I just laughed at  myself – this post goes in more categories than any other most I’ve ever written!

Anyway, this post has a slightly different perspective from the last blog that might have the penny dropping for someone, so here it is anyway…

You see, the thing is, it’s not just a simple little puddle to your horse.  Your horse has no depth perception so they cannot tell whether  the water is only ½ an inch deep or 50 feet deep.  The uncertainty of that, even for an experienced horse can be a bit nerve racking.

And here’s another really big point – fear is cumulative.  Every time that we or our horse feels unsafe and either cannot or is not allowed to act on that, it adds to the fear buried last time, making the NEXT fear more intense than it needs to be.

Hmmm… I need my horse MORE confident, not less.

And I personally want me and my horse to be able to look after each other, which we can only do if we listen to our fear and help each other BE safe. 

At my age the ground has got harder every year (anybody else noticed that?) so being as safe as I can be out there on my horse is a very big deal to me.

I also want me and my horse to enjoy ourselves and that really only happens when we both FEEL safe as well.

We can undo those old buried fears and make the new fears less intense, with the processes in the 8 lessons on the CD for your MP3 player that is in the back of Zen Connection with Horses. 

If you have the book but haven’t done the lessons yet, the feedback that I have been getting is that they are as easy to understand as I meant them to be.  You just download the CD onto your MP3 player and take it out to your horse, where I talk you through each step.

As for the water, the next time I rode, I would plan on fixing his fear of my leadership around water, rather than going on the rest of the ride.   And I expressed it that way, because my horse is ALWAYS going to be a bit afraid of water when he doesn’t know where his foot is going to meet solid ground.

When you have retreated to where your horse is in their comfort zone again, you could start by visualising how deep the water is – sending your horse a clear picture of the depth of the water.

Then I would approach and retreat from the water, using my feeling of Not Quite Right to know when to retreat.  For those who have not developed their feelings of Not Quite Right, the 8 lessons in the back of Zen Connection with Horses helps you develop that as a subtle communication, instead of that “oh shit I’m dead” feeling.

On each retreat to his comfort zone away from the water, you would stop, sit there no matter how long it took and wait for The Chew.  He will probably do some processing, which may take a while but that will be the most useful time you spend in the saddle.

At some point, it may be right to sit there at the edge of the water and just wait, instead of retreating.

One really nervy horse in a clinic recently showed his owner how people’s normal way of asking him to do things felt to him like the fast forward on a video.  That was a big insight to get!  Slow it down… Horses like slow…

So don’t be afraid of taking as long as it takes for your horse to think through and process whatever they have to, in order to be OK with what you are asking them to do.

Every time we help our horse deal with a fear and become not afraid of this particular situation or thing, we become more and more leader like.  Until, eventually, just the fact that we say “ït’s OK ” is enough to have them follow our leadership. 

But that takes quite a few examples to them first…

Laughing at the doubling up on the same subject - but I hope you enjoyed the difference!

First of all, know that your horse  has no depth perception in their eyesight, so they cannot tell whether  the water is only 1 cm deep or 10 metres deep.  So they have to trust you when you tell them that it is only 1 cm deep.

I am a bit “thingy” about the trust word.  Too often, trusting involves not making myself safe and giving my power away to someone else.  I am VERY into listening to my fear and making myself safe.

And for my horse, I am VERY into listening to his fear and helping him to be and feel safe.  That is the very base of my of having a good relationship with my horse.

So in this instance of the water, the question is not so much “how do I get my horse across the water”, but “what can I do to help my horse to feel safe when I ask him to cross the water?”

Hmm… that question puts a bit of a different angle on the situation, hey?

Click here for my thoughts on how to “fix” this problem.

Pam’s question had some great timing to it, because we have just had a second aggressive / dominant horse change his ways here in our herd and stop beating up on the other horses and I had been doing some thinking about what it was that caused him to change.

So here are my thoughts on that.  Click here for the rest of this story…

We have decided to set up Heidi’s emails and my replies about Tilly’s dramatic float loading problem as an on-going lesson here on the blog, so that others may benefit from the on-going lesson.

Click here for Heidi’s email and my reply.

Click here for the rest of this article that brings a new perspective to problems with our horses.

I was happy to be able to help Shea in return, with a noisy dam water drainage pipe under the road that she had a fear of, by doing that approach and retreat and then  just sit there and wait for the Chew exercise that I describe discovering with Bobby in Bobby’s Diaries – Straight from the Horse’s Mouth to You. 

For those of you who haven’t read that book, I discovered (Bobby told me!) this brilliant method of dealing with things that my horse is afraid of when I am out riding 

Click here for the rest of this article

Well, guess what?  There IS a golden thread.  It is called “Synchronicity”, but Anita Wheeler likes to think of it as “Power Flow”.

Click here to read Anita Wheeler’s article about following  the golden thread.  It doesn’t make mention of the word “horse” once, but it might have been written just for us and our horses anyway!  At the bottom of Anita’s article, I bring this excellent concept back to relate to you and your horse again.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

All went well the first few times until out of the blue, Jazz went down as I slowly turned in a circle in a paddock preparing to park.  She had her tail hanging out the back at the time and wrenched it upwards as she fell.  She may have suffered a small fracture which we were unaware of at the time. 

The next time we tried to float her she walked in no trouble at all but was scrambling / falling over virtually immediately.  She was too scared to back out of the float. 

Click here for the rest of this story and a discussion on why Alison and Vanessa were successful in solving this problem.

Well, it turns out that the fight reflex was not genetic like I thought it was.  It was imprinted into her by humans who cornered her – trapped her in a small space when she was young (a foal by the feel of it). 

It is such a normal thing for us humans to do, I have done it dozens and dozens of times myself in the old days before I knew a different way.  You get the horse in a corner where they can’t get out and catch them when they give up.

Click here to read the rest of this story with its surprise ending.