Equus Integratus

16/01/2025

As always, the parallels between children and horses are astounding. 😕

15/01/2025

What do you like most about your favorite teacher(s)? As many people do this time of year, I’m reflecting on my practice and examining all the different aspects that go into it, such as my own knowledge and skills, how I convey those things, and the effect it seems to have on my clients (among other things). So, I’m asking you: what are the best/worst experiences you’ve had while learning, either with your horse or in other areas of life? What are dealbreakers for you? What would you want a teacher (coach, instructor, etc.) to know or do? And if you’re one of *my* clients, what do you want me to know, or do differently?

14/01/2025

Just read an article on the The Equine Documentalist website by Beccy Smith (Holistic Equine) entitled "Health, safety & welfare considerations for successful hoof care & sound horses":

https://www.theequinedocumentalist.com/post/health-safety-and-welfare-considerations-for-successful-hoof-care-and-sound-horses

In it Beccy mentions using "training and positive reward or behaviour shaping.":

"Horses don’t necessarily choose to stand on 3 legs without some sort of training and positive reward or behaviour shaping. Without appropriate preparation, horses can be reluctant to pick up their hooves and hold them off the ground themselves for long enough for the assessment, map, trim or shoeing job to be completed to the best of the HCP’s ability, and to ensure the horse receives what it needs.

Having to haul the hooves off the ground, keep them off the ground long enough to do a quality job and avoid being stamped on or pulled about by a reluctant equine partner is not only exhausting, it can increase the risk of injury and trauma and create unwanted stress experienced by all parties. Simply increasing the appointment time creates unnecessary pressure on the HCP to meet the needs of his or her clients on the day. Many horse owners don’t realise the impact reluctant equine partners have on the short term and long terms well-being of the HCP."

Just another little prompt to assess your horse's health and comfort level with not just foot handling, but healthcare procedures generally. Also a prompt to consider using positive reinforcement training along with other modalities to help them learn to be comfortable, so that everyone is safer and you have all the options available for long-term soundness.

If you have questions about how this can work, or you're in a position to have to change your approach, I'm more than happy to chat about what I do and how I can help take the stress out of healthcare procedures, including foot handling.

This article outlines the ways in which hoof care professionals might experience health conditions & how these might be lessened or avoided.

08/01/2025

This is the first time I’ve been able to touch Brandi’s hind foot with my hand. As always, some notes:

▪️ Built-in pauses - looks like I’m feeding for nothing, but I’m reinforcing a pause, and then I’m pausing at shoulder and hip as a check-in to see if going forward is a good idea or not. Also emphasizes the difference between cuing for a foot lift, and *not* cuing (I don’t want her to lift her feet willy-nilly if I’m just standing and not asking).

▪️ I was going to click for my hand touching her hoof. I’ve never gotten to this point before, so at first she lifts her foot and puts it right back down, just like she’s learned. So, I ask again with fingers at the chestnut (my cue to lift a foot), and this time I’m able to slide my hand down and catch her foot and actually hold it. If it didn’t work this way (which it doesn’t quite for the right hind just yet), I can click for just the touch of my hand to her hoof and not try to hold, and build from there.

▪️ She’s still not 1000% relaxed in her body. That’s always the goal, and she’s SO MUCH better than she started, but it’s not there yet. Short sessions, high rate of reinforcement, small, logical steps, and alternating between different tasks is what’s been most effective for getting us to this point, and that will only continue to work for us going forward.

Also pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to click with a cough drop in my mouth. Harder than it sounds! 😆

06/01/2025

Some (scattered) thoughts on a recent moment with Fool’r:

We’d just taken a break and he was eating across the arena, so I went to the mounting block to see what he’d do. I figured he’d wander over, but I didn’t expect the trot.

▪️ It’s a good sign that the work we’ve done is okay and he knows what I’m going to ask next, but it’s not the whole picture.

▪️ Here’s where it can go poorly - this looks like enthusiastic participation, and for this part it is, but it was trained, so it’s not a guarantee that he’s 100% all in, it just means it’s worth the trade for timothy pellets. That’s not terrible.

▪️ I still have to be careful to back off when he’s no longer leading with yes, and it doesn’t mean he won’t change his mind. (He did on this day after a short ride, but he doesn’t always).

▪️ This is important because we’re still in the foundation phase with riding in particular, where many small wins are necessary now for some larger leaps forward later.

