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August 2007 • VOLUME 24 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
Often it can seem as if training our horses is fraught with frustration. Frustration sometimes because we do not understand why our horses are giving us so much difficulty. Sandy had decided to move stables. She debated about whether she should ride over or should she try to borrow or rent a trailer. After all it was only seven miles. Mind you it was seven miles that she had never ridden before. What if there was a problem? What if something spooked her horse?
Sandy hemmed and hawed trying to decide: the risk of riding a spooky horse over ground that she had never been over before, or trying to put her mare one more time in the trailer. Visions of the last time she trailered her mare kept wafting through her mind. Visions of the embarrassment and frustration of spending hours and hours standing in the trailer, trying to convince her mare to get on. Why was she so stubborn?
Even the breeder at the barn was amazed by how nothing, just absolutely nothing was going to convince that horse to take one single step on the trailer. It just didn't make any sense. After all, she had no problems the last time getting her to go onto the trailer to get her to the breeders. Ultimately Sandy decided to ride, it just was not worth it to go through all of that again. Does any of this sound familiar? Again and again, all of us have seen horses that just refuse to go on the trailer. If not our own horse, many others.
Why is it that we have so many problems trailering our horses? Some horses don't seem to have any problem at all. But others ... it can be an exercise in patience each and every time we want to move our horses. Moving is stressful enough, worrying about whether the next barn will be all that we need them to be, trying to get a trailer to move our horses, without the ultimate in frustration of not being able to get our horses onto the trailer. Research into how our horses learn offers us both an explanation and the solution to why we encounter these kind of problems with our horses.
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