So a continuation of Scooby's story. I mentioned in the last post how, when left to think for himself, Scooby (9year old Sporthorse) has absoultely no self confidence. Coming out of the old stuff, it's hard to convince the horses that its okay to make their own decisions. With Scooby this hesitation came with a lot of freaking out. With typical horse training you use mostly negative reinforcement, that is, leaving the horse alone when he/she is good, and correcting them when they do something wrong. Can you imagine the difficulty of knowing you could never please someone because all they can tell you is what not to do? Maybe you go through that at work, with a parent, a co-worker? Now put that into every time you are interacted with... You see where I'm getting with this. Not so pleasant is it? You wouldn't want to be around that person for long would you?
Anyways, back to Scooby. So he's a horse who was raised on negative training techniques. They are his bread and butter, or meat and potatoes if you will, of his training experience. As a result for a lot of the time he thought he was doing the right thing unless you told him not too. This meant that when sacking him out, or starting him western, he was incapable of working through a situation on his own. If he spooked at an object and you didn't correct him, he thought that's what he was suppossed to do. If he bucked when you did up the back cinch on the western saddle and you didn't correct him, he thought that's what he was suppossed to do. Now the thing you must understand with Scooby is that he's a horse that takes his job rather seriously. He's an aloof, meaning he attaches more to the job then he does to you. His personality dictates that he should attach to a job and once he gets it figured out, you'd better just leave him to do. "Don't interfere please, or I may just have to fight you!" So how do you reprogram his brain to the positive training techniques? A lot of sweat, time and tears is one option. My biggest question was how do I let this horse know that his only job right now is defining who he is? It was a lot of doing nothing. Of standing around waiting for Scooby to make a decision. Even moving his feet of his own free will while in the arena was a big hurdle. But now we are at the point where Scooby knows he can express his own opinion, and boy is he taking his job seriously.
On Monday he decided that he needed, more then anything, to switch over to the big herd. He displayed his idea by practically dragging me over to the gate to the big feild and pushing on it trying to get it to open. I told him "Okay, I get it, let's go ask Dessa." so off we went to talk to Dessa. She asked him, got a big yes, and everything was set. However, we needed to talk to Cathy the barn manager, who had already left for the day. Scooby didn't understand that he couldn't go out now, that he had to wait. Horses live in the moment, they don't comprehend our human perspective of waiting. If they need to do something, they go do it, whether it's for them, or for the good of the herd (these usually go hand in hand together). Maybe it's time we all took an example from them and stopped worrying so much about the "suppossed to"s in life and started living a little more for ourselves, and for the greater good.
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