How does your horse react to a scary situation?

Yup defo.
Before, he would usually rear, spin and b****r off!
Now, he remains calm and although stops and stares he waits for my instruction.
He is much less spooky to things than he used to be, now its more like he is curious!

(thats it in a nutshell, although there are variants to each situation because I've learnt how to deal with the various degrees of fear he is displaying)
 
Completely different horse!!

At the slightest thing, even his own shadow once (I kid you not!) he would jump out of his skin, turn and run the other way, and if I was still on board after the jump spin and leg it stage, then good luck to me hanging on!!

He will still sometimes slip back to old tendencies but it takes alot more to get him there and his reactions aren't a patch on what they used to be.

It has been a long slow process but i have loved every minute of it.
 
My favorite horse is the worlds "spookiest". She spooks because she enjoys it, and often "fakes a spook" if she can't find something convenient to really scare her. One of her greatest pleasures is to "freak out" at anything she can conceive as frightful, which is anything new or changed.

Today when I ride her people will comment on "how calm" she is around strange objects. I chuckle because I can still feel/sense those spooks but today I'm "proactive" enough to keep them unseen by outsiders. A horse like this will demand your total attention, much like driving a "sporty car" in comparison to a "sedan".

So I would say that my horse didn't change. Her 'over reactions' are still there if I miss the signals needed to prevent them. The thing that changed to help my horses reaction to spooky things, was me. :)

Are you having problems with a spooky horse HashRouge?


Keep on, keepin on

Jack
 
Yesterday as I waited by the in-gate, on my Tiny Pony, a girl and her 17.2 TB eventer crashed spectacularly at fence 7. The huge bay horse galloped straight towards us in a panic and didn't see the fenceline around the arena. He hit it and took out several hundred yards of plastic chainlink, which rattled and sizzled like hotwire burning pony-flesh, less than ten yards away from us. Tiny Pony was terrified, as you would expect from a mind-blown pony who was completely uncatchable very recently. This was her first event, her first time in a crowded warm-up, and she is generally always expecting terrible things to happen.

Her response was to take a step back, flex to the right, and wait.

Drama over.

Honestly, the NH, 'spook in place' work has saved both our lives many times over now.
 
still get lots of dramatic snorting but generally stormy will follow my lead if there is something scary going on. it takes time to build this trust but the more you do it and nothing ate them the more they trust your judgement. well thats the theory anyway, as long as its not pigs!!!!!
 
Im quite liucky my horse hardley spooks at anything & if he does he usually diggs his heels in or will decide to take flight depending on his mood,the thing he is totaly scared of is squirals he freaks at them:D
 
Mine has always been good and very trusting but since NH is better. Will squeeze through small gaps beside tractors/lorries. Yesterday we rode past some orange tape that blew out into the road and nearly touched his legs, he just looked at it.
 
Are you having problems with a spooky horse HashRouge?


Keep on, keepin on

Jack
No, I was just interested! I sometimes wonder if NH would have got me and Lou round our spooking issues sooner (she always stops when she sees something scary, and my old reaction was to tighten my reins and tap with my heels, which just led to her going backwards as fast as possible). I think I read an interview with an NH person several years ago (can't for the life of me remember who) where they were talking about how important it is to give horses time to consider scary situations rather than just expecting them to listen to your aids and forget their fear, and I started trying it with Lou to great success. I never studied it properly, but liked the idea as does my horse (I don't even know if I do it 'right'!) so I was just intrigued to see how NH has helped other people deal with 'spooks'.
I think I agree with the person who says it is the way that we react that is the most important thing though, and that's certainly what changed with me :).
 
My arab will freeze, think about it, wait for reassurance and then walk on. Did that his first time out on the road so very proud of him :)
 
What makes me smile as a driver is riders, who, when the horse starts to even begin to thing about napping or spooking, pat and tell him in a sing song voice that he is a good boy, thus rewarding the behaviour.

