Teresa and I had a seriously interesting time trailer loading Black Jack today. Apparently Teresa had been trying to load him for 2 hours before I got there. He would get 2 feet in, stand there, but never put his hind feet in.

At the last high school equestrian team practice, Black Jack would put his front feet in, then fly out backwards over and over again. I told him that that was a “learned behavior” and that it wasn’t really him. Black Jack is a right brain introvert, primarily, meaning that he hides his emotions. All the rapid in/out movement he was displaying was indicative of a right brain introvert (ie., an emotional introvert), trying just to keep moving so the handler didn’t get mad.  He wasn’t really cognizant of what he was doing, however. When he finally did get it, it was as much of a surprise to him as it was to us. Fortunately, with Lavonne there to close the door, when he was in he was in for the ride.

I continue to be really interested in what happens when a horse is treated like it has a different horsenality than it has. You get movement that makes the horse look like an emotional extrovert but it’s still a right brain introvert on the inside. The horse still has thick emotional barriers up and his mind is closed off to the world.

The perfect example of this is when I went to pick up Mini from her old owner. Mini was running all around the round pen like a banshee. I thought, “Ok, we have a right brain extrovert on our hands.” I’ve never had it take me longer than 20 minutes to get a horse to join up with me. It’s not the way I like to do things but it works when the horse won’t let you get close enough to feed it a treat.

So, I did pressure on/pressure off with Mini. 2+ hours later, I still hadn’t caught her. She was sweaty and her poor duck-billed-looking feet were probably getting sore. At that time, she hadn’t even stopped moving long enough for me to see that there were porcupine quills stuck in her nose. I can’t imagine how painful it was to be huffing and puffing with quills going from the outside of her nose through to her gums.

We finally tricked her into sticking her head through a lasso. Once she had the rope on, she changed gears completely. We haltered her and she led right into the trailer. The way she froze and stared straight ahead when she has the halter or made it sudden clear that she was a different horsenality than I had first thought. I was trying to use join-up/hook-on, a game for emotional extroverts, on an emotional introvert. Mini’s brain had never been on. All the running around was just pushing her more and more introverted.

I believe what caused Mini to behave like a right brain extrovert was round pen training. On this particular day she was chased into the round pen with her herd, the other horses were sorted out, and she was left alone. The minute I entered the pen she new what to do - run in circles. Since Mini was from a Welsh breeder, she was likely taught basic round penning so that the breeder could get photos. The breeders hold a whip in one hand and a camera in the other. They try to make the pony look really fancy by chasing it around harshly so it flags its tail and takes bounding strides. To someone with a trained eye, they can see the pony is scared, but most people think they look wild and elegant. Because Mini honestly believed that she knew what to do with a round pen, I didn’t stand a chance of trying to catch her with join up. She thought the whole point was to run until the person opened the gate and let her go. She had been taught never to ask questions, just to stare straight ahead and keep running, lest the whip lash her heels.

To date, Mini’s primary reaction to a person walking into her pen is to run in a circle around the perimeter. This is an incredibly common problem. Lunging is the only thing most breeders teach their babies. They put them in the round pen just so they can get photos of them to get them sold. Thus, the only thing a horse knows growing up is how to get chased around. Mini, at age 4, hardly knew how to give her feet and could hardly lead at all. In 4 years, her only real training experience was running from a whip, so of course she thinks lunging is the answer to everything.

Right brain extroverts, on the other hand, run because it’s natural instinct. Flighty breeds like Arabians have a “run now, ask later” approach to life. If you turn an Arab out in an arena, they will almost always gallop for 20 minutes before coming to the gate and hanging out. A right brain introvert usually paces the gate without ever doing much running.

Black Jack, who is naturally an emotional introvert, acted like an emotional extrovert when presented with the trailering situation. Like Mini, he had been trained to move forward at all costs. Like Mini associated the round pen with running around, regardless of the fact that I was not carrying a whip, Black Jack associated the trailer with frantic in/out motions, regardless of the fact that we didn’t have a whip. Because the techniques used on these horses were for the wrong horsenalities, not only did the approaches used on them not work, the approach, in fact, firmly ingrained behaviors completely unrelated to the desired outcome. Now Black Jack thinks the trailer is a pedestal for some strange dance and Mini thinks everything with fences is a round pen. Because of the techniques the trainer used, the horses were not easily able to associate the stimulus with their behavior, and thusly developed superstitious beliefs about what the stimulus was cuing.

Another example of superstitious behavior is pigs that paw, dance, or shake their heads in front of feed troughs. Troughs at commercial pork farms often have sensors that deliver food when a pig advances on the trough. The pigs all wear electronic id tags so that no pig gets fed too many times in one day. Because the pigs have no idea how electric tags work, they associate whatever they were doing at the time when the food came with the food delivery, thereafter maintaining the superstitious belief that pawing/shaking their heads/dancing causes food to fall from the sky.

Black Jack’s superstitious belief was that dancing in and out of the trailer was what was wanted. When he finally realized that Teresa wasn’t going to hit him for not dancing, he stopped trying all together. Then we saw the right brain introvert freeze. He got halfway in the trailer and froze in fear. It can look like stubbornness. The only reason that I knew it wasn’t was that he had a stressed wrinkle to his eyebrows and because I’ve spent enough time around him in other situations.

