The Starting Point

      “Are you going to chase him around?” the woman asked as the two of us stood outside the round pen and watched her sorrel gelding frantically pace back and forth along the fence opposite us.

      “Chase him?” I asked, a bit surprised by her question. “No.”

      “Every trainer that goes in the pen with him wants to chase him around,” she said with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “They say he has to learn that running from people is a bad thing and standing still is good.”

      “I’m not planning on chasing him.”

      “Good.” She put her foot on the bottom rail of the fence. “It doesn’t help.”

      We had only been standing near the round pen for a few minutes, but the gelding had been worried long before that.

      The pen he was in had been visible from the road so I was actually able to get a little look at him as I drove up. Even from that distance, it had been clear that he wasn’t a very happy horse. He stood in the middle of the pen, head high, neck and body tight, ears erect and nostrils flared.

      After I met his owner, a small dark-haired woman by the name of Marie, we walked around the side of the house and started down a small footpath covered in tiny white and grey rocks toward the pen. Almost as soon as we walked around the corner of the house, the gelding saw us, immediately headed for the far end of the 50-foot pen, and began pacing. We were still over 100 feet away from him at the time.

      The footpath we were on led all the way down to the round pen gate where the path with the little grey and white rocks split, forming a 3-foot border in both directions around the pen itself. On the far side of the round pen, near where the gelding was pacing, was another gate that opened into a 6-foot-wide, 30-foot-long alley that led to another gate that opened into the nearby 150- by 200-foot arena. The little rocks bordered the alley and big arena as well.

      “I got him from the people at the end of the road about three years ago.” She pointed at a lone house across the neighboring field and about a quarter mile away. A four-rail white fence surrounded the entire property, about 50 acres worth.

      “They got him for their daughter and he was supposed to be very well trained,” she continued. “From what I saw, she mostly just got on and ran him around every time she rode. A few months after they got him they started having trouble catching him.”

      She went on to explain that they turned him out in the big pasture one day and when they went to get him, he turned and ran off. After several hours of trying to catch him, the girl got on their four-wheeled ATV and chased him until he was so tired he could barely move. From that day until this, he had been nearly impossible to catch or even get near.

      He had gotten so bad that the family was going to send him off to the sale barn where he was sure to end up in the killer pen, so Marie gave the killer price for him, named him Laddy, and brought him home.

      “How were you able to catch him to bring him here?” I asked.

      “We cornered him in the barn and after about an hour I was able to get a halter on him. I led him home after that.”

      She said that after trying to work with him for a year or so and having made little progress, she decided to get some help so she took him to a clinic. She said that surprisingly, once she was able to catch the gelding, getting him in and out of the trailer to get him to the clinic was no trouble at all. But things had not gone well at the clinic.

      “On the first day the guy chased him around the round pen with a flag for a long time, and finally ended up roping him to get him caught,” she recounted. “Then the next day he did the same thing. Long story short, he told me that he was a dangerous horse and that I should get rid of him before he killed me.”

      We both looked in the pen at the gelding who was still pacing the fence, going first one way, then the other, head so high that he looked like a swimming dog trying to keep his nose out of the water.

      “Since then,” she continued. “I’ve had three other trainers come out, each one highly recommended by people I trusted. The first thing each one did was to go in the pen and chase him around.” She took off the ball cap she was wearing, gathered her shoulder length hair in one hand, put it in a ponytail and stuffed it through the opening in the back of the cap before putting it back on her head. “Now he is so scared of people even I have trouble getting close to him.”

      I took the time to explain that I believed this was one of those situations where the people believed they could teach him how to be caught by making him see that running was both difficult and uncomfortable for him. The problem was, in order for that way of training to actually work on any horse, the horse must first be able to think his way through what is happening, while it is happening. In other words, he has to be able to reach a frame of mind that is at least somewhat void of fear. This is an important aspect in training because a fearful mind—in any animal, including humans—is usually unable to reason, and therefore, unable to solve problems.

      From everything Marie had told me, and from what I had seen so far, Laddy most certainly hadn’t reached that state of mind when people were chasing him. In fact, it appeared that this horse saw what was happening to him in a completely different light, one that actually taught him the absolute opposite of what they wanted him to know.

      “Most horses,” I said, “in fact, probably the majority, usually catch on to the idea pretty quickly. It’s why so many people rely on that method so much, because most horses will respond in a pretty predictable way. But every once in a while, a horse like this comes along.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “He’s a nice guy. Willing and sensitive with a lot of try in him,” I told her. “If I had to guess, I would say that more than likely the very first time