Successful Loading

By Your Horse

04 March 2011 10:00

Everybody knows someone who has a problem loader. Some reluctant loaders have been involved in a nasty road traffic accident and have a good reason to be fearful, while others just get up one day and decide they don’t want to do it anymore.

For Richard, who has worked with tricky loaders for almost 20 years, the reason why a horse doesn’t want to load isn’t important. Instead he focuses on changing the horse’s posture and earning his respect. By doing so he’s able to load any horse in a matter of minutes.

Here he explains how to get your horse walking on and off your trailer in five simple steps.

1. Learn to look past the reason

“Loading is a universal issue in the horse world,” says Richard. “It affects everyone from your happy hacker who wants to do the odd pleasure ride to your four star eventer. Natural survival instinct means all horses prefer wide, open spaces to the narrow, confined space of a trailer. For this reason, loading asks a lot of a horse.
“For me, the exact reasons why a horse is reluctant to load are irrelevant. If you could sit your horse down and ask him why he didn’t want to travel, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. All he knows is that it’s easier not to.”

2. Recognise the handbrake

“When your horse plants his front feet together, spreads his hindlegs and raises his head, he’s putting the handbrake on,” Richard explains. “When you get to this stage there’s no point continuing until you can control his hindlegs.” 
Think of your horse as being rearwheel drive – it’s his back legs that dictate where he‘s going.
“The biggest mistake you can make is to keep trying rather than identifying what needs to change,” says Richard. “You’ll simply get stuck in a cycle where your horse does his thing and plants his feet, and you turn him back to try again.”

3. Use groundwork to gain his respect

Richard uses simple groundwork exercises to gain the attention and respect of the ‘problem’ horses he works with.
“It’s important to be able to drive your horse as well as lead him, otherwise your options are limited,” says Richard. He starts by moving the horse forwards and backwards. “Most horses are happy to move forwards as fast as you want,” he explains. “But many resist being asked to move backwards as this requires a certain amount of submission and trust.” He then gets the horse to move his quarters round by twirling the end of the leadrope towards his rear.

Next Richard sends the horse out on a 20m circle by twirling the end of the leadrope towards his quarters and letting the rope slide through his hands. After the horse has completed a couple of circles, Richard shortens the length of line, making the circle half the size. He then twirls the rope towards the horse’s quarters, asking him to move his hocks out on the circle and come to a halt facing into the circle. “As I shorten the rope I’m putting slightly more pressure on the horse, both physically and emotionally,” explains Richard. “This signals to him that he needs to listen.”

Richard repeats this exercise several times, until asking the horse to turn in and halt is more of a suggestion than a clear twirl of the rope. Richard demonstrates how little pressure is required by holding the rope between two fingertips as he asks the horse to turn in and halt.
At first the horse prances around the circle on his toes, looking around suspiciously, but once he gets the idea about what’s required, he starts to lower his head and lick and chew.
“Horses can only take in new information when relaxed. We can tell he’s relaxed because he’s lowered his head position and we can tell he’s thinking because he’s licking and chewing. He’s also starting to realise that it’s easier to be near me than to be away from me, which will be helpful when we come to ask him to load.”

Within 10 minutes the horse is fully focused on Richard, who’s able to move him around with subtle but purposeful movements. Only once Richard has got the horse listening and earned his respect does he return to the vicinity of the trailer.
“You have to take the role of the herd leader,” he explains. “You have to be a calm, assertive influence your horse can trust. Horses only respect people who are consistent and fair, and they only trust people they respect.”

4. Never use pressure as a punishment

Richard has created his own pressure halter to help communicate with the horses he works with. “The pressure halter is crucial in getting the horse’s attention and getting him to understand what’s being asked,” he explains. “It’s not designed to punish the horse in any way. As far as the horse is concerned he’s made an intelligent decision in deciding not to get in the trailer and you can rapidly lose a horse’s confidence by telling him off for making, what is for him, a smart decision.”
Richard’s halter spreads the pressure across three areas – the nose, poll and cheeks. “The pressure acts in a pincher-like way to surprise the horse – in the same why you might squeeze a child’s knee,” he says. “It gets his attention and opens the lines of communication. The horse then gets to choose to avoid the discomfort of the pressure by stepping towards the handler. It gives him the sense that he’s making a choice.
“If a horse feels bullied into going in the trailer he’s likely to be just as reluctant to go in next time, but if he feels he’s made the decision to go in, there’s no reason he won’t choose to go in again.

“The level of pressure never escalates,” emphasises Richard. “The pressure is there to encourage the horse to choose to follow you, it’s not designed to be used to drag the horse in. The pressure simply tells the horse he shouldn’t be over there and encourages him to think about what he needs to do about it.
“People sometimes think that pressure will dull a horse’s willingness, but it doesn’t, it aids the flow of communication. When you put pressure on a horse and take it off they say ‘thank you’ – they don’t hate you for putting pressure on them in the first place. If they did we wouldn’t be able to train them at all.”

5. Repetition, repetition, repetition

Once you’ve dealt with the initial problem the key is repetition.
“When you have a horse with a loading problem it can be so tempting to rush to shut up the back of the trailer and set off as soon as you’ve managed to get the horse in, but a horse doesn’t start to take information in until he has done something five or six times,” explains Richard. “The more he does it, the more he’ll realise that it’s in fact easier to go in the trailer than not to.
“I always recommend that the owners of the horses I work with load and unload their horse 15 to 20 times a day for 10 consecutive days following my initial visit. That’s 150 to 200 times in total.
“By the time a horse has done that comfortably you know any time after that is going to be easy.”