Horses that spook...
If you are here watching this video, guarantee you've already watched a bunch of trainings on dealing with the spooky horse through densensitisation.
We want to show you something different.
The problem with desensitisation is that it only teaches the horse to not react to the thing it is scared of.
It doesn't show them how to relax, or what to do other than freeze when approached with something scary or when they get a fright.
This is still in that flight response (ie fight, flight or freeze) and they can still be tripped out of this freeze state into fight or flight. Because they haven't been shown how to process this fear and shift out of this flight state.
Instead what we teach our horses is confidence through curiousity.
We can show up for our horses as a good leader with well established communication, connection and consent and a well established cue to encourage relaxation and to ask us to back off if they need a break so that we can guide them emotionally through that fear response to a relaxed state.
Once in that relaxed state we can show them how to approach and investigate the scary object. What they learn is how to have the confidence and courage to investigate things that scare them, rather than run away from it…
And they get super chuffed with themselves in the process!!!
We have had student after student tell us that once this process was established with their horse their horse will literally drag them around to the scary objects in the new environments to investigate them and then say “Righto, I'm good to go now”!