Humane Cattle Pens, Custom Designs and Behavior Consulting
In ???? ? of this series, I discussed the importance of the first experience of handling the legs and feet of pre-weaned foals and setting the stage for a lifetime’s acceptance of this necessary and critical husbandry procedure. The old timers had a saying, “?? ????, ?? ?????.”
The farrier is a forger, welder, toolmaker, shoemaker, anatomist, physiologist, and diagnostician when lameness is foot related and trained to treat the many symptoms of lameness. Combined with all these skills, it’s a para-medical like field, and a good farrier works alongside your veterinarian to diagnose and treat injuries and diseases of the feet.
The school I attended taught all this, plus the school’s owner was a veterinarian with a 24-hour emergency clinic on-site where all the students were required to assist and observe any emergencies arriving in the clinic, from foot abscesses to colic surgeries, to humane euthanasia. I learned to shoe live animals and shod one horse every day for the six weeks of the course. The school taught the principles, and I then had to go out into the field for my clinical experience. My instructor emphasized the obligation of the farrier to educate his clients on proper hoof care and management and to refrain from obfuscating with extraneous information,”???? ?? ??????,”he said, “trim or rasp the foot to achieve symmetry, with equal distance from hairline to the ground around the hoof, and “????? ??? ???? ?? ??? ??? ???? ??? ??? ??? ???? ?? ??? ??? ????”. The textbook used was “??? ?????????? ?? ????????????,” 1st edition, by Doug Butler; in my opinion, the first or second edition is a must for every horse owner.
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Training the pre-weaned foal to accept the handling of their legs is like preschool education, with a long-lasting impact on their emotional development and acceptance of this necessary fact of life. It also teaches them the patience to stand for 30 thirty-minute trims or shoeing later in life, which can take an hour or more. I waited to trim the feet of my foals post-weaning unless I saw a therapeutic need in a colt or filly whose legs were growing slightly crooked or abnormal wear on the feet that could influence the straightness of the legs as they grew. Although the training began in the neonatal stage by handling their legs to accustom them to this procedure before and if needed. I described the approach to the first experience in part one of this post. Following the first experience, I follow up with leg and foot handling once or twice a week for no more than 10 minutes each time. By the second month of life, I can hold their feet up for a minute or two without putting the legs in the position a farrier needs to work on the feet. The foal is almost too small at this age to hold the feet where a farrier needs to do the job, but I pull the front feet forward, simulating the necessary move to put the foot on a stand for finishing. I also pull the rear legs ahead, affecting the same. From the beginning, I always ensured the foal was standing squarely in a rested position with all four feet to avoid throwing it off balance when one foot was off the ground.
The worst mistake people make is skipping preschool education and trying to work on the foal’s feet when it becomes necessary or in an emergency. As a farrier, I always instructed my clients on performing preschool education or suggested they hire me to do it. The bottom line is, I always did a better job when the horse cooperated, a worthwhile consideration for anyone needing the services of a farrier.
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Depending on the horse’s age, the position of the hair whorl(s), and the amount of previous experience the animal has determines the approach needed to train or retrain a young horse with negative previous handling. The success you have is more complicated once the horse has developed maladaptive behavior. If the horse is near or a few months past weaning age and has only one or a few forced handling experiences, usually using my “??? ??????” approach of doing ???? ??? ???????? of that done before is enough to correct the problem. When you try and pick up the foot, and the horse pulls it away, let it pull away. Holding it confirms the fear and reinforces the resistance. Each time you do this, the horse gains the confidence that you’re not forcing it to do something it fears. It sometimes takes a lot of repetition, but with each repetition, new memories form, and the horse is on its way to believing you mean it well. The speed of change depends on the hair whorl location, the amount of fear in the horse naturally, and how much-learned fear is present from the repetitions involved in the old school force from the past. To make this process easier for the horse to understand, remember to start the process on the opposite side of the hair whorl location (the approach side of the brain). If the whorl is on the left side, start on the right. If the whorl is on the right, start on the left side. Secondary reinforcement is also helpful in the form of a soft, kind voice. Food reinforcement is an unnecessary distraction during the lesson, but an apple or carrot is useful after completing a successful lesson.
But here’s the rub, you have to ??????? in your ????? and ???? that your horse is ?????? ?? ???. You can’t fake it until you make it with the horse. The horse is much more sensory aware than us and can easily sense our intentions, moods, and attitudes. A herd animal without language learns to discriminate between friends and enemies within the herd by sensory information alone. This makes the horse a sensory-based thinker, and its social-emotional behavior around other horses and us is unlike the internal dialog running in our minds. It comes from their ability to sense the emotions of other animals including us. They can judge our moods, and states of mind through our mannerisms, how we move around them, the confidence we convey through body language, the look in our eyes, the way we touch them, it’s an unconscious processing of emotional information mainly absorbed through a right hemisphere subcortical route, through which emotional stimuli quickly reach the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in the brain, considered the hub for fear processing in the brain, and it’s the primary processing center for emotions. The amygdala also links emotions to many other brain areas, especially the parts of the brain where memories are stored and areas involved in learning.
Let me create an analogy without all the neuroscience jargon; the horse brain is like a photo album that stores events, places, people, herd mates, etc., in different brain areas–like sections in a photo album. But these snapshots in the albums of individuals and events has emotional content attached. It’s like a picture with feelings, like the pictures we store in our photo albums that evoke emotional memories. Image one of these pictures is of a farrier that kicked the horse in the belly for not standing still (I’ve done this); the horse stores the image of me in the album, but the image has a big red stamp on it with the word ???? across it.
All this information is gathered through the senses (sight, hearing, smell, and touch) and gets sent to the amygdala, where it gets processed. Here is where the ???? stamp goes on the image before being stored in the memory section of the photo album under “??? ??? ??? ?????? ?? ?? ??? ?????.” The next time the horse sees me, the memory of the past event comes up with the fear stamp, and the horse responds accordingly. As humans, we can choose to only store happy images in our photo album, horses don’t have a choice; keeping and storing all images and content is critical to survival.
Rehabbing the maladaptive horse starts with ???????? ??? ??????? and starting a new section in the album with positive emotions. Fill one page, then another, until the old-school sections get replaced or forgotten. It’s a procedure in which maladaptive thoughts and behaviors become substituted with healthy alternatives with the help of focused, constructive therapies centered on positive emotional activities.
From the start, my new school approach involves filling the album with images that have emotionally happy stamps. When the album fills, you end up with horses like mine that don’t need bits and spurs.
In part three, I discuss chronic cases of maladaptation and their consequences, with additional tips for successful rehabilitation.
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