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What To Do With A
Horse Who Constantly Pulls Back
There are a lot
of horses with a problem that I call pull-back. There are also few
people who view it as a priority problem to fix. Many people just
live with it and keep buying new equipment. In fact, it is a
dangerous situation for both the handler and the horse, not to
mention expensive — with the cost of equipment and vet bills. The
problem almost always gets worse on its own, and soon you find you
cannot tie your horse to your trailer, a hitching post, in crossties
or anywhere else. In fact, it is such a common problem that I did a
video about solving pull-back problems.
I didn’t need
any convincing that it was a common problem, but my feelings were
justified when we started looking for horses to be featured in the
video. We placed a notice about seeking horses with pull-back
problems for the video on a local horse internet chat board. The
response was amazing. Within 24 hours we had over two dozen people
contact us with stories about their horses’ pull-back issues. Many
people told us that while they would love their horse to lose the
problem, they felt it was just not fixable and, as a consequence,
was something they had learned to live with.
You don’t need
to learn to live with it! It is very inconvenient and annoying for
you as a horse owner not to be able to safely tie your horse, but
more important, as I mentioned, it is dangerous. Pull-back problems
can absolutely be fixed. I have been dealing with pull-back horses
for over 15 years and have been 100% successful in elimination the
issue.
There are two
reasons that horses pull back. The first is that the horse has not
learned to give to halter pressure. When the horse feels pressure
on the poll, it panics and resists, which is pretty much a horse’s
natural instinctive response. Their survival instinct is their
flight mechanism. When they get scared, they want to bolt. This is
what we call their emotional button; all horses have it, but some
are far more sensitive than others. On a scale of one to ten, the
average horse is around a five. But then some horses have a healthy
dose of fearfulness which brings them up to a ten or higher. In the
old days, and some people still do it, a horse would be tied hard
and fast to a snubbing post and then the handler did what we call
“sacking out”. The horse would pull and pull but eventually would
give up. This worked okay with horses that had a naturally lower
emotional level. Those horses with a high emotional level, a strong
flight instinct, would continue to pull and flail about and
eventually break what they were tied to and hurt themselves.
As our methods
of working with horses have developed, as horse trainers in recent
years, we have learned that it is not a safe method or even a
successful one. We want to set up a horse to succeed, not fail
The second
reason that a horse will pull-back is that it has learned to give to
pressure but has become so frightened that the flight instinct
overrides the cue. In response to these situations, we train the
horse to learn to pull back in a specific way so that it can get
relief (a way out) while still maintaining contact as the tie
line is pulling backwards so it does not get release.
Horses learn by
pressure and release. Once a horse has broken a snap, line or
halter, he gets that instant release. The next time a similar
scenarion happens where he may feel fear or restriction, he will
keep pulling to find that instant release again. A conditioned
response has been established and the horse has learned that it can
get away. To overcome this, the horse has to first learn to give to
pressure, then learn to give to pressure when in a highly emotional
state.
Charles Wilhelm
NW July 2008 |
