Sunny was lethal with her feet when she arrived, slamming one foot down so hard and fast that if it had connected with a part of your body on the way down, it would have broken bones.
I could have made her pick that foot up in all kinds of ways. I’d learned all kinds of techniques that would have made her uncomfortable and “caused her to want to” pick that foot up. But none of those techniques would have solved the underlying problem. All of them would have left the tension in her and risked my feet trimmer getting hurt if something went wrong while she was under there.
I made a commitment to Sunny (and the trimmer!) that we weren’t going to make her pick that foot up – that we’d work with her until she could pick that foot up happily.
I’ve had a number of rock star feet trimmers over the years and Cat was the first of them. I’d get her to trim 3 feet, see how far she could get in picking up that 4th foot with Sunny still in her Comfort Zone and walk away with the fourth foot not trimmed when she couldn’t. Every now and again I’d trot her over the stones to help that foot trim itself a bit.
Whether it was Cat or I working with her, we broke that whole process down into tiny bits of progress and only went as far as she felt good on any given day. We backed off when we felt the first sign of stress or tension in ourselves or in her and then waited for her to signal that she’d finished thinking about that, by licking and chewing, stretching and yawning.
At first we were unable to even stand at her back end without her tensing up. Eventually we got to being able to tip her foot so the toe was just on the ground and she could balance on her other three feet without tension. Then she could pick the leg up a little for just a second or two and we’d put it back down again.
This part still makes me emotional even after all these years later. One memorable day about 5 months after she arrived, with a whoosh of anguish she showed us “in our mind’s eye” what she had experienced. She showed us how her trainer back then had tied that leg up in the air and she’d fought and fought and thrashed to the ground and fought some more there until with a mighty whoosh of anguish, she gave up and thought she was dead.
She was what we call a Fight Horse – a personality who fights when they’re afraid – and she’d probably kicked him. Tying the leg up like that is a common technique in some natural horsemanship circles when they consider a horse is really difficult. I remember a famous trainer describing it to me as “I take the leg away and then I’m a hero when I give it back.”
Gosh I can still feel my heart now as I describe what Sunny showed us. Cat was and is a very practical no nonsense lady who doesn’t cry easily. Both of us had this same vision in our heads and both of us bawled our eyes out – the communication of that anguish was so strong.
THAT was the stress and tension that had been tied up in her inability to hold her foot up for trimming.
And from that day Sunny could pick that foot up. She got so good that she’d walk up to the feet trimmer all by herself and stand there with no halter on, to get her feet done.
So what would have happened if I’d used techniques to get her to pick that foot up? The tension and anguish from that experience would still have been stuck in there, the PTSD reaction of it ready to bite us on the bum whenever anything went wrong with trimming.
But bigger than that is the fact horses and humans both bury fear that we can’t escape from. Buried fear is cumulative, each fear adding on to the next and making it bigger. So each fear Sunny experienced after that incident, was made worse by that underlying buried terror. Can you see how it affected everything else she ever did?
No wonder she was such a “tough” horse.
Keys to success
The keys to success starts with us. In this case it started with me. It’s that open-hearted willingness to understand what was really going on with behind this feet problem that was the biggest key to success.
The next key to success is our ability to listen to our horse that everyone has and yes I mean everyone without fail has the ability to hear / feel their horse. Everyone. Everyone has the ability for the two way communication that you feel inside yourself. That’s what Feel for your horse is – that ability for simple inner communication. The thing is, you can’t copy someone else’s way of doing it cos’ it’s unique to each of us – which is why I went around feeling like failure for so long.
Feel for our horse enables us to understand what’s going on with this horse in this moment. It enables us know when to stop and back off. It enables us to know what to change and to just flow into that change when we need to. It enables us to understand and “fix” a problem in the moment before the problem is even happening. Feel is much bigger and more important than knowledge. If you haven’t seen them before, these short videos explain the different ways that we can experience Feel for our horse.
The third key to success is our horse’s confidence that we can be relied on to take action on what we “hear” and Feel. That takes the pressure off them so that they can think again and even enjoy learning in what would otherwise be very difficult circumstances.
Just pause for a moment and think about how incredibly wonderful that would be – that our horse could ENJOY learning how to have happy feet?
There’s a very big p.s. to this story.
Some time later, I was meditating with Sunny about her future, when I had this incredibly strong, “loud” presence in my mind saying, “We are powerful beings creating our own destiny” that came with a flood of understanding that profoundly changed my life. Ahhh but that’s a story for another day…
Today’s photo is Cat trimming that same foot, just after the break through all those years ago.
Leave a Reply