just a quick backstory... in April, i acquired a 7-year-old pure Polish Arabian gelding with the barn name of Sir. what i was told was that he was for sale as a youngster because the breeder's wife had died and the breeder didn't want to mess with the horses any more. supposedly Sir just hung out in a field for several years, then somehow he came into the possession of the woman i bought him from. i was led to believe that he was broke, but still fairly green and i was told he just needed some time and he preferred women to men.
when i went down to pick him up, he was in a stall with no halter on. i grabbed the halter i had brought with me and let myself into the stall. Sir immediately stuck his head in the corner and it took me a few minutes to get the halter on him. i raised an eyebrow but figured it was just because he didn't know me. next, i took him up to where we had parked the trailer and he resolutely planted his feet and wouldn't go in the trailer. the woman i was getting him from managed to get him in and her daughter then told me that his previous owners had tried to load him into a trailer in the middle of a thunderstorm and that he had started freaking out which made the owner freak out and it became a circle of fear. the way she said it made me think there was more to Sir's history than i had been told.
finally we got him loaded and were on the 2-hour drive home. any time we stopped, the truck would rock from the fuss Sir was kicking up in the trailer (brand new 3-horse slant with living quarters, so not a small trailer) and when we got back to the barn, my friend (who owns the truck and trailer) pointed out that my horse had broken one of the bars clean out of the window of the trailer.
i led Sir into a small paddock by himself and took the halter off, made sure he had plenty of water in the trough then, after a long day, went home.
the next time i went to the barn, i grabbed my halter and went to catch my horse. he walked right up to me, but when i went to put the halter on, it was a good 30 minutes before i could catch him. once i did, however, he was perfectly behaved. i chalked it all up to being in a new environment and me being a stranger.
this pattern continued so i eventually turned him out in a breakaway halter so that at least i wouldn't have to wrestle with that. as the days went on, i began to realize that it wasn't that Sir didn't want to be caught, he was just afraid of the halter and lead rope. i made an educated guess that at some point he had been trained to show in halter and the experience had traumatized him. essentially, my horse has PTSD.
it has now become worse and he's managed to slip out of his halter. he'll approach me willingly when i go into the pasture but if i'm holding a halter, he won't let me touch him. if i have the lead rope draped around my neck, i can put my hands all over him but as soon as i reach for the lead rope, he takes off.
i've decided to NOT try sheer force and i've come to realize that, more than anything, this traumatized horse needs to learn to trust me. i firmly believe that if i can gain Sir's trust, true to Arabian nature, he will do anything for me.
i'll use this blog to chronicle each day of working with him, to track our progress (or lack thereof).
