What’s training a fly got to do with a training a horse?

 

I think you’re going to be surprised at how many similarities there are between getting happy co-operation from a fly and having it willing to do what you ask and having happy co-operation from a horse and having them too, willing to do what you ask.

Here’s a derrr…  First do no harm.

Second derrr…  Cause no fear.

THEN the fly is open / more likely to be open to developing a connection with you.

If you have any trouble with the video playing below, click on this link to watch it on Youtube.

I’ve been exploring training flies for a few years now.

The first fly I trained, Sue McKibbin took a photo of it landing on my fingernail, that’s the photo I used for the top of this article.  My best friend called that fly Trevor and all small house flies are jokingly called Trevor among my family and friends these days.  There’s calls across the verandah “Mum can you ask Trevor to leave me alone?” “Jen, can you get Trevor to stay the heck off my dinner?”

Sheila even sent me a photo one day of a dead fly floating in a cup of tea with the caption “You should have taught Trevor to swim.”

There’s been lots of good natured disbelief because the other times I’ve trained a fly to come when I called them and land on my fingernail, I’ve only had photos – but THIS time, I managed to get a video!  Woohoo!

So how can YOU do it?

Here’s what has to change BEFORE you can think about training a fly.

Think about it.  Why would any being want to do what you ask when your first instinct is it to swat it?  Or to flap your hand to scare it away?

And how does this fly thing relate to horses?

Instead of me answering that question, think about those first steps that I talked at the beginning:

1. First do no harm.
2. Second cause no fear.
3. Then the horse is MUCH more likely to be open to developing a connection with you and from that connection, a whole new level of feel good co-operation is possible.

Their generosity as soon as we start to work towards these goals, constantly astounds me.

To help you with those three things, if you haven’t seen the new free video lesson yet about the terrified little wild horse turning his little heart over to his novice horse owner and the Feel for her horse that she learned in order to achieve that,  you’ll find the Trailer here. 

At the beginning of that video where the horses were being tormented by biting flies, I promised to tell you the story of Trevor and then a few days later up pops a cheeky little fly that is easy to train and I have the opportunity to video it.  Coincidence?  I don’t believe in coincidences…