31st May, 2012 Flies are open

It's open season for the flies again and many horses struggle to accept fly repellent, possibly because of the smell but also because we tend to slap it on cold and in a hurry, aiming vaguely inside the ears. Best thing is to make sure that the cream is at body temperature, use desensitisation techniques to work on the ears and just focus on the putting it on the outside edge of the ear rather than trying to get it inside. It'll work it's way in anyway and provide a good deterrent at the entrance to the ear. I used to suffer with terrible ear ache as a child but hated having cold Earrex drops dripped into my ear. A bit of anthropomorphism should make us realise that horses might feel the same way.

"Just to let you know Rose behaved perfectly when I put fly repellent on her today and was completely relaxed about it." SA (the day after the training).

28th May, 2012 Confidence Tricks

Special delivery for Weston as Shay and his owners arrive at the fields. This is his first return journey since I went out to do some loading training with him a while back. Since then his owners were able to dispense with the panels almost immediately and have been practising regularly. They've also done a couple of circular journeys. They wanted to come to me just in case they needed panels to load him to go home.

While they were over, B wanted to see how confident she would feel about riding him out on the Forest. We worked with a few breathing and energy techniques before she set off, most of which I have openly pinched from Mark Rashid and Amanda Barton. However, if she wanted to carry on with this sort of work I would point her at Amanda so it would all be fair in the end!

"So nice to have photographic evidence of just how relaxed he was. I'm so pleased with how it went yesterday, it's such a confidence boost. I realised that the reason I can cope with shows and not hacking is a lot to do with having time to build up to riding - going for a walk and then doing the exercises gave me time to calm down - whereas when I've hacked out it tends to be off the box and on the horse."BW

Later it was time to work with Rye. We have narrowed down the trigger to his traffic shyness and it does appear to be vehicles at a given distance passing behind trees. First of all we went off for a little ride with a rather exciting encounter with the Shetland pony herd that came galloping past much to Rye's amazement.

Next we started off in the usual way, asking Rye to follow and then be followed by the car including some overtaking, before setting him up at the distance where he has been known to struggle. No problems today and you can see in the last picture he has floppy dressage horse ears.

27th May, 2012 No news is good news

Occasionally I go out to a horse and then don't hear much from the owner afterwards. It leaves me wondering whether I did any good. Today I was really pleased to get this email from the owner of a horse I saw two years ago.

"In April 2010 you came to the riding stables to treat my 15.1hh HW cob S who had serious leading problems. Since this time he has been 200% better at being led around the yard, loads much better (eventually discovered he hates travel boots and now no longer wears them) and is generally a much nicer horse to own." ED

27th May, 2012 What have you done today....?

....to make you feel proud?

This is my friend and colleague Jenny Major working with one of the yearling ponies at H.O.P.E. Dartmoor Rescue using NFNF techniques. I first met Jenny at the Moorland Mousie Trust where she impressed me straight away. She had only been working there a week and yet coped with a trek where she was given a set of identical ponies, fortunately all identifiable by their brands, and a list of riders to put on top of them. Out they went on to Exmoor where she discovered that she had no phone support from the Centre (no signal) and then the fog came down. Not only did she find her way back but she was completely calm about it.

Over the next fortnight of the foal handling course, she embraced IH concepts straight away and was really good with the foals and the students. I told her then that she would make a fantastic RA. She's almost there now with just her case studies to go.

26th May, 2012 When the S*** hits the fan

Why is it that when a story seems really bad, people disbelieve it and doubt the motives of the person telling it? When the tenants moved into the house next door to us, we told them about the trials that the owners had put us through when building it (two years of the track being practically ploughed up so that we couldn't have any visitors round) but more importantly how badly the house had been built. For example, they forgot to put a damp-proof course in, forgot to add the chimney, the bricks were all wonky and the guttering doesn't work. Not only that, but they had grassed over one of the manhole covers to the septic tank and the septic tank was not big enough to cope with a family of four with all their showers, washing and dish-washing. They looked at us as if we were mad, but sure enough eight months later they moved out with a pending court case against the landlord and liquid human manure running down the track. They had grown tired of having the septic tank emptied once a fortnight at a cost of £300 each time.

The same is true about first hand stories about the treatment of the elderly or people with learning difficulties. It seems that there has to be a grand expose with someone with a secret camera before anyone will listen. In the animal world people like Mary Chipperfield, lauded by many as a lover of animals with a special gift, was exposed for her cruelty and neglect. At a local Owl Centre, an undercover member of staff exposed the extremely poor treatment of the birds in their care (now under new management).

I wonder when the same thing is going to happen with some of the horse trainers I hear about? In particular those that use water deprivation as an integral part of their training and others who have half starved horses or expose them to ragwort poisoning. Years ago some show-jumpers were exposed for using electric prods and bottle tops to 'rap' horses as they went over jumps and it is well know that 'soring' techniques are used with Tennessee Walking horses and Arabs. In some cases, this stuff is not going on behind closed doors and can be seen and heard straight from the trainers' mouth and yet no-one is really hearing what they are saying. Water deprivation? Really? Does that make a horse love you then?

25th May, 2012 Orphan Annie

Annie's story is one of the saddest I have ever heard but it has a very happy ending. When the farmer that owned Annie as a foal was being investigated for neglecting a lot of his horses, he set about shooting them himself in front of the others. When Annie was rescued, she was extremely thin and had mange and she required a lot of medical treatment. This meant that a head-collar had to be put on as a matter of urgency. Today she looks amazing and all that is left of that experience is a worry about being approached with a head-collar.I was asked to work on that and to do some groundwork with her.

Once again we are back to energy. Annie's owner finds it hard to talk about what happened to Annie without becoming emotional, intense and animated. Accordingly we have talked about leaving that emotion at the gate since it is no help at all when training her. We used clicker training for the head-collar work and Annie thought that was fantastic.

"We all thoroughly enjoyed the session..."MR

25th May, 2012 Habituation

This is the definition of habituation. Major lives right next to the railway line in Brockenhurst and doesn't bat an eyelid when the trains come past at frequent intervals.