The area I am in New Mexico has a lot of volcanic rock, and the horses literally wear their feet down naturally, requiring no foot care at all unless they have conformation issues or are inactive. Even though lordosis supposedly doesn't impact a horse's health or performance, in the last year or so I've noticed Sophie wearing her feet differently, or more accurately not wearing them down like she had been. Sophie's right forefoot was starting to grow much longer than the other feet, and the others were beginning to lose the wonderful balance that they'd been exhibiting for the last 19 years. Trouble was, Sophie had never had her feet handled, much less trimmed. In fact, she was pretty sure that my bending over and even touching her lower leg was an act of predation.
Either Spiritual Horsemanship works on the ground, or it's just another crackpot horsemanship approach that amounts to one more way to bilk money out of the frustrated horse owner. (Not that there is any charge for what I'm sharing, but you know what I mean.) I'm here to tell you that Spiritual Horsemanship works with real horses in the real world just fine.
An aside...
My relationship with my horses has always been along the lines of what I'm talking about in this blog. Although it wasn't maybe quite at the level of what it is today, from day one my horses have been given a lot of options - so as dubious as Sophie was about my touching her feet, she wasn't unused to me doing things without restraint. (This is my way of saying that if you do this at home, your results may vary.)
Let me also say that I have nothing against rewards, and I'm using treats as positive feedback for Sophie in the form of alfalfa pellets. One positive response gets rewarded with one pellet. Yes, that's not much of a reward, but Sophie doesn't get any pellets otherwise so she thinks it's pretty special. The idea here is not to feed her, but to provide a spurt of pleasure that quickly and strongly connects her actions to that pleasure. I could do it with a pat on the shoulder or even saying "good girl", but Sophie hasn't been handled enough for either to be as meaningful to her as the pellet.
And back to the process...
I started out by bending over and simply touching one shoulder, then walking to the other side and touching the other (front legs only at this time). One pellet for each touch that Sophie allowed. Two pellets each session, twice a day.
Sophie was free to walk away from me if she wanted to - a very clear communication! This meant that I had to learn to never cause Sophie to want to say no. I was the one being taught, I was the one altering my behavior, and Sophie the teacher. My reward: Sophie doing what I wanted.
Over the days I worked my way down each leg, a few inches more each session, till I got to the feet. Total time invested each session: About 2 seconds of actual training and maybe two minutes of preparation (grabbing two pellets and walking over to Sophie, plus moving around her body).
When I got to the point where I could rest my fingers anywhere on each foot without Sophie even shifting her weight, I was ready to proceed to the next stage. Everyone has their own preferred way of signaling a horse to pick up its foot, and mine is to gently squeeze the soft part of the fetlock behind the cannon bone. Gently and briefly - and I release immediately and wait for a result. The waiting part is as important as the squeezing part.
I started this process with Sophie about a month ago. Today I can pick up each foot and hold it for a full second. Every time I do this I can hold the foot marginally longer than before, and each time the increase in time is by a larger margin. Still, we're talking a whole month to get to this point, which may seem like a very long time. And I haven't even introduced rasp or nippers.
What's the rush?
Most of the time we work with horses as we would with human children: We drill, we repeat, we spend chunks of time going over the same thing. Horses' muscles may benefit from repetition and increasing stress, but I'm not convinced their minds do. I have found that when it comes to learning (training the mind vs. conditioning the body) what horses benefit from more than repetition is time to process - time for an incident to be stored in long-term memory rather than being lost in short-term memory that is constantly overlaid with input. The sheer uneventfulness of my one second foot handling combined with the little spike of pleasure, followed by sufficient time for that event to move into long-term memory, means that each time I do this with Sophie she's going a little bit further forward from the last time, making progress that needs no backtracking or correcting.
And that means steady progress, no matter how slow it might seem.
Walk away
Equally important as taking it slow is the removal of pressure. A big part of how I work with Sophie is moving away from her immediately after giving her the pellet. Body location is significant to horses. We use it all the time when we free-lunge horses to get them to move, but keep in mind that it works the other way as well. In another post I'll talk about how to use moving away from your horse as an inducement for the horse to come to you, but for now just remember that it's important to immediately reduce the pressure of you to give your horse the mental space to process what you really want him to process. For now, the point is that when you're teaching your horse something new, moving away and reducing the pressure of your body location is an important tool to use.
This is the beginning of applied Spiritual Horsemanship
You don't have to start with a horse's feet. You can start with anything you want as long as there is one clear, discrete thing for a horse to learn, and as long as you are willing to break the learning into tiny increments well spread apart. The point here is to establish - to yourself as much as with your horse - that a partnership like this can really work, and to actually experience how it works.
Most of us find it very easy to either up the pressure or push the horse in some other way if the horse offers an opinion the human doesn't want. But a horse's response doesn't always have to be yes when the human understands the value of a no.
Spiritual Horsemanship is who you are, not what you do
When you let the principles of Spiritual Horsemanship guide you - in your relationship with your horse as well as in your personal life - you will find that the slower you go, the faster you get where you want to be.
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