Horse Tips : Hard to Catch Horse

 Help- "I have a hard to catch horse"

There are multiple aspects in working with a difficult to catch horse that we must consider.

First, let's talk about the past. Whether it is you or previous owners, or folks who interacted with the horse, every single catching session was teaching the horse about the human experience. The two most common ways that people deal with a difficult to catch horse is coercing them with food or fear by making it a lesser of two evils to be caught.

What people often don't recognize when using coercion, is that whatever the issue(s) are that cause the resistance during the catching, will still be present and continue to filter the horse's perception during the human interaction that follows the catching.

That means that all those sessions where the horse with difficult to catch, the entire time the human was interacting with the horse afterwards, was reinforcing the root cause(s) of the horse's initial resistance.

The second aspect in working with a horse that's difficult to catch is recognizing that one can have no assumptions. One must start with the horse as if he had have never been interacted with. This allows for an opportunity for observation and assessment as to what the horse's initial triggers are whether it is spatially, fear of the human, et cetera.

Without first being able to engage the horse's mind from afar, having him learn to mentally and visually track the human's movement, help the horse learn how interrupt and let go of avoidance patterns, the horse cannot come up with "new" thoughts, leaving them stuck in behavioral patterns of resistance.

Until we interrupt those patterns and help the horse learn to search mentally and try different things, we will continue to see the behavior of fleeing escalate.

Another aspect in helping the difficult to catch horse is recognizing that catching the horse is not about the act of containment, but instead the horse mentally checking-in with the human and offering to participate.

The quality of catching the horse is everything in the interaction and yet for so many people it is just an annoying interaction that causes human emotions to be triggered if the horse has any form of counter offers.

After learning to engage the horse's mind from afar, giving him time to think, search, try, and work through his options until he offers to participate without fear as a motivator, we then have to look at how the horse feels about physical pressure, especially the human touching him and the halter.

Although the horse may have been interacted with before, if the act of haltering or the use of the halter has been weaponized (which in most cases it has,) then the horse is quite defensive towards it.

If during movement with or of the halter, the horse is mentally anticipative and carrying physical tension, and it is not addressed, then that overflows into what the horse carries while being led, tied, groomed, tacked, ridden, etc and influences the next time he is about to be caught.

So many of the tools that people want in horsemanship to have options in influencing a willing, adaptable, reasonable horse, starts with the quality of the catching.

If interested in learning more, you can click the link to watch the four part series of when I was working with an Uncatchable Horse in South America.