Mine know I am the scariest thing they are ever likely to meet, and I am on their side :D :D
 
Well, the NH-type approach to spooking that I follow, is two-sided. One is to despook the horse to lots of different things, so they're less likely to feel fear. The other is to acknowledge that there will be fear, and to teach a particular response to that fear - other than bolting away.

Despooking - lowering the fear - is all done in stages, introducing to a scary object .... then in time the horse hopefully gets the idea that so many different things that seemed scary turned out not to be, that eventually, he starts to think 'hey ho, perhaps that new thing what I've never seen before isn't scary either'.

Then the second part, the better response to fear, is where the one-rein-stop comes in. You practice it to death at a halt, then a walk, then trot - it's a simple flex of pony's nose to your boot - over and over. Then when the poop hits the fan, and you've got a big wreck coming at you full speed, you simply remove yourself out of its path if you need to, and flex to a halt. You have a 'safe exercise' to return to whenever you can feel fear rising in the horse.
 
You have a 'safe exercise' to return to whenever you can feel fear rising in the horse.

This is very much the way a friend trains her pony team. When they get into hot water or a crash, (HDT) they are taught to stand still. It's safer than running.

I remember her breaking the pole with the pony team, something that can be scary for horses and driver. The ponies were flustered, but they stood like rocks while they were untangled. It takes a lot to train a flight animal to reacts by standing....but it can be done.
 
I think it would be a significantly more difficult task to achieve driven ! Ridden, it's relatively simple because you have a lot more ways to redirect movement to hand. I can't even imagine how to adapt that to driven training !
 
Can't say i've really done any NH, i do join-up with both my two. Then de-sensitize them and all the rest of it. But Nimby who is absolutely 1million% bombproof in all situations. For example yesterday we were galloping on the endge of a field racing a train :cool:, and he's plodded past fire engines with all the lights and noise going.

One day i was hacking out with my mate on a quiet but wide country lane when a flat bed transit with a not folded up trampoline on the back started coming up the road. (later found out they were from the gypsy camp and had jsut stolen said tramperline!) I remeber seeing it coming round a slight curve in the road and looking at the lower wishbones etc (i know a bit about cars) and seeing how much load they were under. And thinking "boy he's not guna slow down without a fuss". Anyway i then remember hearing him left off the throttle then i i remember hearing it rev up again, he then aimed the van at us.

Now normally Nimby wouldn't bat an eyelid at a speeding vehicle, no matter how fast or what it looks like. And i didn't have enough time to react to what was happening. But good ol' Noo bolted out of the way, bolted onto the verge and carried on up the road a bit before finally stopping. I was so shaken up but wasn't injured. If he hadn't done that then.. well doesn't bare thinking about really.

So IMO it's not always a bad thing that they do everything to get the hell out of the way and occasionally react differently.

He's never reacted to a scarey situation in that way before or since, normally he'd always wait for my cue as to whether we should get out the way or not.
 
Forest spins around and runs off. Usually the spin is so dramatic that I lose balance and take some time to pull him up. That or he jumps out infront of a moving vehicle! :rolleyes:
 
The first time I took Belle out alone (too soon really) and we came across a deep gully and she ran backwards! I got off and walked her and she was fine, since then she just gives it a hard stare. Generally she gives things a wide berth if possible, things like scary traffic signs that weren't there before need to be passed along the middle of the road. When in company she finds very few things scary.
 
Both of mine are really good with proper scary things, if they're worried I always try and give them the time they need to come to terms with it, or get off and provide a lead if we simply don't have time or it isn't a sensible place to dawdle. They almost never back up, spin, or run, but how much of that is down to them simply being nice brave trusting horses and how much is down to handling I don't know. More the former than the latter I suspect.

Neither are immune to spooks at 'silly' things though now and again, Tess has a particular thing about stuff on the ground and once came to a dead stop from canter at a patch of sunlight on the floor of a wood :D
 
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