Life at Resting Heart Farm

Feedback is a really important part of training horses…any animal for that matter.  Being non-verbal for the most part, horses use body language to communicate their mental and emotional state, as well as their physical well being.  Its important as a trainer and as a caretaker to observe this feedback and make adjustments in our agenda to address feedback, when necessary.  Some feedback requires nothing more than acknowledgement, such as a horse wrinkling his lip with pleasure during a good grooming session.  Some feedback requires action, such as a pony pinning its ears during feeding.  In such a case, I might simply insist he share his food with me or request he back away from his supper for a moment for an attitude adjustment. Feedback can be quite complex and the body language difficult to interpret….is it fear, is it dominance, is it confusion? Using punishment or dominance with a horse that is scared or confused will produce unsatisfactory, sometimes disasterous results. Such is the art of living and working with an animal.  To complicate matters more, there are horses that use body language very efficiently and energetically and others who are more stoic, showing little in the way of opinion.  I find the later more challenging, but most horses are somewhere in between.

The most obvious of body language can be sorted out by watching horses ‘talk’ to each other.  We all know what a swishing tail or pinned ears mean, and generally what follows if that feedback is ignored.  Horses often use movement and energy to alert their herd members to percieved danger or to engage in play.  We see these behaviors during training as well and need to interpret their meaning correctly to maintain rapport as well as progress in the training process.

But the type of feedback that I have been thinking about recently relates to physical limitations and rehabilitation.  For instance, Reno, while he has pretty typical body language in regard to manuveuring the herd, showing pleasure and confidence as well as lack of confidence,  he is quite stoic in regard to his physical condition.  Recovering from 2 very serious injuries in the left hind, he really rarely showed evidence of pain or discomfort.  Now that he moves relatively normally, its even harder to percieve what his true limitations are.  One of the reasons I decided to start riding him in stead of driving him during his rehabilitation is that I wanted a different way to access feedback about his physical status.  Sitting on his back I get a better sense of where he is stuck or stiff.  I can sense when one stride is shorter than another and when he braces in the neck or becomes disconnected behind.  Recently I have become aware of a new form of feedback that astonished me.  For months, I’ve concentrated on the injured left hind nearly entirely.  As in any instance when I focus too narrowly,  I risk missing the larger picture.

I had ridden Reno 3 days that week and he was coming along nicely.  My first bit of feedback was that he preferred to canter on the right lead…..odd, I thought, that lead should be the harder for him, given his injury.  The next bit of feedback went right over my head until this morning.  I noticed last week that my right hip and back were killing me.  In fact, I woke up one morning wondering if I had a kidney infection…it was intense.  Try as I might, I could not think of anything I had done to injure myself.  My back is not perfect, and so I blew it off and took some ibuprofen.  It did indeed improve over several days.

Yesterday, I put a saddle on Reno for a ride after a week off.  My sis-in-law wanted to sit on him in the worst way.  I rode for 10 minutes to get him settled for her and after her brief ride, I did some light work with him before heading back to the barn.  Well, several hours later, the right hip pain was back, along with a stabbing pain in the upper back….just like last week.  HELLO, a lightbulb went on, when I realized I was mirroring Reno’s pain.  Fascinating!  How could I have missed something so obvious…something that makes so much sense.  Reno spent months with his left hind leg off the ground, leaning on his right.  Of course his right hip is stuck and sore. I knew that intellectually, but had no idea how severe it was.  Bingo!  Feedback!

I have read about this type of mirrored pain…generally in the reverse form.  In those cases a horse picks up the pain syndrome of the rider like a mirror and can become lame.  Truly fascinating!  The phenomenom, in a positive way,  explains the ‘oneness’ good riders feel on their mounts and how some rides just seem to flow from within….with barely a cue from the rider.  In the past, I have actually felt relief of back pain from a good balanced ride on a sound and willing mount.  But I digress…back to feedback.

So being the scientist you all know me to be, I will have to ride every horse on the farm this week to be sure its not just me and my bad back.  I will do it, but I suspect I will be fine.  That’s the other piece…intuition.  Anyone successful around horses developes this sixth sense.  You just ‘know’ when you are right.

So now that I have identified this source of feedback, I now need to process how to deal with it and obviously, make it better.  This will likely be the topic for another post.  For now, I have to simply accept these facts as feedback.

Reno’s training is primarily as a driving horse.  I believe he has been ridden sporadically by some kids, but no formal training.  He’s got a pretty cooperative personality, so I didn’t think it would be huge deal to get him going undersaddle.  I also felt I could help him rebuild his topline and atrophied musculature in his haunches putting him through some low level dressage maneuvers such as ‘shoulder in’.

Our first ride was mainly a ‘meet and greet’ event.  Teaching him to pick me up at the mounting block and stand quietly.  Walk, simple turns, stop, back up.  By the end of the session we were doing some walk-trot transitions as well.  What I learned about him is that his driving experience had set-him up well to understand rudimentary rein cues undersaddle.  I had to reinforce leg and seat cues with the verbal cues he already knew…kiss, whoa, back up, easy, etc….in the beginning, but he very quickly understood what I was asking.  We ended our first ride by taking a leisurely, trail ride back to the barn.  He balked at a gate and at the pigs, but easily moved past these obstacles with alittle squeeze from me.  Above, pictured by the chicken coop.  It was an exceptionally good first ride.

