Are treats okay?

Lots of people ask me whether my horses are so badly behaved because I give them carrots.

Of course I tell them my horses are badly behaved because of a myriad of complicated reasons that have little to do with carrots, but I never manage to convince them. They blame the carrots.

I am not even sure Aristotle would believe me. He'd just set out the following:

Marti gives her her horses carrots.
Marti's horses are badly behaved.
Therefore, carrots make horses badly behaved.

Now, just because he is Aristotle does not make him right. And let's face it, Aristotle was NOT a natural horseman. In fact, I don't remember him ever starting a single colt. And anyway, he married a woman named Pythias and then named their daughter Pythias. That's not very smart, is it?

By contrast, Pat Parelli has started lots of colts and his wife, Linda, has a different name to his daughter. Linda and Pat say it's fine to give your horses carrots. So I do. But if you want to see what my horses REALLY love, have a look at this video.

Are treats okay?

Don't Call My Mare Fat!

Don’t call Millie fat -- she is a mare with a fuller figure. And don’t think I am not aware of just how much she resembles a puffer fish or one of those balloons you buy at the zoo. I know it. The question is what to do about it, as the restricted grazing is not (apparently) restricted enough and the exercise program is not (apparently) vigorous enough. Click here for a video that explains why this may be the case.

Pat Parelli went on the HCG diet. HCG is the hormone that pregnancy tests measure and I can’t quite figure out why this diet is all the rave, but he lost a lot of weight on it by taking small amounts of the hormone and some other stuff I don’t understand, then eating almost nothing all day.

While I don’t really like the sound of the diet, I bet Pat’s horses are happy he took the plunge. I always wondered how a little 14.2 quarter horse deals with a large cowboy aboard, and whether this has something to do with that breed’s impressive slide stop.

But I don’t think the HCG diet will work for Millie. First, all those injections. Second, all those injections. Now that spring is here, I’ve had to get out the fat clothes -- a 6' flysheet even though she's only 14.1 hands (I tell her she looks like an opera diva in it and she believes me)

Black is actually a slimming colour, so at least she has that working for her.

Apparently, a daily exercise program for horses requires a couple of miles of trotting and galloping. This is what I read. I couple of miles of GALLOPING? Are they mad? Where do we do this couple of miles? How do we get the fat horse into gallop?

Millie says she doesn’t want to gallop. She wants to sing. She thinks she can be as good as the soprano, Luisa Tetrazzini, who famously said, “Some singers gotta the figure. But Tetrazzini gotta the voice.”

Lazy horse? Give them carrots!

Anyone can ride Milo, so long as they don’t want to go anywhere. Milo is a genius at training his riders to give up. “Riding Milo is like kicking a brick down a road,” said one rider. Another explained that this young pony was “just too exhausting.”

By halting and refusing to move, or only walking when continually reminded that going forward is the answer, Milo has cunningly convinced people to move onto bigger, faster, more energetic horses, and to leave him alone.

That gig worked for a long while. But lucky for me, Parelli Natural Horsemanship has some good tips for ponies like Milo. Watch this video to see how to train your lazy, immobile horse to move forward with exuberance and surprising speed, without the use of whips or spurs.

And just in case you don't know already, Parelli Natural Horsemanship does not endorse this video or recommend most anything I am doing here, except to have fun with your horses. (Oh, and they do have a very effective point to point solution within their larger program to motivate "lazy" horses and YES, it does work!)

Natural Horseman Safety

This picture of me lying half dead after a serious fall from a horse is only an enactment. But had I been riding my horse on the patio and suffered such a fall, I would have joined the nearly 100,000 people per year suffering a horse-related injury.

Does this mean horses are dangerous? Not at all. They almost never kill each other. It’s us who add the dangerous element.

Let’s look at the math:

Horse + nothing = SAFE
Horse + Horse = SAFE
Horse + Human = UNSAFE, EVEN LETHAL. (imagine skull symbol here)

However, had I been riding my horse on the patio this afternoon and taken a tumble, I probably would have been all right. Have a look at this video about Natural Horseman Safety to find out why:

Video Re-Enactment of Join Up Disaster

Some people may wonder why I settled on Parelli Natural Horsemanship when there is more known about Monty Roberts here in the UK.

I guess I never understood what I was supposed to do after the “join up.” I looked at my horse and said, "So now what?" and he said, "Anything but this again."

I see that Monty Roberts now has an on-line university. For all I know, he has a great program and also, let’s face it, he sure seems a nice cowboy. If you go to his website you’ll see he is helping mustangs in the United States.

See? Nice. A nice guy.