It was very difficult to come up with a means of getting Black Jack in the trailer that used clicker training and not natural horsemanship. It’s hard to clicker train when the horse is frozen in place and giving you absolutely nothing to click for. What I opted for was training a behavior that he needed to learn anyway and using getting to go to the trailer as a reward for progressing at that behavior.

I started asking Black Jack to sidepass from the off side. There are several reasons I chose this behavior:

1) It would help bring his hind legs up underneath him, making it easier for him to lift his feet up into the trailer.

2) It would help him separate his right hind foot from his left hind foot so that he would be more comfortable stepping one hind foot up at a time.

3) It was physically tiring, making getting to go to the trailer more rewarding.

It took about three spanks with the lead rope to wake him up and get him stepping sideways. I don’t like teaching things with spanking but experience with my Mustang, Ilo, has taught me that with some horses, particularly introverted Mustangs, sometimes the simplest method for the horse to understand is spanking. I always choose the simplest method for the horse to understand, even if it is spanking, because (at least currently) I believe that hours or days of confusing training sessions do more emotional damage than a couple of quick spanks in the first 5 minutes of the lesson, followed by 55 minutes of positive reinforcement. If you don’t get the behavior, however, you can’t click for it. So, I used I couple of quick spanks to get Black Jack sidepassing as was able to keep him sidepassing off of rein aids for the rest of the session. That’s how it worked with Ilo also.

At first Black Jack sidepassed only 1-2 steps, 6 times before earning a trip to the trailer. I was clicking for enthusiasm- watching his face and feeling his movements and clicking the least introverted moment. When had that moment, I sealed it with a click and attempted to carry it over to the trailer. Black Jack froze about 3 times in a row. I then, with my “simplest method for the horse to understand” approach, stepped back to his midsection and spun my lead rope to get him to step up into the trailer. From that point on, if he stepped into the trailer immediately when I walked at it, I threw my lead rope on the floor of the trailer and he got to play the targeting game. If he didn’t show that he was willing to try, by aiming for the trailer and stepping up, we went back to clicking for enthusiasm with sidepassing.

By the end of the session, Black Jack went from 1-2 steps of sidepass 6 times at a walk, to about 6 steps one time at a trot. While it was taking him 6 attempts to get enthusiastic at the start, it was only taking 1 attempt by the end. Definite improvement in that area.

Black Jack also started out getting to play the targeting game for 10-15 clicks and ended with playing it for 3-5 clicks. It was interesting to see how he really didn’t care to play it for that long. He always wanted to play it for a few clicks, though.

After getting him in the trailer one time, we lost some ground when I gave him back to Teresa. He just didn’t believe that she has the same plan I did. It was also rough because at this point, everyone was tired and frustrated. It’s always hard to know if you should quit or not in these situations. I was thinking to myself, I’ve never had a trailer loading take longer than 3 hours if I stuck it out… Of course, I had the thought of Mini and her learned behavior in the back of my mind, wondering if this would prove to be as big of a hurdle. Since Black Jack had been in the trailer numerous times, I figured it was worth staying the full 3 hours to see.

After he started freezing and refusing to move all together again, I brought out my carrot stick. I felt he needed to have a point of comparison and to know that I was making a conscious choice NOT to do this (natural horsemanship trailer loading) to him. I was not surprised at all to find that, at the sight of the stick, Black Jack immediately started the in/out dance again, a glazed look on his face. After a frenzied 5 minutes or so of that, Black Jack had an epiphany. He looked right at me and his face said, “Neither one of us wants it this way, do we? Can you help me?” And I thought, “That was a try, that is what I have been clicking you for, that honest enthusiasm, that kind of thinking.”

I walked into the trailer and he started to freeze again, though his front feet followed me inside. I held out a target, very easy for him to touch, inches from his muzzle. His eyes lit up. “You mean I can still play this game??” “Yes,” I thought, “the natural horsemanship episode was a reference point, not me going Dr. Jekyl Mr. Hyde.” It seemed to restore quite a bit of his faith to have me offer the target. I offered it a second time and he walked into the trailer, and stood, with all 4 inside.

My hope is that Black Jack will now have enough faith to start asking questions and communicating his thoughts and feelings. I feel like we had to go through the wiggle dance (which Teresa conquered originally on her own), back to the innate behavior of freezing, and click our way to the surface. I’ll be interested to see if sticking it out the full 3 hours makes a difference. I’ve had other 3 hour days with horses that I swore paid off twenty-fold, but since starting clicker training I’ve been questioning the need for that. In this case, because Teresa and Black Jack were fully entrenched in the problem when I arrived, and because they were up against the high school equestrian team meet deadline (they have to trailer out tomorrow), I felt it made sense to give it a try. In the future I hope to have more complete clicker methods for dealing with this sort of situation - what to do when the horse simply stops trying. However, my thought is that I will rarely be in a situation when the horse completely stops trying, if I keep my training sessions short and build a solid base. Of course, Ilo is notorious for simply refusing to try, so I am bound to keep pondering this balance between desiring never to pull on or spank a horse and wanting to communicate with the horse with the simplest method for the horse to understand.