Guilt

Let's say Tuesday was just a bad day.  Stuff at work with a co-worker who is not fully doing his job coming to a head as I am tired of doing extra work.  When I got off early I come home to find my sister-in-law & her mom having pedicure time in the living room.  Not wanting to intrude on their mother/daughter time I retreat to the horse pen outside as I am safe there.  Well Macho & Kodi must have sensed my stress as they really did not want to do anything either.  Once I finally caught them I chose to ride Kodi & tie Macho to the trailer.  That was a bad choice.  Macho was pawing rearing, slamming his body into the trailer, & kicking the trailer.  This really stressed me out.  I tried to ignore him & just work with Kodi but Macho just kept gettting worse & worse.  My frustration hit a high.  I untacked Kodi & tied him out to the telephone pole where he stood & rested quietly after our ride.  I went to the trailer & got the long lunge whip  out & proceeded to convince Macho he needed to STAND quietly while tied.  I am not proud of what I did  goes to show you have to have the right mindset when training ANY animals.  I untied Macho & had him do some lunging excercises over the ramp of the trailer at a walk.  He stripped the lead rope out of my hand & ran off to try be with Kodi.  I brought him back to where we were lunging & added a chain to his halter & this time when he tried to strip the lead out of my hand I was ready.  I held on & the chain bit into his nose & he right away realized that waas a BAD idea & stopped pulling.  I continued to lunge till he relaxed & responded at a walk.  I stil had to find a stopping place with him & it was now getting dark, my boots were not waterproof & my feet were wet & geting VERY cold.  I took his halter & lead off but had closed the gate between the two horse yards so he could not get to Kodi until he was respectful to me.  Macho was wanting to run the fence & frantic to get to Kodi so I used the long lunge whip to get him away from the fence.  I did not hit him just the air & ground till he moved away.  He would run around the horse trailer & try to get back to the fence.  I asked him to stop & he did.  I would allow him to advance toward the gate 1 step at a time.  Remember this is all at LIBERTY.  When I would ask him to come close he did quietly, then he could not stand it & would go back to runing the fence.  I again drove him away completely.  Making a long story short, in about 30 more minutes Macho figured out I wanted him to walk quietly through the gate & our work for the day ended.  I spent the whole night feeling guilty about how I had handled the entire day.  I contacted a good friend Susan Smith & enlisted her expert help with Macho. 

I am finding that Macho is ever pushing his boundries & I am becoming more & more harsh in my training methods.  With this approach neither me nor horse is going to win.  With Susan Smith's help I am exploring Carolyn Resnick waterhole rituals training.  Susan came to the house on Wednesday to help me start approaching my horses as other horses would.  This training is done at liberty so it is the horse's choice wether they want to engage or not.  The responses I saw with my horses in 2 hours of working was awesome.  I am not typically a "warm fuzzy" trainer.  I prefer the whack em with a stick method.  HOWEVER, I am seeing I need a larger & larger stick to whack with.  This is not good for anyone involved. I will give this warm fuzzy approach a chance. 

I now need to sleep as Thursday I am heading to Farmington to see my foot Dr & get new inserts for my shoes.  Hopefully my feet & legs wil hurt less & I can eliminate one more stress in my life.