21st September, 2011 No going back

Happy to back up when only his front feet have stepped up on to the ramp

Absolutely stuck and mentally unable to back up once his back feet have gone in.

Carefully backing out, step by step.

After an early morning visit to Anna for her regular foot trim, it was off to see a Lusitano stallion called Amador. Amador was imported from Portugal by road and by sea and has proved to be a lovely riding horse. He's certainly a bright boy. Although he has always loaded very willingly and travels well, he cannot leave the trailer without leaping the front ramp banging his hip or shoulder every time. He absolutely refuses to back out of the trailer and appears to be very afraid of doing so. This can happen when a horse has never been taught that he can back out in the first place (people have this bizarre idea that backing a horse out of a trailer 'teaches' them to back out when they don't want to load), has been backed out of a step-down trailer; others may have been hit to make them load and then are not keen to back out towards a perceived threat. Amador's owner is keen to rectify this situation so that he she has both options available to her - after all, she has two ramps!

The first thing that was noticeable with Amador was that he isn't all that keen to back up on the ground even though he backs up easily when ridden; his owner says she just has to think back. When a horse is afraid, his natural, instinctive, automatic response to being pushed is to push back and if pulled, to pull back. This tends to be even more ingrained in stallions that use this into-pressure response to engage with their foe. Having backed him up a little and got him a lot lighter by not engaging with his body at all,i.e. using body language as a cue, we used the L-shaped poles to move him around forwards, backwards and sideways and ask us to trust us to manoeuvre him in this way, step by step.


When it came to loading, Amador was happy to back off again when only his front legs had gone on to the ramp, however, once he had committed his back legs, he felt there was no going back! Funnily enough he is not the first Iberian horse I have met with this issue - Raf was the same. Rather than engage with him physically by pushing him hard on the chest or pulling hard on the Dually, I kept up a consistently light ask and rewarded every step back with a click and treat - even if it was actually a repeated step because he had gone forward again. Bit by bit he worked out what he needed to do and gradually he was willing to place one back foot over the lip of the trailer onto the ramp, move it forward again and then try with the other foot. I took my time and 'thought' about him lifting up his withers and engaging his hindquarters and eventually he found the courage to take first one foot and then the other onto the ramp itself. I rewarded him every step of the way and made sure that I kept his head over to the right so that his legs would truly be in the centre of the ramp as he backed up. Once out he was given a bonus handful of pony nuts and then asked to load again.

The second time he backed out a little more fluidly and looked less worried and on the third occasion he backed out relatively confidently. We will practice this again next week and then start to work on asking him to unload through the front door.

 "Thank you so very much for today. I feel a lot happier that we are making progress and will soon have Amador unloading without risking life and limb on either of us." LB