Very Unhappy!

Poor Zep refused to come up to the round pen this morning when we fed. I can't really blame him. I'm sure he thinks we're going to try to catch him again. It makes me sad though. I really thought he trusted us more than that. It's so frustrating dealing with an animal that has no trust at all in humans. Faran isn't happy with us either, I guess because he thinks we're going to deworm him again lol, but he gave in fairly quickly.

If you're the anthropomorphizing type (I do it sometimes lol),
their stares are almost accusing lol.

Zep did finally eat, although I had to put it quite a ways from the round pen. He even came up to me for a treat, but when I readjusted his halter on his nose so it would be more comfortable he spooked again. Sigh. It's going to take a while to rebuild the trust. :(

Chrome was the only happy one. He's always happy.
Here he is wearing my toboggan. He looks like he's greeting his own shadow lol.

And here he is wearing their feed bucket. What an adorable dork!

At least grubby Faran still trusts us, although he's still skeptical of our motives at times. You would think these guys would know we aren't here to hurt them! If the most unpleasant thing we've ever done is put a halter on them and stick nasty dewormer in their mouths you'd think they would feel lucky lol. Too bad they can't understand English!!

He's Haltered!!

I bet you can't guess who is wearing a halter . . . yep, it's Zep!!!

It was time to deworm them and we skipped Zep last time, so we knew we had to get him this time. Since we couldn't use the barn we locked him in the round pen where we feed and I added a panel on the inside so that we could use it to corner him. We eased him into the corner and I squeezed the panel in toward him a little so that he didn't have an escape route, then my husband roped him (gently) with an old lariat. Once we had the lariat on him I went to his head where he had it stuffed in the corner with me on the outside of the spare panel. I reached through the panel and put a halter and lead on him, then we took the lariat off.

When we opened up the panel he bolted. Then when he hit the end of the rope he totally freaked out!! Eventually he stopped and we let him rest. He used to know how to lead a little bit, but apparently he's completely forgotten what halter pressure means because we couldn't get him to step forward off of it at all, so I got my target stick and clicker. At first my husband put a little pressure on the halter and I held the target stick up, but we didn't have much success with that. I forget how small the criteria has to be with him. Remembering that just wearing the halter was criteria in itself we put slack in the rope and just had him touch the target while wearing the halter. I left the halter on, although I really didn't want to. Without it there is no way I could catch him again by myself. So over the next couple of days I'm going to have him practice following the target for a little while until I can get him walking again and then I'll practice with the rope on, but no pressure. Eventually I'll have him leading. And eventually, eventually I'll practice putting on and removing a halter over the one he's wearing. It will just take time, but we will get there. Our first success is getting the halter on!!

Sorry there are no pictures, but it was dark. :) So I guess Taming Led Zeppelin is back on!!

Chrome Learns Manners

I remembered watching a video somewhere on YouTube about Carolyn Resnick working with a stallion on respect and manners around food. I've always admired Carolyn Resnick's ways, but I've never used her methods before because I can't afford to pay for her books/DVDs. I finally found her blog here (http://www.carolynresnickblog.com/) that has a lot of really good information on it.

So anyway, I don't remember where the video is, but if you search YouTube you can probably find it. On Monday I decided to try it with Chrome since he can be a bit of a brat about food. I've also been making him back up before he can eat his breakfast and dinner. Once I have the barn fixed and a stall I'm going to teach him to put his ears forward before he can eat. It's just hard to do it right now because the other two interfere.

First we played Chase the Tiger because it had been a while and I figured we've been working on hard stuff (backing with head down; will get video later) and he deserved some play time.



Then I locked the other two out of the round pen, sat a bucket of feed down and got to work. I popped him a little hard the first time with the whip by accident, but I'm telling you he has no fear or respect for whips lol. I'll work with him on that (using another Resnick method and yes I'll get video) so I don't have to hit him next time.



I was proud of him! He still sometimes tried to go for it, but a vocal "eh eh" was enough to keep him from eating the feed. With a little more practice I doubt he'll even look at it. :D There are a couple more things regarding feed that I'm going to try because I've finally learned that what we're lacking in our relationship is respect (I know duh right). He knows I can't move him if he doesn't want to (hence having to smack him so hard) and he thinks that he can have whatever he wants, so he's about to learn that I own his resources and I give them to him because I'm a kind leader. Someday we can go back to being best friends, but right now he has to learn that I'm the one in control and he can't keep trying to boss me around. So things are about to start getting interesting around here so keep coming back. :D I know I sound disorganized right now, but I promise I have a whole training plan figured out. Things are going to be a million times better before May using these methods. And don't worry, not a single one of them ever involves even touching him. I'm not going to beat him into submission because I just don't believe in that and it's not the way I train. Trust me I'll be explaining things better soon.

P.S. After going back over this I realized I'm making Chrome sound like a bully, but he totally isn't!! The things he does are very mild and subtle. Things like pinned ears (keep in mind he does pin them during play and that's not being aggressive or anything, just playing) or not moving very fast when I ask him to or stepping into my path. He's not ugly, but the subtle signs he shows are that he thinks he controls the show. So we're going to work on that.