Boxing Clever

Time to face little B's demons today and introduce my horse box into the training mix.

First off I must say that it's going to be a long old haul before she's ready to just pop on a box and go! Even going from the success of today I'm not daft enough to think this is going to be easy....
This is something that I'm not something prepared to rush / bully her about, at the end of the day I want her to want to load and travel and not see it as a stressful scary experience.

So...she'd already seen the ramp of Dawn's box and been a good girl about stepping towards and popping her front feet on, so I wanted to build on this today.

Ideally I wanted her to have all four feet on the ramp during today's session - see if she'd get on totally from there and if so stand and get off calmly, quite an enormous ask considering how stressful we all found the experience only a couple of months ago when she came down to me.

Well I'd already got the ramp down and the side wings up. The box was in the enclosed & secure box yard so even if it all went horribly wrong (God forbid) she couldn't go anywhere. This yard is next to a motor body shop which was fairly noisy, but I've never seen the point of doing box training in a sterile silent environment....horses have to learn to cope with loading at shows with a million other distractions so best to start as we mean to go on!

Initially I'd wanted to use the clicker for loading training but Bally seems to zone out from food as a reward when she's having a good think about things so this was going to be down to me, a rope halter and longline, patience and praise.......

Anyway I brought B straight round from the field into the box parking yard, no problems and she walked straight on up had a good sniff at the ramp and with barely any encouragement put both front feet on so got a lovely scratch and rub. Well it didn't too long with a bit of pressure and release work to get all four feet on at which point I gently backed her straight off and again let her know just what a good girl she'd been :-)

As she seemed pretty amenable I asked again and once we'd got all four feet on asked the next question - further up the ramp and into the box. Bailarina was super - wary yes, but willing and not scared so I knew I could ask.......and bingo we were on the box!!

I'm not sure if the next bit could have gone any better, but we went back a few steps at this point :-( let me explain......Once on and standing calmly I let her have a sort of half hearted nibble at her feed bowl (again noting this zoning out from food when her stress level is heightened) she wasn't overly happy about the movement of the box when she moved and of course her first reaction was to move herself out of the situation - causing the box to move more! I could see she was worried so immediately turned her and the strength of her unhappiness at the situation manifested itself as she clattered about on the spot and then with no regard for her or my safety she leapt off the box at top speed.

I thought something like this might happen, she really was not happy when we loaded her to bring her down here - this is exactly what she did before and the memory is still fairly fresh in her mind

I reassured her, gave her a wander around to chill out and made our way back over to the box...I now felt that I needed to finish on a good note and that most certainly wasn't it. Bally was generous enough to come straight up and put both front feet on, but at the slightest hint of a pull on the rope made her displeasure quite clear, went up vertical and span round...ah back to square one and not a good place to be :-(

So a bit more ear and face stroking once we had all four feet on the ground and standing calmly next to the ramp, I asked again and yes, both front feet on the ramp. I stopped asking and just let her be, after a minute or so she started sniffing the ramp, and pawed at it..I gave another ask and she tensed, but as I could she wasn't actually scared or stressed at this point (that floppy bottom lip was giving her away!) I asked again..bingo she moved forward until both front feet were right up the ramp and her back feet were at the bottom of it. Again I stopped asking just walked up the ramp onto the box myself, stood at the back holding the longline and let her think about it...choice was now hers....

A couple more bangs and scrapes and about five minutes later (actually at this point it could have been an hour or all night, I'd have waited a week to get the result) she DID IT, walked on up the ramp all by herself!!!
Once she was right up the ramp and in the box I gave her loads of praise, but kept my body language to a minimum so she moved as little as possible. We both stood and chilled, Bally had a nibble of feed and then this time instead of asking her to turn and risk rocking the boat so to speak I asked her to move back step by step....slowly slowly and very calmly we moved back down the ramp till we were off and clear. I was absolutely elated and let her know in no uncertain terms just what a good girl she'd been. YAY!!!!!
I stood her well away from the box and popped back on, fetched the remain of her tea and an apple and let her eat it.

So now you can appreciate just what a task this is going to be - I've totally given up on the idea of getting out and about to any shows / clinics this year...Bally needs to be 100% happy about loading, travelling and going out before adding the stress of competition into the equation. I know we'll get there, but for the moment we have several mountains to climb first....watch this space.....