09/04/2020
❗️Scrambling in Floats (Trailers)❗️
Scrambling (inability to balance, leading to panicking and falling whilst travelling) in horse floats is a very common problem.
🔺First things first - it has little to nothing to do with your float.
Horses who stop scrambling when you put them in an angle load instead of a straight load, have just had a band-aid put over the real problem. The problem lies within your horse. Not your float.
The same goes for if you have to take the divider out of your straight loader to give the horse more room to spread its legs. The horse will be too weak to stand with the hind legs in normal posture and balance at the same time - the problem lies in your HORSE, not your float.
Scrambling happens in horses for either physical or psychological reasons.
♦️ Physical
Physical reasons for scrambling usually start out of the blue following a physical event/injury. One day your horses is fine and the next they are scrambling terribly. The exception to this is long term, chronic weakness leading to instability.
The most common injury that will cause a horse to start scrambling is an injury to the hind end stabilizer muscle. If a horse strains or tears this muscle, they simply cannot balance going around corners in a float. This muscle is responsible for holding the horses' pelvis level when the other leg is off the ground or has less weight on it. If the horse has strained or torn his stabiliser, it will have sharp/sudden pain whenever it tries to engage this muscle to balance, resulting in scrambling.
Sacroiliac injuries will also have the potential to cause scrambling. An injury to one or both SIJ's will cause the horses' weight-bearing to change, leading to them standing with their weight anteriorly in their toes, instead of posteriorly with their weight going into their heels. They are not able to balance well with this posture and in acute cases, they will also be reluctant to weight-bear on the affected side. This means any time you turn a corner and the horse has to load the compromised leg, scrambling can occur.
Effectively, any kind of hind end injury could lead to scrambling but the above two injuries, especially in their acute stages, are the most common sudden-onset cause.
Longer-term, a horse with chronic weakness will struggle to stand balanced in a float, especially on longer trips.
To fix this, you need to treat and rehab the injury. This is done by using osteopathy for specific muscle release, myofascial release, and joint mobilisation, strengthening exercises (both on the ground and under saddle) and stretches.
♦️Re-Training the travelling position
In some cases, the horse may have had a fright or slip within the float and is now afraid to use the full floor area of the bay it's standing in. This often happens with the front legs where the horse has had a slip/fright will not stand with one foreleg in the top corner of the float bay. This means it stands with its front legs in more of a scissor formation and when you turn the float, the forelegs aren't square and the horse loses its balance - as shown win the picture below.
This is easily corrected using simple groundwork. You simply have to have a look at how your horse positions itself in the float and then (outside of the float), teach it a simple forward step command for each of the front legs. This is easiest using a dressage whip as when you get in the float to do the next step, you'll need it as an extension of your arm. After training the forward step on the ground, you load your horse into the float and then using the same command, correct their posture within the float. Keep doing this until your horse is comfortable to stay standing with both forelegs in the top corners of the float bay. If you feel safe, you can keep correcting your horse whilst the float is moving (in a paddock at home), as well.
♦️ Psychological/fear orientated problems
This is the trickiest side to scrambling, where the horse continues to scramble even when there is no longer a physical problem. When the horse enters the float, it is already prepared for something bad to happen (pain/instability), so they start scrambling pre-emptively.
The best way to solve this is to work through the desensitisation and overshadowing techniques taught by Andrew McLean in the Equitation Science Method. I'll attach the link to further information on this below.
The best cure for this is prevention. If you notice your horse suddenly starts scrambling, fix the physical cause straight away before the horses becomes too afraid to travel and you have another larger/harder problem to fix.
Further reading on desensitisation and overshadowing
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew_Mclean20/publication/314109242_The_application_of_learning_theory_in_horse_training/links/5a8df2b30f7e9b2fac829a43/The-application-of-learning-theory-in-horse-training.pdf?origin=publication_detail
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=wmJLDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=desensitisation+and+overshadowing+mclean&source=bl&ots=YVp1n7b26N&sig=ACfU3U1LLeM9FLsTdPlj1Dl7WDPYselmcA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwijvIvau9joAhXxjeYKHVW1C78Q6AEwBXoECAsQAQ =onepage&q=desensitisation%20and%20overshadowing%20mclean&f=false
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18569221/
