
When I boarded the plane to California, enroute to the Monty Roberts International Learning Center where I was to spend a month as an intern, I had only one goal in mind. I desperately needed to find a way to "make" my new horse Messenger listen to me. He had to stop biting, kicking, striking and generally trying to kill me whenever I asked him to do what he was told!
I had one month to try to soak up as much knowledge as possible before heading back to the battleground.... in this case a small farm on Vancouver Island in Canada where Messenger was busy terrorizing his caretakers as well as the other animals.
Arriving at the MRILC was like stepping into a different world. I had never been to California before so arriving there after enduring the dreary wet winter rains up North was like entering paradise. The farm was beautiful and everything there was set up to make the horses feel as happy and as comfortable as possible. Most of the stable hands had originally come up from Mexico, and I had never seen such quiet, thoughtful and capable horse people in my life. They were often dealing with extremely hot and reactive race horses fresh from the track for retraining. Though these horses would arrive rearing, bolting and biting, I never heard one handler even raise his voice. After a few days of firm, gentle treatment, those horses would be leading as gently as lambs.
As part of our internship we joined one of the week-long Join-Up clinics for classroom work and sessions in the roundpen. At one point we were introduced to an exercise called "mirroring" where the horse is loose in the arena and you have to ask them to go over or through as many obstacles as possible while just using your body language.
When it was our turn for the exercise, our instructor, Charity, asked me and two other interns to go and catch our horse, an unbroken mustang gelding named Mustang Sally, from the pasture.
We knew that Sally had originally been brought in from the wild, joined-up with and halter broken but never broken to ride; he was used just for teaching people body language in the round pen.
Just as we headed towards his pasture, Charity casually added, "Oh, and he's sometimes a bit difficult to catch."
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February 2006 • Volume 6
HORSES FOR LIFE™
Published Monthly
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