trailer loading starts.... in the arena

By now many of you have seen that awesome video of Isabel and Wick demonstrating their perfectly synchronized self-loading techniques. If not, the video is right here and is absolutely worth the 24 seconds haha.

getting to know each other

Sure, both of those horses had certainly been on and off trailers long before I met them (especially war horse OTTB Wick), but given our weekly lesson plans and the fact that neither Brita nor I owned either horse, we wanted to ensure that trailer loading was a sure thing every time - no fuss needed.

So each went through a session (or two, in Isabel's case haha) with local horsemanship professional Jim McDonald, wherein I also learned Jim's method for teaching a horse to self load. You may recall I wrote about Isabel's training sessions with him way back in 2014.

the dreaded stick ball!!

Given how fantastically Jim's method worked for Isabel and Wick (not to mention a few other horses I have trailered in the past two years), and given Charlie's extreme greenness and large size, I deemed it prudent to go through a similar training process. Ain't nobody want to be stuck off property alone with 17h of OTTB that won't load!

We ended up not ever even getting to the trailer tho. Jim loved Charlie and was floored to learn the horse was only six weeks off the track... but all the same, there are some important holes that need filling before we add a trailer into the mix.

Charlie started off a little dull

My heart sank when Jim said that, and a very large part of me felt that I didn't need my horse to be a perfectly trained star-student in all things natural horsemanship before we ever even got to the trailer - I mean, for chrissakes the trailer is what separates me from my trainers. I just need the horse to be good enough to get on and off so I can go to lessons and work on our training!!

but then started expressing himself

But the rational side of me understood - and, admittedly, agreed - with Jim's perspective. Basically Jim's entire trailer loading method is beautifully simple. It boils down to: Install a forward aid using a dressage whip (or, in this case, a slightly longer whip type stick with a foam ball on the end) as an extension of your arm and rhythmically tap on the hip.

ANY forward motion (even a lean) is rewarded by a cessation of the tapping. Then when the forward stops, or if a response that isn't forward (ie, sideways, backwards or no response) is given, the tapping resumes. Timing is everything with this method, as is the handler's energy.

Jim emphasized the importance of disengaging the hindquarters

Once this "forward" aid is confirmed in the horse, you ask him to go forward while the trailer is almost incidentally in front of it. And thus the horse goes forward into the trailer. This process is slowly refined until you are sending the horse into the trailer from the ground with minimal, if any, external aids. As in the video (again, here).

Therefore, the most critical piece of the puzzle is that forward aid - that the horse is conditioned to the tapping response from the whip.

Charlie kept his thinking cap on tho!

And that's where we ran into problems with Charlie, who most certainly knows what a whip is and is not accustomed to it being used in this manner (this manner also including much rubbing and practically petting with said whip across the horse's body, while the horse is expected to stand still - see the below photos).

Charlie started off responding mostly appropriately, but then grew dull, and then quite sensitive and reactive to the stick ball thingy. Including some spinning away from it, some attempts to kick or bite at it, and some hopping, mini-bucking with the hind end.

Nothing that I would call dangerous, and nothing pointed in Jim's direction - but plenty to show that there is enough sensitivity there to make me believe Charlie would not at present respond reliably to my aids in a high pressure situation. Which is totally fine. That's what training is all about, right?

deep in thought about the stick ball 

So Jim worked on a few main things. He showed me the importance of disengaging the hindquarters. A common technique that I've heard plenty about before - but basically the idea was that my tendency is to grab at Charlie's face when he starts getting away from me, whereas instead I need to push his hindquarters away to bring him back to me.

"erm, 'scuse me but your stick ball thing is touching me" - Charlie

He would rub the stick ball thingy all over Charlie's body - mostly running into trouble around the hind end (part of me thinks it's defensiveness bc Charlie is so sore back there, but Jim thinks it might be a conditioned fear response too. idk). The focus was for Charlie to stand still when Jim (or I) would do this.

And the trick is to go jusssssst long enough so that you can release the pressure (by walking forward on a circle with the ball on the ground - so in essence the horse was 'chasing the ball away') right before the horse would have stepped away. If the horse stepped away while you still had the stick ball on him, you had to keep that pressure on until he stilled again - ie, negative reinforcement.**

(**ie: a response or behavior is strengthened by stopping or removing an averse stimulus. The pressure from the stick ball stops when the desired behavior - stillness - is achieved)

"ugh ok fine" - Charlie

The other objective was applying the stick ball by tapping on the hip asking for forward, and ceasing the tapping the moment any forward motion happens. This obviously being the aid we will eventually use to ask Charlie to step forward onto my trailer.

And again here - timing is everything. You want to be able to apply the aid and then remove pressure at exactly the right moments to reinforce the desired behavior. And nothing less. So if Charlie swung sideways away from the stick ball instead of going forward, the pressure was to remain on until he went forward. I gotta admit - Charlie did not like that one bit.

"can I bite it tho?" - Charlie

Jim explained that horses progress in peaks and valleys - a concept that most of you have undoubtedly heard many many times. The horse will do well with responses for a little while, then regress. Then improve, and regress again. All the while the general trend remains upward, but it can be hard to see that from the bottom of a valley.

He encouraged me to get excited about the valleys tho, with the idea being that some breakthrough must be coming soon. Tho he also cautioned that it was of critical importance to seek out the right stopping points. You can only stop when the horse is in a calm and relaxed state (think head low, soft eyes, maybe licking and chewing, responding well to the aids).

"bc..... I'm gonna bite it."

And if you maybe push for that "one more time" but suddenly end up back in a valley... well, you just gotta keep working through it then. Bc again - the negative reinforcement works by the pressure going away only when the desired behavior is achieved, otherwise the horse learns the wrong thing (remember, horses learn in the release).

This is, uh, obviously just as true for training under saddle as it is with ground work. I can't be the only one who has gone in for that one last try and lived to regret it lol.

stick ball of dooooooom!

Anyway. Jim also told me about another concept that holds equally true for riding: you must always first know what you want. Then begin asking for it with the absolute minimal aid - the softest possible aid. The strength of that aid increases incrementally until the desired response is achieved.

Jim says (and we pretty much all know to be true) that if you are consistent enough with this, over time the strongest necessary aid to achieve a given response eventually falls away to lighter and lighter cues - until eventually you are getting that response with your softest possible ask. Of course, again - the most critical part is to first know what it is that you want. Rather than say, getting there and thinking 'hm ok good but MOAR' or something like that lol.

he kinda wanted to stomp on it too

So idk. That's a whole lot of conceptualization and philosophizing about what mostly amounted to walking in circles with my giant race horse while occasionally stopping to rub him with a foam ball attached to a long flexible stick. And sometimes he stood still and sometimes he spun out or bucked. It probably looked miiiiighty silly to anyone watching (and I may or may not have done my first solo practice when nobody was around to see lol).

I'm optimistic tho, and believe that once the appropriate responses to the stick and ball are conditioned in the arena (or anywhere else), it'll apply directly to the trailer and then we'll be in business. As we all know tho, these things take time. And consistency.

It wasn't the lesson I wanted, but it was most certainly the lesson we need right now. Isn't that always the way? In the meantime I'm just gonna rewatch this video a million times to remind myself why this is so worth it haha.