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Question: “I’m
at my wits end! My horse keeps pulling back breaking his halters and
ropes. I can’t tie him to my trailer at shows and it is getting
worse. No one knows what to do except to buy heavier halters and
ropes, and to tie him tight to a big tree. I need your help.”
Answer:
That’s an excellent question. I’m actually surprised that no one
has raised this issue before. There are a lot of horses out there
with pull-back problems, but few people seem to view it as a
priority problem to fix. Instead they just live with it and keep
buying new equipment. Yet it is in fact a very dangerous situation
for both the handler and the horse, not to mention expensive -- with
the cost of replacement equipment and sometimes even vet bills. The
problem almost always gets worse on its own, and soon you find you
cannot tie your horse to your trailer, hitching post, crossties, or
anywhere else. In fact it’s such a common occurrence that I am just
starting to do a video about solving pull-back problems to be
released in about two months.
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 about 24 hours we had a couple of
dozen people contact us with stories about their horses’ pull-back
issues. Many folks told us in the e-mails that while they would
love their horse to lose the pull-back problem, they felt it just
was not fixable, and as a consequence, was something that they had
learned to live with.
Don’t learn to
live with it! It’s very inconvenient and annoying for you as a
horse owner not to be able to safely tie your horse but more
important as I already mentioned, it’s dangerous! Pull-back
problems can absolutely be fixed. I have been dealing with pull-back
horses for over twelve years and have been 100% successful in
eliminating the issue.
.There are two
reasons that horses pull back:
1) The horse has
not learned to give to halter pressure. When it 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 to want to bolt. This is
what we call their emotional button; all horses have it, but some
far more than others. On a scale of one to ten, the average horse is
around a five. But then some horses have a healthly dose of
fearfulness which bring them to a ten or higher. In the olden days,
and some people still do it, we would tie the horse hard and fast to
a snubbing post and then did what we called sacking out. The horse
would pull and pull but eventually would give up. This worked okay
with the horses that had a naturally lower emotional level. But
those horses with a high emotional level/strong flight instinct,
well they would continue to pull and flail about and usually finally
broke what they were tied to and hurt themselves.
So as we have
developed our methods as horse trainers in recent years, we have
learned this is not a safe method or even a successful one. We want
to set up the horse to succeed, not fail.
The other reason
that a horse pulls back is that it has learned to give to pressure
but has become so frightened that the flight instinct overrode 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
scenario happens where they may feel fear or restriction, they 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 (highly) emotional. We
do that through a series of exercises with a training tie and
de-spooking work that will be covered in the video. The process to
fix the problem may only take 20 minutes (yep – it’s true) or may
take a couple of weeks depending on how chronic the problem is. For
example, horses that have actually broken gates or posts and ended
up dragging them may take even longer. But no matter how chronic the
problem is, we can fix this problem 100% of the time, saving you and
your horse much anxiety and maybe even injury. |