▪️ Once a horse has got the game, you have a lot more latitude in the affordances you have and the environment and antecedents you can take advantage of. In doing that, you have opportunity to try to develop more intrinsic motivation for the game itself, and less so for the food. This is where it gets fun, and where we’re at right now on the ground. More and more this is where I’m taking a closer look at my training and looking for ways to find ways to let the horse lead as well as find the right balance of challenge to ability, hopefully employing more intrinsic motivation.

▪️ But we have to make sure the ground is solid enough first, and one of the clearest ways I can do that is with R+ (though, as always, other things are always happening).

30/12/2024

Continued from the last post about using barrels for bending:

➡️ Siri has more experience than Fi, and you can see the difference between them. Fi has been more heavily reinforced for trotting, so that’s what she tries harder at. I’m not going to turn down the opportunity for her to get some exercise! And you can see some of the intermediate training steps I did with her to not squash the forward, and just add a little sideways here and there. She gets stuck at one point, so I just work on the hand target piece for a few seconds, and then try again.

30/12/2024

Some notes on using what you have to develop skills you’d like to have, such as lateral work on the ground (Fi is in the next post because FB can’t upload two videos to one post 🙄):

➡️ I don’t have a reverse round pen or anywhere convenient to put one, and barrels are always in the arena, so I may as well use them.

➡️ First get the pattern of the barrel between horse and handler. You can add a target for bend, and then extend the bend after the barrel.

➡️ What the bend looks like in the beginning doesn’t matter. It’s more about letting the horse organize themselves to move both forward and somehow sideways. If the hind end moves sideways too, then that’s the horse’s solution!

➡️ If you need to be more specific about exactly how much bend and on what line, you can always microshape. However, I’d caution against it as it doesn’t allow the horse to move in a way that makes sense to their own body.

➡️ The barrel helps infer the idea of the bend. For some horses that have a hard time moving with a handler, the barrels can be a sort of protective contact. This pattern can be carried over into ridden work, too.

And yeah, she’s muddy. 🤷‍♀️😏

28/12/2024

Majestic pony in flight, slightly rainy edition. Not at all awkward.

26/12/2024

Here is why it pays to know as much as you can about a horse’s ethology, cognitive abilities, and potential physical issues, both on a species level and an individual level. TLDR;/moral of the story: when something doesn’t work, ask why. Especially if everything else is working.

🎯 Lip and his people were referred to me by their trimmer, as he was having trouble standing for trimming.

🎯 Lip is an Appaloosa with lovely amber eyes that he sometimes holds half-closed, and they sometimes have some tearing.

🎯 Everyone starts with stand still/face forward and targeting in order to learn the game, and the concept of targeting can be useful for foot handling later on.

🎯 His people were doing a great job of following through on training during the week, and Lip took to R+ very, very quickly, but was struggling with targeting with the white/translucent flyswatter. We tried different ways of presenting the target, including doing so while moving forward, letting him “catch up” to the target. Moving worked the best, but still wasn’t consistent enough to be a solid skill. Something about how the inconsistency presented itself made me wonder if he was having trouble seeing the target. We switched out the white/translucent target for a green one with blue tape.

🎯 The changing of the target made all the difference - making small changes, especially ones that take into account the horse’s sensory abilities (in this case the horse’s visible color spectrum), can make a big difference in performance.

20/12/2024

Babymustanghorse B (Brandi, because everyone gets 17 dumb nicknames) had her feet done yesterday. The choice was made to sedate her for a safer time for everyone, but she was perfect. I don’t have any video, which is too bad, But it also meant I got to be really present for her and for me. It was a really peaceful experience for me, and it seemed comfortable enough for her. We’re still quite a ways from a full trim without sedation, but this was a really successful beginning to the development of this skill. The hours invested in careful requests as well as not-training created the right conditions for her ability to accept a new person that also gave her an injection, to have her feet picked up and held as well as trimmed and filed by someone she’d only ever met once before, and to do those things with enough confidence and stillness to get the jobs done (she even got vaccinated and wormed).

She didn’t love it, nor did she actively cooperate (except once at the end when she was coming out of sedation and the vet was able to pick up a foot with Brandi offering to lift it).

This is the line of compromise between what needs to be done for the health of the horse, and what that horse is capable of at that time.

That line will always divide necessity and capacity, though where it falls is dependent on a number of variables, such as the horse’s base level of comfort in their environment and with novel conditions, amount of training, degree of health concern, aversiveness of the procedure, and safety of all the people involved, as well as the demeanor and skill of those people, just to name a few.