I think the Parelli group might say that "join up" can be a form of not listening to the horse. But they might say something else entirely. You don’t dare ask. If you say “Parelli” to a Monty Roberts/Kelly Marks follower they spit on the ground. If you say "Monty Roberts" to a Parelli follower they spit on you. That’s just how it is with natural horsemanship. They like to spit.

One thing I will say is that Join up isn’t always the safest thing -- at least not if you have a pony like Milo who was a Sumo wrestler in a past life.

To prove my point, here is my video reenactment of Join Up with my enraged pony, Milo. Actually, he was only acting, too. He loves pretending to try to kill me.

Video Re-Enactment of my Pre-Parelli Days

People have been writing to me, saying, “Marti, you are such an incompetent horse whisperer and natural horseman now, so how much worse were you before you started on the Parelli program?”

Well, much worse. When I first watched the Level 1 pack I felt all the level 1 students were far better than me. That's because they were. Their horses did not run away from them, lay their ears flat, and attack for food. Mine did all that -- and more!

Second, the horse owners who featured in Level 1 brought their own horses to the Parelli ranch. That means they had enough control to get the horse haltered and into a trailer. Wow. Impressive.

I DID put Milo in a trailer when I first got him because the man who raised him for meat, occasionally gave him hay in a trailer. So Milo was happy to get on one. However, as soon as we drove off, he reared up, threw himself over the front bar and got his legs tangled in the haynet. I was alerted to this when the noise of Milo scrambling in the trailer became louder than the honking of horns behind me. Lucky for me, I had an illegal knife hidden in my car, soI easily cut down the hay net. And Milo was small enough so the emergency services were able to lift him off the bar.

No, I can’t quite capture how grossly idiotic I was when I first got Milo, and words cannot describe. But I’ve tried to do my best in this re-enactment of Day One with my new pony.

Buying a horse? Try the chicken test

Those selling horses will often say something along the lines of “This horse will be your best friend.” That is because many prospective buyers want a horse to be their best friend, and rather than seek psychiatric help for this condition, they search the horse classified ads for the horse of their dreams.

That’s okay if you have some experience with horses, but many people searching for their “dream horse” have no experience whatsoever. It is difficult for them to buy a horse because when it comes down to it, horses scare them. To death. One nice lady who wanted a horse to be her best friend asked me in all honesty, “Will I have to touch it?”

I told her no, not at all. Not if she bought a race horse.

“Good,” she said. “Because I am allergic to horses.”

So, I’ve come up with a unique method for assessing horses for those who want a horse to be their best friend forever, but don’t want to be too close to this new BFF. It is called The Chicken Test and you can see it in action on video below.

I think the youtube link here will give you slightly better quality.

The politics of haying

I hang haynets even though the natural world tells me they are so bad for horses’ lungs that I might as well give them Marlboroughs to smoke all night. Eating from the ground is the way horses should eat, not with their faces level with their chests. Haynets mean your horse is inhaling dust and particles of fiber. This is bad lung food.

In fact, hay is bad for them, I've been told. Unless I buy the dust-extracted organic,pesticide-free loaves that come sealed in plastic at restaurant prices -- but you have to draw a line.

I use haynets which are designed with small mesh and make the hay last a lot longer because apparently horses only sleep a few hours a day and require constant small amounts of food for their guts to function. Otherwise, you run the risk of colic.

Of course, you can overfeed the horse and then they get the sometimes fatal condition of laminitis.

Saltwater fish would be easier than these creatures, who can’t do simple stay-alive things like vomit.

So, there I am under the night sky tying hay nets low enough so that the arc of the horses’ necks tip downward to avoid the dust/particles, but not so low that a hoof will get caught, though this could happen if Millie kicks Milo, which is not unlikely. In case of this possibility, I tie the net to a piece of baling twine so that it will break off and save the horse’s leg. There are also special knots I use.

If I can do this, surely I can perform minor surgeries?

It isn’t just that the haynets require physical considerations. There is also the political implication of how I feed these horses to consider. I’ll use Milo as an example.

Milo is a dominant, competitive little pony who wants more than anything to move from his current position as number 3 in the herd to at least number 2. For those of you who have studied drama and know that a good playwrite always considers what every character "wants" in a scene, let me put it this way: Milo wants power. He's a power-hungry little shetland cross who will do whatever it takes to move into a position of authority so that he can punish those below him.

When I come down to the barn and join the herd, he is alerted to the possibility that a power shift might take place at any moment. He knows he must at least maintain his position as third to my fourth, and he works hard in that direction.

So, while I think I am being a nice owner and giving my horse some hay, Milo sees it much differently. He is convinced that the reason I have brought him hay is because of the power of his “draw”. He draws me with his cute ears and friendly face and I bring the hay.

He then angles his shoulder to push me out and, once I’ve tied the haynet and turned around, he is certain he has “won” the food from me. This may seem a small matter, but it is small only to you and me and the rest of the human race. To Milo, it is everything. For a moment there, he is sure he is moving up in ranks and will soon be made General Of The Herd.

The best method I’ve come across so far in dealing with his behaviour of pushing me out is to swing a “savvy string” (a thin bit of rope) around my head propeller-style so that if he “comes into my space” as they say in the horse world, he “walks into the pressure” (gets thwacked in face by string). Okay, fine, But YOU try tying a haynet by the light of a dull bulb while making like a helicopter in the face of Milo at ten o’clock at night in the rain.

It takes “savvy”, which is one of the things the Parelli program teaches me, or tries to teach me. Failing to maintain my position as leader to Milo will have implications the next day when riding. If he’s pushed me away from the haynet (in his eyes) all manner of hell and damnation may follow.

Which is why “just going out to feed the horses" is never a simple thing. I'd like to point out, too, that the NEW red haynet featured in this photo has been cunningly bitten through by Milo, who has no truck with slow-drip feeding and wishes to gorge himself.

Polite and passive persistence in the proper position

The rain continues and the field gets more poached and sodden. Near the barn, we are down to a newly unearthed layer of this planets surface, above which the mud floats like oatmeal.

So why don’t the horses do what ought to be “natural” and seek higher ground? After all, we have two nice hills, the shelter of an oak tree, and temperatures comfortable at 5 degrees celsius.

“We don’t buy this 24hour turn-out idea,” they say to me. “Although,you can drive us down to the New Forest and release us into the wild. We’d go for that.”

They follow Pat Parelli’s advice of practicing “polite and passive persistence in the proper position”, and by 10pm I can’t stand it anymore. I leave my warm house, my tea and my Maltesers, to bring them into the yard.

The two ponies share a cement corral with access into a box stable, but Monty goes into his own box stall to protect him from Millie, who believes he needs a snappier departure when she tells him to move, which she does frequently.

If you want lessons in how to get a quick send, take notice of how
Millie throws her energy, then her “mean face”, then her whole body with teeth forward when asking for the “Circling game”. It is a lesson in cowboy magic. If she were “working the program” as a parelli student, she would have long since graduated her Level 4 and probably be close to an instructorship. She often sends Milo flying then looks at me as if to say, "This is how its done!"

Marti, Millie, Milo, Monty

In the middle of winter I sometimes wonder why we left our old house with its rose trellis and victorian conservatory to move further out of London in order to have horses in the garden.

I say “garden” but what I mean is a pasture that by mid-february is knee deep in clay based soil so sodden that the fence posts rot and lean, and the horses themselves come to smell more like marine life than animals who are meant to roam prairies across America or mountains in nearby Wales.  

It is hard to describe what a shetland cross cob pony with three inches of coat looks like after a roll in Berkshire clay, but if you hear of sitings of the the Loch Ness monster in the home counties, that would be my pony, Milo.

Milo was rescued more or less off a meat wagon by a kind-hearted woman who probably instantly regretted it. I bought him as a project that apparently never ends.

Millie is the more attractive of my horses, a black welsh cob mare with a bald (white) face and two startling blue eyes. My neighbours, many of which have never ventured further than the local Sainsbury’s, sometimes comment on the eyes. One told me that horses with “wall eyes” never go blind. Another told me that only witchcraft produces such colouring. I think it was just the misfortune of a speculative breeder, who sold on the filly as soon as she was weaned, lest she got pregnant by a wandering stallion and produced more horses with bizarre facial features. In the 17th century she would have been burned at the stake. 

By the way, I did not name either of these horses and it is only a coincidence

that they sound like a pair of french poodles. What is worse than having a gelding named Milo and  mare named Millie? Having additionally an older, “retired” horse named Monty. Again, this has nothing to do with any decision on my part. It is my fate to have horses that sound like siamese triplets who share a single brain. 

Being named Marti just adds extra alliterative comedy. Oh, wouldn't Shakespeare have a ball.

Monty is a mellow, gentlemanly 15.3hand cob, but the other two are fiercely competitive. It is constant jockeying for position in my household. When the two ponies are not trying to one-up me, they are trying to one-up each other. Milo bites Millie on the mane and she attacks him. He is perfectly willing to argue and comes right back for more. British natives must be like the terriers of the horse world and I am trying to get them to behave. 

So, here is my blog about them, about “natural” horsemanship, about the 8 principles and the 4 savvies and the 7 games and my 2 horrendously behaved native ponies. Also about me, now officially a middle-aged horse owner.