Books with Spirit – Joyfulness between horses and people

Deb had simple goals when she came into the clinic.  “To be able to catch my horse, saddle him up and mount up without him running off”.  They sound like simple goals, but how many people are having the shine taken off their pleasure with their horse because these simple things are not always happening so nicely?

Deb and her lovely Kaimanawa (kiwi brumby), Parker, reached all these goals and were working on applying the same thorough principles to float loading as I left. The photos show Deb’s lovely, patient approach to permanently fixing these catching, saddling and mounting issues.  At one point, Parker got a fright with the saddle falling off and was set back in his work to get him OK with the saddle.  Deb had been so thorough with what she was doing that it did not take long before the saddle was back on and in his comfort zone.

How safe are we sitting on a saddle that a horse is frightened of?  You know, when something goes wrong, when they get startled by something that should not be a big deal, but it becomes a big deal because we are sitting on this piece of equipment that our horse is frightened of.  I’m telling you that an extraordinary number of horses who come into our clinics have fear about their saddles, probably more than half.  Surprised eh?

When we are having trouble catching our horse, he or she does not want to be with us.  How incredibly sad! They are trying to tell us something is wrong. When we systematically connect to their mind as shown in the electronic book “Bobby’s Diaries – Straight from the Horse’s Mouth to You”, we can find out what that is and fix it – bringing joyfulness to both us and our horse.  Deb must have addressed all these issues beautifully, because Parker walks up to her now in a big paddock – he wants to with her.

It’s slower doing float training the way Deb was doing it when I left, than other approaches that  I’ve used in the past - but it sure is thorough and it gets the horse in his comfort zone in the float.  Which means things can go wrong without a horse flipping out into his “oh shit I’m dead” zone and maybe causing a wreck.  So to my mind, it’s worth it.  

Keep up the great work Deb.