During our second ride, I was pleased to find he had remembered our mounting lesson….he walked over and parked himself next to me on the mounting block.  Some people might take mounting a horse for granted and not spend too much time training for it, but when it comes to mounting an 18 hand horse, you really do want him to stand still and wait for you.  Besides which, a horse that has the tendency to walk off when you are mounting is also likely to move their feet at other times when you don’t want them to.

Anyhow, the riding portion of our second ride concentrated on patterns…cloverleaf and circles…walk and trot with lots of transitions.  Once the patterns were solid, we cantered in both directions.  He had a hard time cantering in a circle and believe it or not his right lead was his favored lead.  With the injured leg being the left hind I would have thought the left lead would be more comfortable.  Hmmm…interesting.  His canter is very smooth and has a rocking horse feel to it…very nice.  Again another leisurely walk back to the barn.

Today was our third ride and my goal today was to introduce ‘shoulder in’, which is a great exercise to build up strength in the haunches and connect the hind end to the front end.  We warmed up in the cloverleaf, walk trot and I really concentrated on keeping him soft in the bridle especially in the turns.  Then we went on the tackle ‘shoulder in’…which I started as a ‘counter shoulder in’ using the fence to block his forward movement.  I wasn’t looking for the finished product, just for him to step over and under his body with the (in this case) outside hind.  It took abit to get the point across, and then we had a few good strides of it.  It was clear that this was hard for him, so we didn’t work at it for too long.  The bugs were atrocious so as soon as he felt confident about what we were doing, we skidaddled out of the arena and went for a bonafide hack…off the farm and into the surrounding fields.  It was lovely to trot through some long stretches of fields then we looped back through the woods toward home.  He was solid as a rock!

At this point it will be a challenge to keep him working at a level that is therapeutic for him without being too taxing, but so far so good…

My last post about Reno was in late March and was full of optimism, as we had finally seemed to overcome his hock injury and were in ‘rehab’ mode.  There are many reasons why I have not updated his progress.  Foremost is a lack of time.  Spring is always a very busy season for me with pasture maintenance, veggie gardening (this year I have extensive plots of potatoes and corn) and this year pigs.  But in all truth, I was waiting to feel optimism again.

Two weeks after my last post regarding Reno and the beginning of what should have been his rehabilitation, he had a set-back.  I found him on 4/7/9, standing alone in shock, hemorrhaging from his previously injured left hind.  He had had a fight with the fence and wrapped the poly wire around the leg, struggled (and eventually tore down a complete length of fencing), lacerating the leg below the hock right down to the canon bone.  My vet confirmed that he had severed the extensor tendon completely.  In addition, she was worried that the flexor tendon might be at risk with a late necrotic event (because the wound was circumferential).  I was devastated and quite frankly, depressed.  Once I got Reno settled in a stall, for what would be 3 weeks of stall rest, I phone his owner, Andre and told him about the accident.  I’m pretty certain Andre never expected Reno to come back to work and simply wanted some sort of life for him.  I simply asked for Reno to be mine, permanently.  For some reason it seemed important at the time, though I have no doubt Andre already thought of Reno as mine, and that enabled me somehow to go forward with more resolve.

Three weeks of stall rest, daily cold hosing and dressing changes later, I turned Reno out with the mini rescues in a smallish flat turnout.  It was progress.  His attitude has been awesome throughout.  Even during the stall rest he managed to be engaged and friendly with my nieces and nephews…who adore him.  I took him out for a short walk once or twice a day, just to keep his muscles from freezing up entirely.Extensor tendons enable a horse to lift the toe during gait to allow proper landing on the foot on the ground.  Injury to the tendon causes tripping when the toe inadvertently gets flexed on landing, so the toe hits first and buckles.  Its scarey to watch it happen and can be unnerving to the horse, but Reno never got excited about the problem and it happened less and less frequently.  I did alot of reading about extensor tendon injuries and realized that a good 80% of them recover completely…piece of cake…I’ve beat odds way worse than that!!!

My immediate concern was that we were losing the gains we had made in his hind end development from earlier in the spring.  He was already in such bad shape behind…atrophy on the left, fatigue and spasm on the right.  And anyone who has ever rehabilitated a horse knows that colic and founder are both eminently waiting in the wings for an injured animal.  I worried incessantly, but all I could do was wait.  Three more weeks in  the small turnout and we were still ahead of the curve….I was amazed.  The general time line for tendon injuries is 6 months (or more).  In 6 weeks he was able to rejoin the main herd.  I probably pushed this time line abit.  I’ve always believed that healing happens faster when the injured area is subjected to some amount of stress.  The body has mechanisms in place that accelerate healing when necessary…I was counting on this mechanism to jump start his progress again.

Thankfully, my instincts were good and he did well.   Two months later (to the day), I drove Reno and he pulled a load.  It was a short bit of work, but it seemed like a mountain of accomplishment!

After this inital success, I drove Reno 2-3 times a week, for short distances, but incorporated hills and lots of stops at neighbors houses.  He was getting stronger and stronger.  His ass was also filling out nicely!In July, we had a visit to Vermont with Reno’s extended family and he pulled a wagon with Coral, Andre’s lead mare. Reno was awesome, as was Coral and I found my optimism once more.Since then I have started to ride Reno…but that will be a new post.

To read more about Reno’s original injury, go here.

Pictured here actually ‘resting’ on the bad leg…a very good sign.

He finishes his antibiotics (a full 6 weeks) in a few days. I’ll be watching him carefully for any relapse at that point. So far, so good.