I’ve been asked to write about a horse that was sent to me for breaking in about many years ago. I learned something very unexpected from this horse and it was something that nobody had ever mentioned or described to me before. In fact, to this day I don’t know anybody who has had a similar experience.
The horse was a young gelding. It had only been with us a few days when Michèle noticed he seemed “off” somehow in the paddock. She had been cleaning his paddock and picked up on the fact that the horse seemed lethargic and disinterested in the activities around him. The symptoms were vague, but I knew to trust Michèle’s instincts about these kinds of things.
We had only recently moved our work to the area and didn’t have a regular vet, so we called a local equine veterinary practice and they sent the first available person. He was a thin, lanky fellow, as tall as a tree who had a super calm and quiet manner about him.
We arranged for the owner to be there at the time and I had the horse waiting in the round yard. We made our introductions and Matt proceeded to ask Michèle and me several questions before examining the horse. Matt handled the horse in a nice quiet manner and the horse seemed unbothered. After a pretty thorough going over he said he felt sure the horse was displaying the very early signs of a mild colic. He didn’t think he needed to do too much and the horse would recover of its own volition. However, just to be sure there was no peritonitis (infection) he wanted to take a peritoneal tap, which involved inserting a needle into the abdominal cavity.
The owner told us all that her horse was not good with needles. But in my arrogance, I figured he would be fine if I held him just right. Matt felt similarly confident. As Matt bent down by the horse’s flank to insert the needle, there was a flash of something and Matt was lying on the ground holding his leg. The kick came so quickly and without any noticeable warning that I was unsure at first why Matt was sprawled on the ground. To his credit, he did not utter any profanity except “gosh”. I started to question what sort of vet didn’t swear when he was kicked.
The man was clearly in a lot of pain and I thought the force might have snapped his shin. Luckily he was able to put weight on it after about 10 minutes.
We all thought a different approach might be a good idea. Matt said that he figured that the horse should be given a five-day course of antibiotics to cover any risk of infection – penicillin to be given intramuscularly (IM) and gentamicin to be given intravenously (IV). Matt insisted that he needed to be available to inject the gentamicin for legal reasons. However, it was not obvious how we were going to needle the horse without casualties.
We tried using a twitch, but it didn’t work. We tried holding a front leg up, but that didn’t work either. I even permitted Matt to try grabbing an ear, which is something I never do – but to no avail. The horse was just too scared and had too much fight. Then I asked Matt if the antibiotics could wait a few days. He said that if the horse gets no worse that would be ok, but if its condition deteriorated we would have to find a way to administer the antibiotics immediately. I told him to come back in 3 days.
I immediately began working on teaching the horse to lie down. I didn’t throw it to the ground as you see on some breaking-in videos. Instead, I taught it to shift its weight to the hindquarters when I picked up a left foreleg. I worked at this until the horse volunteered the leg and would step its hindquarters backward. This was the hardest thing to get the horse feeling okay about and it took a little time.
Then I progressed this movement into teaching the horse to lower its forehand with the right foreleg stretched in front. This was pretty easy to teach because the hindquarters were already yielding without a struggle.
The next step was to help the horse find that he could go from resting on his left knee to tipping his weight to the side to lie down. This took some time and was done in small increments because he was worried about yielding entirely to lying prone on the ground. Commonly, horses get bothered when we take away control of their feet and their capacity to flee. A horse just never knows when he will have to run for his life at a moment's notice. However, with patience, empathy, and going slow the horse was able to lay down with confidence.
It took about 5 or 6 sessions over the 3 days to have the horse lying down with very little bother.
When Matt returned on the third day to administer the injections he was a bit dumbstruck to see the horse lay down when I lifted the foreleg. For safety's sake I asked Michèle to rest her knee on the horse’s neck to prevent him from getting to his feet in case he reacted badly when he felt the needle pierce his skin. That was a good idea, because when he felt the needle he tried to get up. But Michèle blocked him and he calmed again quickly. Matt was able to give him the injections without any further resistance.
Matt said he was very impressed and had never seen anybody lay a horse down before without a lot of fighting.
The next day Matt returned. This time I laid the horse to the ground, but he felt so good that I decided not to use Michèle’s help to keep him down. He just lay there while Matt injected him. Each day the horse became more confident and okay with the injections. By the fifth and final day, Matt was able to give him his injections while he stood in the yard and smooched on me.
What really surprised me was that the horse learned something by being laid down. My experience is that laying a horse down can help to reset a horse’s trouble for a few moments. Most people force a horse to the ground and I have never seen anything good come from that – it’s pure dominance and submission and a horse learns nothing good from that.
But to teach a horse to lie down and learn from it surprised me. It had not occurred to me that would happen and nobody has ever mentioned it to me before.
It could be argued that the reason the horse seemed less bothered by the injections is because the process of lying down caused the horse to shut down. It mentally went away to that place inside its mind that allows a horse to cope with the horrors of dealing with the stuff people do to horses. Over the years I have seen many horses with various levels of shutting down and they all exhibit a range of behaviours. But this horse did not show that at all. He was the same horse in all other aspects except he was more comfortable with being needled. So I believe there was a learning process going on in association with learning to lay down.
I think the learning comes from the fact that the horse felt okay about yielding to the loss of control of his feet. I believe the important part came from the change in the horse’s thoughts that it was okay to lie down. And with this came a quiet mind that made it available to learn something.
To me, it doesn’t matter if the horse is laid down or not – that’s not the important part. The important part happened before the horse was laid down. The laying down came after the change of thought and it was the yielding to an idea that I presented that was the important part. The element that made it possible for the horse to accept being needled was not being laid down, it was yielding to the idea that it was okay to give control of his feet to me. If the horse had not done that, every time we needed to inject the horse we would have had to lay him down and have Michèle kneel on his neck for control.
I found this a profoundly important and interesting experience. For me, I think I learned something more important than the horse did.