In order for foot handling to be successful, there has to be a great amount of stillness from the horse. In time, that stillness can come from a combination of training and other pleasant interactions (ideally - it can also come from behavioral suppression). Yesterday was the best possible blend of a small foundation of training and pleasant interactions, and sedation to humanely take away movement options. While everything we do with horses has the potential to be dangerous, this was the safest way to fill in the gap from capacity to stillness in this moment. We will of course continue to build foot handling skills and tolerance, and hopefully this experience was beneficial enough to set us up to be closer to meeting stillness with more skill and efficacy, and less restraint for the next time.

11/12/2024

A short update, working towards lifting back feet with hands rather than the pool noodle.

- Camera angle is wonky because I just leaned my phone up against something and couldn’t see the screen from the glare. 🤷‍♀️

- This is toward the end of the session, so she starts to throw behaviors she knows - lifting legs - when she’s getting to her limit of attention span.

- Using hay as the reinforcer, and it’s also not on me, it’s separate and I have to go get it after the click, helping develop a little bit of patience on her part.

- I start at her shoulder, pause, move to her hip, pause again. I want the cue to be my hand touching her chestnut and not me touching her hip, so I pause to make that more clear.

- Still working on the mechanics of the hind legs, so I wait and don’t reinforce when she does more than I’d like, and then she tries something different that has worked before.

07/12/2024

Worth a reshare.

It’s easy to be calm. It feels good. It’s home.

Anxiety is uncomfortable. It prompts us to take action. To make ourselves safe. It’s a continuum, not binary. The further toward (or past) the threshold of anxiety you are, the further away you are from calm, and the further you have to go to get home.

If it’s all-out panic, you’re already lost. Get home however you can. Anxiety doesn’t suddenly flip to calm, especially by an external force of anyone’s will. There’s a transition process between the two states, which is coupled with behaviors that indicate the process is happening, but not that it is finished.

What induces calm, then?

Take a smaller step forward than you’d like. Then step back. Repeat. Again. Two small steps. Back. Explore the margins of anxiety, always with the possibility of returning home. You aren’t practicing the calm. You’re practicing the transition from anxious to calm. The reorienting from static to clarity. The gathering from overwhelm to focus. Calm is almost a side effect of the process. The more skilled you are at finding home, the more free you are to explore. It’s the difference that makes the difference.

06/12/2024

I was watching a class on CreativeLive by David H Wells called Create Powerful Photo Essays & Personal Projects, and it reminded me of the article I wrote after a trip to Haiti in 2016. In retrospect, the article was much more from my personal perspective than a strictly reportage piece should be, the fact of which I'm somewhat ambivalent about now, especially after nearly nine years of experience as an American woman watching the racial and economic happenings in this country. Nonetheless, though some of the information is slightly outdated and not everyone is where they were, the sentiment, and the overall issues I raised in the article, remain.

The article I wrote, which you can read on my blog (along with all the blog posts and the full Haiti gallery, on my blog here: https://shorthorsestudios.com/blog/haiti-thinking-back/), was originally for the eQuester, the monthly newsletter of the Wisconsin Dressage & Combined Training Association, many of the members of which raised the funds for me to go to Haiti. All the images were released to Equitarian Initiative, and they have gone on to be used to help communicate both the need for help and the success of the organization.

Watching the class, and revisiting the article and images, I'm reminded of the process of creation, what it took to create the images and then the story, and how it was a catalyst for enormous change in my life. Being in a similar position now, I'm returning to this process and wondering how I can create not only a similar catalyst for myself, but also hopefully produce something that's useful for someone else, something that will create movement for others.

I'm open to suggestions.

05/12/2024

It’s very windy.

30/11/2024

From 2019, but worth repeating:

Choice. That's what this is. It's what she does when she's game to be a riding horse. It's a go button. Including tonight, of the last three times we've hung out, once was “no” and twice was “yes.” I declined a proper ride this time, since she was more mud and rain than horse, but I did slip on and off the other side, so she had confirmation that I understood her offer. At least, that's what it felt like to me; she was confused but didn't seem offended.

How much more powerful are we, when we are aware of even the possibility of choice? It recently occurred to me that I could, if I really wanted to, move to another part of the country. Change my environment completely. While there are some logistical issues with this, consent is not one of them. I don’t need permission to move. This bore itself out in me very slowly rearranging my apartment over the past few days, for the first time in my life without the need for consent.

