In the clinic, Gina did her brand new leadership at liberty work and did it beautifully. And here he was … coming into her with soft legs, soft eyes and the most beautiful energy … and then with the most beautiful energy …
… he bit her again!
I was flabbergasted! He LITERALLY did not know biting was wrong. I’d never seen anything like it and I remember it sat me back so hard that it took me a moment to figure out what was happening. Monty had only ever been told biting was unacceptable when he was in his what I call the “Oh Shit I’m Dead” zone. In the Oh Shit I’m Dead Zone, the horse (and we too!) can only react the same way that they have done in the past They don’t learn to think and respond to us, they can only react.
The Oh Shit I’m Dead Zone is exactly what it sounds like – a place of very big fear. No learning takes place in the Oh Shit Zone, only reactions – reactions that establish brain pathways that may or may not be useful to us or them.
The way the brain works, Monty was reacting the same way all the time, even though that reaction was getting him whacked and not serving him at all. Because he was in his Oh Shit I’m Dead zone, he didn’t learn anything at all from the whack that he got whenever he bit – only how to duck faster and try and avoid the whack.
He had reacted to the whacking, but he’d never actually learned that biting was unacceptable.
At the time for me, this was an amazing realization, with implications for all kinds of behavioural problems and training techniques. I have now this proved so often, with so many horses, consistently – that these days that knowledge has become part of my way of being with a horse.
To fix this biting, Gina had to change the way she was dealing with it – obviously the old way of punishing him for biting was not working.
So, instead of punishing him for biting in ways that put him into his Oh Shit Zone, she aimed to keep him in and only just outside his Comfort Zone where he could learn new things, where he could learn that biting was unacceptable to her – where he could learn to co-operate and try – and where he could respond instead of just react.
When he went to bite her, she defended herself with her elbow or whatever she needed to do to actually keep herself safe, trying to keep him in the Not Too Sure Zone with however she chose to defend herself – then she waved her rope at him, sent him away and changed speed and directions with the right attitude (no “blame” or “bad boy” – just “no thank you, that is not acceptable”).
Please note: We’ve come a long way in nearly twenty years since Monty and Gina were here. These days we’d solve the biting long before she needed to defend herself from getting bitten and she wouldn’t need to defend herself.
In a very short period of time – minutes not hours – he had stopped biting at her altogether. I actually felt him looking at her with this quizzical look on his face, as if to say “You mean you don’t want me to do that?” The way that it had been dealt with in the past, he had never understood before…
This had been going on for ten years, so this was a pretty amazing deal!
But remember, even with such an aggressive, dangerous habit, this was still not a “bad horse”. It was a horse with behavior that he had learned and it was a horse who had never learned to think and respond, only to react with biting that then became a habit. But he was never a bad horse.
I’m smiling as I’m telling you this story.
These days, we’d deal with Monty a little differently and probably even more easily than before and we would have the behavioral improvement in Monty’s muscle memory faster so that it continued on into the future easily AND with even more co-operation AND have a clear path forwards to take this progress into every aspect of their lives together.
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Today’s photo is Gina and Monty, taken 6 weeks after that initial clinic where he made the biting breakthrough. He was in the beginnings of self carriage, dancing into her hands, reaching into the long reins and generally being an utter delight. The same principles that fixed their biting problems translated into beautiful saddle work as well.