Moving on?

I’m trying as best I can to move forward and continue with my love of working draft horses.

I’ve been trying to spend time with Pam every night. She is soooo rough on her training. I’ve been doing lots of little things like disengaging the rear end, flexing her neck, desensitizing to rope, and things like that. I don’t think she see’s me as the alpha, and so she still doesn’t listen well.

One of the first things she taught me was that she is not motivated by food like Lily was. With Pam in the pasture alone, I can call and call and she will not come up. She gets to where she can see me and then just watches me. I suppose the sight of me calling, whistling, and shaking a feed bucket as loud as humanly possible is quite an entertaining sight. As for me, it got VERY frustrating. So … some changes were made.

I put Pam in my smaller fenced of pen (probably just under 1 acre big). This is the pen where my sons horse resides. My sons horse, Duncan, is 30 years old, and is on a special diet since he has no molars(teeth). Also, because he has no molars, it takes him over an hour to eat his food (which he gets twice daily). Because of this, I had a problem to solve … how do I arrange things so that Duncan can eat in peace, without having a much larger Belgian run him off and steal his food.

The question in itself had the answer. I needed to design something that allowed a small horse to enter and eat, and keep a big horse out. My mind went to work and here is what I came up with.

I made the entrance to the normal horse stall just wide enough for Duncan (who is a quarterhorse) to walk in. I thought this would work alone, but I soon realized that Pam has a “tank mode” where she will just push herself in any opening not wide enough for her. How do I solve this? Add a line across the top of the stall at the end. This line is about 5 feet off the ground. Duncan has no problem lowering his head and walking under it. The first time I left the horses, Pam wrecked the whole thing by trying to go under, then lifting her head. She unhooked the panels, and the line took a nice fistful of hair off her mane. I had to reconstruct the whole thing, but it taught Pam that this entrance was BAD.

The next problem I had was that Pam would run up and bite Duncan on the back, causing him to abandon his stall. I guess Pam thinks “If I can’t have it, nobody can!” The solution to this was to create the empty stall in the middle. Now Pam cannot get to Duncan. It is quite humorous to watch her run a U around him unhappy that he has food in his bin that she can’t have.

This is working very well and lets the horses eat in peace. So far, I’m extremely satisfied.

Having Pam in this pen, allows me to easily work with her every evening when I get home from work. This Pen is right next to the house, and it keeps me from having to walk a half a mile to get Pam. In these winter months, every minute of daylight is precious. 10 minutes saved chasing her, is 10 minutes of getting her feet moving.

This is what I’ve been up to lately. I may try to ground drive Pam again with my carrot stick in hand to motivate her to walk. She did so well that last session with her and Lily, that I’m hoping she’ll now catch on to what I’m asking. Raises Glass … Here’s to hoping!