Although our experiences don’t match perfectly (I mean, she’s a *horse* and I’m not), there are some parallels that can be drawn, here: To stay or to go? To offer one’s literal self, and with it a part of one’s dignity, or to protect oneself and create distance? Choices aren’t always easy to make (the psychology of choice is fascinating), and realizing the freedom of choice is sometimes paralyzing, but allowing my horse to have a say, and creating my own environment, have been seemingly small actions with enormous impact on my life.

25/11/2024

There are myriad reasons a horse has trouble being comfortable and cooperative, generally originating from physical, mental, and/or emotional discomfort (and frequently all 3).

Sometimes there’s a compromise between fully cooperative care and railroading a horse into a healthcare procedure, especially in a training situation where the procedure itself isn’t imperative. Such is the situation with Clio, here. I chose to show all of the actual foot handling (albeit in fast motion) to show the rhythm of doing and not doing. While I won’t go into too much detail, below are some notes on our training session:

🎯 Using target as a focus other than her feet, and for high rate of reinforcement

🎯 Target is set at a height that doesn’t require much head movement, so her balance isn’t disturbed, making it harder for the trimmer

🎯 Starting in arena where there’s more space and reinforcement history

🎯 Note where she changes focus to something outside, then comes back - the target gives her something she wants to focus on.

🎯 Moving in and out of barn to keep anxiety from going over threshold

🎯 Moving down aisle to extend time in barn without having to stand still (not shown for brevity)

🎯 Starting with just picking up and picking out

🎯 Moving on to hoof stand - a little movement of the hind legs to see if I can help a little with proprioception and to invite the muscles to relax

🎯 Filing, but only a little just to approximate - future sessions could have more, but her hind end muscles are tight so her window of time is short before she’s uncomfortable. Since this is training and not actual trimming, no sense in pushing past discomfort. I can ask, but she can refuse.

🎯 Giving breaks for her to just stand and target - keep behavioral and reinforcement momentum with low demand

In addition to this sort of “stop-gap” measure, other things that could be done to help Clio would be bodywork, work with mats and other variable surfaces, groundwork of various types, and other enrichment activities.

03/11/2024

Brandi, the young mustang mare from the Sand Springs HMA in Oregon, USA. She’s been at her new home since September 6th. She can be groomed and sprayed, which my clients have worked on on their own, and haltered, which we’ve done together. I’m now starting foot handling with her. To be brief, here are some notes about my approach:

🟤 Why I use a pool noodle: I don’t want to put my face (or any other parts) down there, because I don’t know what to expect from her (which turns out to be a good decision).

🟤 The buoy: used as an anchor rather than tying (which is a separate skill), as well as an additional way to get reinforcement when she’s confused, and to keep momentum going.

🟤 Using hay: even timothy pellets are too high value, and dropped hay is an opportunity to take a break if she needs one.

🟤 Changing how I use the noodle: just touching the fetlock was not enough information and probably surprising, so combining the contact with the hip with using the noodle provided more continuity and less surprise.

🟤 The beginning doesn’t always look like the end: she’s kicking because that makes the most sense to her in her repertoire of behavior, and because I’ve reinforced it before in order to get the leg lift to start, not because she’s trying to be malicious.

🟤 Shaping the kick to just a lift: slowing the speed at which I moved the noodle allowed us to explore different responses.

13/09/2024

This is Brandi. She’s a three-year-old mustang, unhandled, from the Sand Springs HMA in Oregon, USA. She belongs to some lovely clients who have five other mustangs they’ve already tamed/gentled (I dislike both of those terms, but don’t have a better one). Brandi arrived on Friday September 6th, and this video was taken four days later. My client had spent time with her over the last few days and had been able to go in and feed her and touch her. This is the second time I’ve met her, but the first time I’ve actually worked with her other than chucking food in a tub from outside the pen two days ago, when she wouldn’t take food from my hand.

We know we need to be able to reliably catch and halter her before she can be let out of the pen, and since she was doing so well, I thought I’d get that process started. This is about a minute and a half at the end of a longer session (over the course of about an hour, with several breaks and scratches), where she not only learned to put first her nose, then her whole head, then her neck in a loop, she decided to come to the loop from across the pen and “halter” herself as though she’d never *not* done it. There were a few previous steps, but otherwise almost no “formal” work.

This little mare is so different than I expected, and I feel so much relief and wonder in that surprise. I’m largely stepping back from social media for a while due to some painful life events, but I wanted to share this very bright spot in the darkness of the moment. I will have more to share when I’m in a lighter place.