Natural Horsemanship: Trailering

Understand Horse Time for Successful Trailering

BY WARREN WECHSLER

Learning by Chance is presented in part by The Natural Gait, near Marquette,Iowa, the ideal place for recreational riders. www.thenaturalgait.com

Ask horse owners where they lack confidence in their horsemanshipskills, and often the response will be getting their horse into a trailer fortraveling. Notice how often ads selling horses use phrases like “loadslike a dream” or “loads and unloads easily.” Yet in my experience,there is a disconnect between the reassuring ads and the bleak reality formost people. Why is smooth trailering such an important quality in a horse?Because loading an unwilling or frightened horse can be a nightmare for bothhorse and human.

Trailering my horse is a lesson that I’ve recently learned. My daughterand I signed up for a weekend clinic about 25 miles from our home, so amonth before the clinic was to begin, I began my trailer loading lessons.I’ll share the specifics later in this article about how I made out,but first let’s look at the principle behind the tactics. It’snot what you might think. The magic is not how you position the horse orthe trailer, nor is it about buckets of grain as enticements, and it’snot about brute force either (definitely a losing proposition for the human.)

The key is to understand horse time. A horse’s sense of time ismuch different than a human’s sense of time. People are driven bythe clock. We awake at a certain time by the alarm clock, we drive 23 minutesto work, we eat lunch from noon to one o’clock, and we run staffmeetings Thursdays at three p.m. sharp! Then it’s the weekend andwe want to take our horse on a trail ride, and we expect our horse to loadon our schedule.

That doesn’t work for horses. Horses have a very different senseof time. They don’t live in the past, nor are they anticipating orliving in the future. They are living in the moment. They survive by beingalert to situations in which they find themselves now, and when they areled to a trailer, they are thinking, “This is a dark, enclosed space,and who knows what predator lurks inside that space. How do I escape?”

Do you see the potential train wreck approaching? Human time and horsetime are colliding. And do you know how to avoid the wreck? Be on horsetime. Think like a horse. This is one of the truly great aspects of excellenthorsemanship—that humans, when with horses, make the choice to livein the moment, which is not always easy. Not to get too philosophical,but some say the key to enlightenment is living in the moment. “Behere now,” Baba Ram Das once said. That’s the way horses are.And it’s critical to understand this concept in terms of every interactionwith them. When we’re trying to help our horses into the trailer,if it takes an hour for them to learn it the first time, then we must prepareto patiently invest that time. We’d like them to learn it in threeminutes, and maybe six months or a year from now, our horse will load inthree minutes.

With my Arabian gelding Chance, who is my teacher more than I am his teacher,my trailering experience was quite remarkable. My goal was to move fromone comfortable experience to the next without caring how long the processtook. Chance would let me know. On day one, I brought Chance in to be groomed,picked his feet (which took almost an hour the first time I tried it twoyears ago and now takes about two minutes—another testimony to horsetime), and led him out to the trailer. We walked around it a few times,and I stopped at the back of the open trailer and let him check it out.He snorted, peered inside, and moved forward the tiniest bit. I praisedhim, walked him back to the barn, and turned him loose.

On day two, I did exactly the same things, and when he moved forward atthe trailer, I encouraged him with a calm voice. He placed first one frontfoot inside the trailer and then a second, and stood quietly. After aboutten seconds, when I could feel that he was becoming slightly less comfortable,I encouraged him to back out, and that was that.

On day three, again following the same routine with no expectationson my part, Chance walked right inside the trailer, moved all theway forward, and stood quietly, looking at me with alertness, calmness,and softness. Chance achieved a major milestone that day and did it hisway, on his time frame.

And what did I learn from Chance? It’s not about time. It’sabout now.

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name

Email

Website

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment