Positive Horsemanship

Why doesn\'t my horse backup?

I met Charlie, a young black cob, a couple of weeks ago while working in Ireland. His owner Vicky was finding it really difficult to back him away from her. No matter how hard she swung that rope or pushed and shoved he just wasn’t moving - he was STUCK!
Whenever a horse doesn’t answer our request we need to stop and analyse why he might not be able to carry out what appears to be a very reasonable request.
There a few reasons why a horse doesn’t do what we want, PAIN is first on the list (this wasn’t Charlie’s problem). Perhaps Vicky wasn’t important enough to bother doing anything for, maybe he was exhausted and too tired to move, perhaps he didn’t understand or was too frightened to move backwards (I’ve seen people getting quite violent with horses that won’t back up only to then notice that the electric fence was dangerously near the horse’s bottom.)
I took a good long look at Charlie wondering if there was something in his body language that would help us understand why things weren’t working and how we could rephrase the question.
Then I saw the answer and stopped Vicky in her tracks. It was nearing the end of the session so we let the horses go out for a bit of hay and rest and returned to the warmth of the kitchen to discuss what I had seen.
I got everyone on all fours on the ground – if you are physically fit I urge you to try this at home folks – and got them to position themselves with a ‘leg at each corner’ then to lean forward at far as they dare before they fell flat on their faces! Having got everyone well and truly on their forehands I asked them to backup…and guess what?
THEY COULDN’T PHYSICALLY DO IT!
I then asked them to play around with their position to see what they had to do to make the backup possible. After much hilarity the general consensus of opinion was to rock their weight back onto their ‘hocks’ and immediately the backup became easy.
We went back out to Charlie and put a head collar and rope on him.
Immediately everyone could see that he leant way over his forehand, (interestingly he suffers intermittent lameness in one of his front limbs) why did he do this?
Well as a cob he is a draught animal bred to push his shoulders forward into harness to pull a load but Vicky had also fed Charlie titbits by hand from very early on in his life so that when in the presence of people he constantly leant towards then with his head and neck to beg, he had learnt not to move his feet only his head and neck therefore being constantly on the forehand.
So what could we do to help Vicky and Charlie?
I suggested that she stop feeding titbits by hand because I felt this was encouraging Charlie to lean forward. Then Vicky very gently asked Charlie to rock his weight back by reaching under his chin and pushing the clip away from her (she made sure she was standing to one side in case he threw his head up), she didn’t want him to move his feet just his body back so that the weight came off his front end. She asked this very quietly and without much energy because if she did too much he just pushed back into her. As soon as his weight dropped back she released for a second then raised her energy and directed her intention towards the foot that was next to step back he then moved back smoothly and with no difficulty at all! After a very few requests Charlie was distributing the weight himself before backing up – what a success!!
Vanessa Bee - Nagony Aunt!
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