CALM DOWN!!!

Ok, maybe the title of this article should be “Calm…Down…” instead of “CALM DOWN!!!”  But how many of us can truly generate that behavior in the case of a stressful situation or an emergency?  How much of our horse’s stress is actually manifested by us?  I’ve actually seen it a lot. 

Experienced horse drivers promote being aware of your horse’s situation at all times.  You shouldn’t “let your guard down” and be unprepared for what could happen.  You should be watching what your horse is looking at, listening to, and focusing on.  However, that doesn’t mean that you should be on edge, waiting for the blowup. 

While I took riding lessons much earlier in life, my family got our first horse when I was nine.  He was a stoic little freak.  When he decided that something was scary, he blew hard and fast.  And he wouldn’t load in the trailer, and he wouldn’t clip, and he wouldn’t bathe, and he wouldn’t stand for the farrier, but he would buck.  He was the epitome of a horse with “vices”.  He was so lazy that he would drag his front feet and wear off his toes, so he had to be shod on the front feet only.  He was a slow western pleasure horse at home, and a jiggy English horse at every show (the couple a year I got to go to).  As a young, impressionable kid, I learned to be on my guard all...the...time.  There’s only so many times that your rear end, and ego, can land in the dirt in front of the other kids before you develop major self-protective habits.  Those habits, unfortunately, probably didn’t help the situation.  Looking back, I’m sure that I probably inadvertently caused many of the behaviors in my horse that I was trying to avoid because I was so worried about them manifesting.  I not only learned to ride with my legs braced for the buck (which, by the way, equitation judges really don’t like), but I learned not to trust my horse at all.  And he didn’t trust me.  This was not a match made in heaven!

While I learned a lot from that first horse, I also learned a lot from my subsequent horses, ones I could trust.  Eventually, we came across a stunted little Arab mare that desperately needed a good home.  I was a teenager when we boarded our horses across the street from where she was kept, and we trail rode past her paddock.  In the summer, she looked fine, but later that winter (in cold Wisconsin), we happened to see that she wasn’t being cared for.  The hay was there stacked outside the fence, but nobody in the household went out and fed it to her, or they weren't feeding enough.  ☹ She was skin and bones.  My mom and I decided to offer the family a couple hundred bucks for her just to get her out of there.  And thus began my journey into working with a starving, abused, untrusting pony.

Long story short, I did lots of groundwork with her until we could actually do “grown up horsey things” like haltering, leading, tying, bathing, clipping, etc.  The more nervous we were around her, the more nervous she became. She was probably the first horse that I started to learn to control my own emotions around horses. 

When you ride horses, it’s kind of a given that eventually you are going to fall off.  When my riding students would fall off the first time, they were sniffling and upset, and I told them that they have to fall off at least two more times to be a real rider.  (Ok, I know that some people tell their students that it is more like ten times, but hey, you have to give younger kids quicker “rewards”!)  The second time the kid fell off, they would brush themselves off, take a breath, and get back on.  The third time, they would jump up very excitedly and proclaim that they had accomplished their third time!  So, how does this all fit into driving?  If you participate in a sport long enough, you are going to have negative experiences, and it’s no different for horse driving.  However, with driving, we REALLY try to limit the potential for accidents because driving accidents are usually way more hazardous that simply falling off the horse with your butt in the dirt.  If you become dislodged from the carriage and the horse takes off, he may never drive again!  This is where handling your emotions is imperative. 

In my opinion and terminology, a driving “accident” is not coming back to the barn the same way that you left.  This can be the result of an equipment malfunction (harness or carriage breaks), a bad placement of the carriage (that causes a rollover, etc.), or the horse reacting to something (that causes a runaway or other damage to the carriage and/or harness), among other things.  Those of us who have been driving long enough have had at least one of these experiences.  Through my experiences and education, I have learned to train myself to be calm.  We recently had a short “runaway” with an inexperienced horse while I was on the back of the marathon carriage.  While the first thing that seems to happen is that my heart sinks into my gut, the next thing that I have worked on is to keep my wits about me. I get very quiet, take a deep breath (this is a MAJOR challenge because everything in me says to hold my breath), and work to control my heart rate.  I learned from a natural horsemanship guy that horses can tell your heart rate from 4-10 feet away.  I don’t know if that is true, however, it doesn’t hurt to keep it down in the moments of a disaster.  This all happens now in the process of a few seconds.

