Many horses resist loading into a horse trailer. A trailer is a strange, noisy box on wheels – it’s no wonder many horses are afraid. Unfortunately, horse trainers have traditionally resorted to negative reinforcement based methods when teaching trailer loading, tactics based out of force and discomfort. Trainers create potentially dangerous situations when they try […]
Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t teach an old dog a new trick?” Many people assume that once an animal gets to a certain age or practices an unwanted behavior a certain number of times, that it will be hopeless to try to train the animal a new behavior pattern. However, nothing could […]
It seems a bit counter-intuitive. If we break a training task down into more steps, it should take longer. However, the opposite is usually true. Smaller steps can get us to our goal quicker and often result in better quality behavior. This came in handy several weeks ago when we picked up Connor from the […]
Our sweet Dottie got adopted! Dottie has really blossomed into a sweet, curious little mare this fall, largely thanks to multiple volunteers at the rescue being willing to take it slow and let her learn that it’s fun to interact with people. You can read about some of the work Meghan did working on building […]
The weather was perfect this weekend for playing with the ponies at the rescue. I spent quite a bit of time on Saturday working with Tex, one of our two year old ponies. He’s friendly and halter-broke, but really hasn’t had a whole lot of training. Tex was absolutely TERRIFIED of people when we first […]
What a great day on Saturday with the horses! My friend Kirsten was out at the rescue for the weekend and we worked most of the afternoon with a few of the horses. I am continually being reminded that animal training shouldn’t be a race. Slow and steady progress beats fast and rushed! The horses […]
