Читать книгу Finding the Missed Path. The Art of Restarting Horses онлайн

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I’m sure from the outside looking in, it may have seemed as though all I was doing was moving the horse around the pen, and I suppose in a way that is what I was doing. But, more importantly, what I was really doing was looking for certain patterns in his behavior. Specifically, I wanted to see if he made a point to go back to the same spot in the arena once he felt he needed to move out of it. And he did. For whatever reason, our gelding felt some comfort in that particular spot in the southwest corner of the pen so he chose it as the place to stop or rest.

The other thing he continually did once in that corner was stop and look in my direction. This was an important piece of the puzzle. By stopping and looking, he was showing that even though he may have been frightened or confused, he was still curious enough to want to engage. This was completely different than what we had seen when he was in the round pen.

In the round pen, he stayed as far away from us as he could and kept his head over the fence, only looking at us once in a while for very brief periods, but never really settling in one place. He was almost always in perpetual motion in the smaller pen, which told me his fear, driven by our proximity to him, was overriding his curiosity. But in the bigger pen, where he could establish a distance and place in which he felt relatively comfortable, he could let down a bit, which allowed his curiosity to kick in. The reason this is important is because it tells us a lot about where he was emotionally. In short, he was most certainly troubled, but not so troubled that he didn’t want to find a way to work out of it.