In the time of a stressful situation, your horse needs you to keep it together.  He isn’t thinking clearly, so he needs you to do the thinking for him.  If both of you are freaking out, nobody is thinking.  Screaming and wailing is not staying calm.  Yelling at the horse to “WHOA, WHOA!” is not staying calm.  Being quiet and keeping your head about you is extremely beneficial to the horse.  Many times, it can even mean preventing an accident when he realizes that you are not freaking out, so there must not be anything about which to freak out!  There have been times when I see the horse’s demeanor start to escalate, so I take a deep breath, let it out slowly and deliberately, and watch the horse do the same. 

Quite a few years ago, a lady came to our barn with her horse, and she stated that he didn’t like tarps. It was almost like a “badge of honor”, or a “my horse is unique” proclamation. So, my husband, without prompting, gently took the horse from the lady and said, “Well, let’s get him used to tarps!”  The owner was aghast, in almost a panic over what was going to happen.  At first, the horse sidestepped the tarp and tried to act crazy, but Chad remained calm with a friendly, workmanlike, nonchalant “This is your good work, today” attitude.  Within ten minutes or less, not only was that horse walking calmly across the tarp, but Chad was pulling it over the horse’s head!  It was all the owner’s stress that caused the horse to panic over the tarp because she was panicking over the horse’s previous reaction to the scary thing!  Now, any time an owner says, “My horse doesn’t do X” or “doesn’t like X”, I take that with a grain of salt because I have seen horses that are perfectly fine when not being handled by the owner who is a ball of stress themselves! 

When I was in college, I had a summer internship.  My boss and I were on our way to a meeting in her truck when a car pulled out in front of us at an intersection.  I could see that we were going to T-bone them, and I tensed up with a big gasp, at which then my boss slammed on the brakes.  But it was too late.  The front of her truck ended up in the side of the car, and the girl in the passenger seat ended up with a cut on her forehead and broken ribs (she initially had no idea that she was hurt).  There happened to be two off-duty police officers at the same intersection who were on a fishing vacation, but since they saw the accident, they went into first responder mode.  My boss and I got out of her truck, and just stayed out of the way.  Her truck was undrivable, and we knew we had to give a statement.  The officers requested that we sit on the curb, and while we were there, they asked us if we were alright.  I thought I was initially, but quite quickly my chest started hurting.  One of the officers asked if I was wearing my seat belt, which I was, so he said that it was probably the result of slamming into the belt. Knowing that, I declined going to the hospital in the ambulance because I thought I was fine.  However, about an hour later, I couldn’t turn my head/neck.  My boss borrowed a vehicle to take me to the emergency room where they diagnosed me with whiplash, a result of tensing up before the impact.  I was put on muscle relaxers and pain meds, and discharged.  Back at work, one of my coworkers made a joke, but it made a lot of sense.  He told me that next time, I should “just relax, and enjoy the accident.”  😊 My boss didn’t get whiplash because she didn’t see the car until the last second, and wasn’t tense when we impacted.  I had stiffened up, bracing for the impact.  I was hurt more.  It took a long time for me to not brace every time I was a passenger in a vehicle (it drove my now-husband crazy when I gasped at every little blip on the road!), but I also had to force myself to relax, knowing that the result of being tense was worse than the impact.  I now use that phrase with my students to get them to just “relax, and enjoy the accident”.  It at least gets them to giggle a little bit thinking about the seeming absurdity of that comment! 

I have also had my students sing the ABC song while driving their horse to distract them and force them to breathe.  Or get them talking about something that has nothing to do with their horse, like what they do for a living, etc.  It's amazing to watch that horse take a deep breath, lower their head, and lengthen their stride when the driver isn't grabbing ahold of the him for dear life, because the driver is finally relaxing thinking about something else other than how stressed out they are driving their horse!

So, CALM DOWN!!!!  Or…calmmm dowwwnnn.  Take a deep breath, stop and think, keep your wits about you, control your heart rate, and stay quiet.  It may just save your keister someday when your horse needs you to be the leader and the one who has it together.