From: Kitkat
Hi Jessica, I love your mailing list it has answered many of my questions! I have come to find the need for your help on one of my own problems.
Salsa is an 11 month old Paint filly. She is quite a sweet horse and seems to be learning everything well, but at bath and fly spray time she becomes a Raging Bull. She rears, strikes, pulls, and fights and its quite a mess. My husband can't even keep hold of her!! I tried tying her on her last bath. She stayed put but put up a heck of a fight. I started slowly at her legs and talked gently to her the whole time. Should I tie her for this? I'm worried about her slipping and falling as at times she still would fight and try to get loose.
For the last fly spraying, my husband held her on the lead with a stud chain while I sprayed and that was even worse. She still managed to pull free and it look me a few minutes to calm her down. It was very scary because she was running with the lead dragging. We resorted to put her in her stall and spray her from the outside. She didn't like it, but fly spray is a must in our area because we have alot of mosquitos. Salsa has had a "mind of her own" on other things I've taught her, but with persistence she has learned quite well, but with this I just am not sure if it's my approach. Do you have any suggestions?
You must think about what your long-term goals are in this situation, and then you will need to adjust your short-term goals accordingly. If you use chains and leverage to force your filly to stand while you spray her or bathe her, you will probably manage to spray or bathe her ON THAT OCCASION. But you will also convince her that spraying and bathing, in addition to being strange and nervous-making activities, are actually painful and unpleasant experiences.
Horses are much more nervous than humans, and humans can get very nervous in certain situations. Imagine yourself at the doctor's office, getting ready to be given a shot -- if you are held down by several people who yell at you, you will become tense and fearful and the shot will be much more painful, and it will be VERY difficult for anyone to get you near that office again!
Your filly can't intellectualize any of this, much less understand that the spraying and bathing are GOOD for her -- from her point of view, she's being forced (painfully) to stay in one place while unpleasant things are being done to her. So forcing the issue MAY make her stand still today, but she will be MORE frightened the next time it happens, and even more frightened the time after that, and it will take more force and more pain to keep her still. And eventually you won't be ABLE to keep her still!
In other words, if you insist on winning the battle, you will eventually lose the war.
Instead, change your tactics. If you are willing to take the time and make the effort to make spraying and bathing NONthreatening, NONscary activities, and perhaps even pleasant ones for your filly, it will be less traumatic and dangerous for all of you. Horses in a panic can run over humans, and horses in a panic can slip and slide and fall in a wash-rack. Take the long view, and focus on making the experience acceptable to the horse.
In the short run, if fly-spray is necessary, take some old soft rags to the barn, wet them with your fly-spray, and WIPE the filly down. Get her the fly protection she needs -- there's no need to fight about it. And that wil allow you to separate the flyspray issue from the learning-to-stand-for-spraying issue.
Take your filly out on the grass, or somewhere with wide open spaces and good footing. Wear gloves and tie a knot at the end of your leadrope. Carry a spray bottle loaded with water (or mild saline, in case it gets in her eyes, or yours -- and also because you'll want to have quite a lot of it, and flyspray is expensive). If you are working with ANY horse that rears or strikes, be extra careful and WEAR YOUR ASTM/SEI helmet while you work with her. Be safe, not sorry.
Begin by spraying the ground, then her feet, then her lower legs, and work your way up slowly. Talk to her while you do it. When she moves, shifts, dances, jumps, LET HER as long as she jumps away from you and not on top of you. Let her move around, and when she does, just don't say anything at all. React as little as you possibly can -- no jerks on the rope, no screaming, no hitting, just STAND there saying nothing until she calms down, then talk to her and spray again. Make this part of the daily routine. Don't spray near her neck or face -- be happy if you can do legs and body after a few days. If she knows that she can get away and that you aren't going to chase her, hurt her, or yell at her, she will eventually calm down because you will no longer be confirming her fears. It's the reason that nervous horses become much less afraid of trailers if they are trained to relax and stop thinking of the trailer as a trap. If such horses are loaded into the trailer and allowed to get out again when they like, ten or twenty times, after a while, they realize that they CAN get out of that box, that they AREN'T trapped forever, and they stop worrying. ;-)
Bath-time -- same thing. Take a hose and a bucket outside with you, and put the filly on a long leadrope, and start doing the same thing you did with the flyspray. If you need to put the chain over her nose to convince her that rearing is absolutely NOT ALLOWED, do it -- but adjust it so that it loosens as soon as she comes down, and don't pull on it yourself. Let the filly pull against herself -- she'll learn faster that way.
Cold water can be quite a shock -- don't try to train a baby to love baths by tying it up and hitting it with noisy cold-water spray. Instead, use a sponge and bucket of warm water (leaving a black rubber bucket full of water in the sun for a few hours will work), and sponge her with the warm water while talking to her. If she pulls away, let her walk around and move away from you, as long as she doesn't go too far. Just stop talking and stand quietly. When she quiets down, start talking again, and go back to your sponge and bucket. Eventually she will figure out that (a) it isn't going to kill her, (b) it doesn't even hurt, (c) it may even feel good.
BTW, my own preference for teaching young horses about bath-time is to wait until it's a VERY hot day and the horses have gotten themselves sweaty and sticky and uncomfortable. On days like that, they learn very, very quickly that water FEELS GOOD and makes them less itchy and gets rid of flies.
Remember that an 11-month-old filly is big enough to do a lot of damage, but that she is still a baby. You aren't just teaching her skills, you are teaching her attitudes about learning things, attitudes about dealing with people, and attitudes about New Things. Try to keep her confident and happy. She's still a couple of years away from riding, so you have TONS of time.
If YOU don't feel confident of your own ability to train your young filly (not an easy task for a first-timer!) you won't be able to convince the filly. ;-) Do you have a good trainer in your area -- someone good with horses, someone who LIKES horses -- someone who trains with a brain instead of a two-by-four? (Not a joke, I wish it were!) Ask her/him to come out and help you with the filly for a few sessions. It can make all the difference in the world, and some good help will be worth the investment. Someone once said "Education is expensive -- but ignorance is MORE expensive." It's true! So play it safe, invest in a few professional sessions, and have fun with your filly.
Jessica
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