feeling guilty about not listening

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em n stormy

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Nov 6, 2008
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:(bit of a long winded story, sorry!! last night after a long hard day at work i got to the yard with my daughter to bring our horses in. it was cold, dark and torrential rain. to cut a long story short, my daughters horse planted his feet outside his gate and refused to move and stormy followed suit. he was snorting and spinning and eyes were rolling. after 10 mins of this i confess that i got really cross and shouted and stropped and flicked my beloved stormy with the end of the lead rope telling him loudly to 'get on'!!!
we were making very slow progress along the track when a friend came by and told me that there was a trailer full of pigs parked ahead! Suddenly i felt extremely guilty as pigs are stormy's absolute hate and he could obvious smell and hear them in the dark. I feel really guilty about not recognising the difference between real fear and being silly about nothing. and as soon as my attitude changed, so did his. we eventually made it into the stable where I made a huge fuss of him, telling him how brave he was and gave him a big handful of nuts to compensate for my stupid behaviour.
now feeling really stupid that i did not immediately recognise that he was scared out of his skin, and think i should give up all this nh lark because obviously when i am stressed, tired and wet it all goes out of the window! he couldnt have told me any clearer that there was a serious issue. all i can do is apologise to him and hope that my promises to listen in the future are taken seriously. am i being too hard on myself??
 
em n stormy said:
am i being too hard on myself??
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Yes!! Much!!!!!:):)

Firstly I assume you have no halo and cannot expect to be perfect. But also tbh your horse needed to trust you despite his fear, and he did and nothing bad happened to him. So maybe not so bad after all??
 
I totally understand how you feel - we have all done it - we all have moments when we arent the people we would hope to be (and not just around horses) Its OK to not be perfect so stop feeling bad.

The important thing is you are trying to be the best for your horse and its a journey for both of you. The fact he went anyway says a lot about your relationship. You had no way of knowing there was a truckfull of pigs and as you are not a horse (you're blooming good at typing if you are!) then you are forgiven for occasionally misreading the language. The fact you are trying to understand him is more important than getting the message misconstrued sometimes. He obviously isnt holding it against you, so neither should you! You've told yourself off (thoroughly it seems!), now get ready to figure out what you can learn from your mistake and move on.... :D
 
Yes you are....but it is a lovely trait that I wish more horse owners had.

The first thing I always do is question what I did....was I wrong, did I handle it badly, blah blah blah........

The downside to having this attidude is it makes you overanalyse things a bit too much but IMO it also makes you are nicer owner!

Nothing I hate more than peeps blaming their poor horse for somthing they caused or could have handled differently!

But, yes.........you are being hard on yourself....I am familiar with the signs (lol!!). We all get tired, we all get stressed and sometimes no matter how hard we try it can affect how we work round our horses.....the lovely thing is that you felt guilty about not listening to him, which you normally would do when less tired. But you told him all this when you got to the stable, so he knows you're sorry....so stop beating yourself up.
 
the fact you are feeling guilty shows you are a very caring owner, but i think you need to give yourself a bit of a break we all make mistakes but at least you know you made a mistake!!

stop beating yourself up :):):)
 
thanx guys, feeling better already. i guess its worse because we have had a lot of problems in the past and it took margrit coates (the world renowned animal communicator and healer) to sort us out, and it seems the major problem was that i wasnt listening when he telling me that there was a problem. i made him a promise then that i would do the very best i could and we have had the most amazing relationship ever since. good job his hooves are too big to use the keypad of a phone or i can imagine what he would be saying to her now!!!
 
em n stormy said:
I feel really guilty about not recognising the difference between real fear and being silly about nothing. am i being too hard on myself??
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Yes - you are being too hard on yourself - but I come at it from the the side. The horse is never "being silly about nothing". Fear is very real to the horse, even when the apparent cause seems "silly" to us. I think the only thing you could have done better was to not get cross. Moving the feet (telling him to "get on") was the right thing to do - you just did it with a less than ideal attitude, and your crossness probably made the situation worse. However, you resolved it and got him back to the stable, and you noticed that when your attitude changed, so did his. Next time, just skip the getting cross bit! :p

I'm afraid you can't give up NH - it's now part of the way you think! :D To be not NH you'd have to say that he was stupid to be afraid of the pigs, and ignore his fears. Once you've started on the road of understanding where the horse is coming from, you can't un-learn it. You can throw away the carrot stick (or whatever you use) but you can't stop understanding - so there's no turning back, I'm afraid! :cool:
 
Kate F. said:
Yes - you are being too hard on yourself - but I come at it from the the side. The horse is never "being silly about nothing". Fear is very real to the horse, even when the apparent cause seems "silly" to us. I think the only thing you could have done better was to not get cross. Moving the feet (telling him to "get on") was the right thing to do - you just did it with a less than ideal attitude, and your crossness probably made the situation worse. However, you resolved it and got him back to the stable, and you noticed that when your attitude changed, so did his. Next time, just skip the getting cross bit! :p

I'm afraid you can't give up NH - it's now part of the way you think! :D To be not NH you'd have to say that he was stupid to be afraid of the pigs, and ignore his fears. Once you've started on the road of understanding where the horse is coming from, you can't un-learn it. You can throw away the carrot stick (or whatever you use) but you can't stop understanding - so there's no turning back, I'm afraid! :cool:
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I was gonna throw my two pence worth in but then read this and it is more or less exactly what I was gonna say so Ill just leave it at that!:D;):cool:
 
Kate F. said:
I'm afraid you can't give up NH - it's now part of the way you think! :D To be not NH you'd have to say that he was stupid to be afraid of the pigs, and ignore his fears. Once you've started on the road of understanding where the horse is coming from, you can't un-learn it. You can throw away the carrot stick (or whatever you use) but you can't stop understanding - so there's no turning back, I'm afraid! :cool:
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Kate exactly what I thought, you cant give it up it is part of you now. At least you recognized the situation you had been in and felt bad and know to listen more in future. We have all done this at one time or other. Sometimes I override what he is telling me if I have to, and other times we do it his way. Bit of both, if that had been an emergency situation you did well with your bonding because he still put faith in you and went past them.

You have had a good test and you both came out of it smiling having both learnt something.
 
thanks guys!! feeling better about things now, i know what you are all saying is right and that now i have started to 'listen' to horses, i can never stop trying to figure out what they are saying!! just need to take a step back when i get stressed/ wet/ tired and think about what i am doing. lesson firmly learnt!! incidently, i know that horses aren't really silly about nothing but sometimes stormy can blow things out of all proportion and if you give him time, he then realises that its not really that scary after all! thats what i meant, just didnt explain it very well!!
 
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