Setting Them Up for Success vs Pushing Buttons

On Wednesday night, Disco and I had our second driving lesson. This time, he'd be driving during evening bring-in and feeding time, hearing the grain hit the pans, seeing horses move down the aisle. I'll admit, I had a moment where I thought, "I should really set him up for success by bringing the horses in before his lesson even though it's not my night."

I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. He was perfect. Perhaps a little sticky at the gate a time or two, but nothing egregious. It was like he didn't even hear the feeding chaos, and we had an incredibly productive lesson, even trotting for the first time.

Utterly unconcerned about feeding time

I find myself weighing this "setting him up for success vs pushing his buttons" thing a lot lately. Button pushing is, after all, how we train them. If we never tie them to a wall, they never learn to tie. If we never put them in a situation where they have to work during feeding time, they never learn to work during feeding time. 

(And obviously you have to have a little bit of both - you install "give to pressure" and "confinement" in order to set them up for success when you start tying them, for example.)

He's now been here a month, and I have erred on the side of "setting him up for success" a lot while he got settled in and while the co-op members got comfortable handling him. But now that baseline rules and human/baby horse pecking orders have been installed, I need to remind myself to keep pushing his buttons too.

Getting tacked up, which I did a surprisingly decent job with (as in, I am surprised that I remembered as much as I did). Of course I did not leave the breeching strap over his tail!

 

The latest button I'm ready to push is allowing everyone else to halter him. As I mentioned in the last post, I've been working with him for a while on this (not allowing him to grab the halter while you're trying to put it on him), but because I didn't want to ask the other co-op members to be as doggedly persistent as I've had to be about it, I've left his halter on 24/7 for a couple weeks now. With me being the only one haltering him, he got uninterrupted time with 100% consistency and black-and-white rules, and no opportunities for regression.

Over the last week, he hasn't tried to bite the halter one single time with me, so I'm ready to push that button and have everyone else try it with him too. I will be watching for a few things - does he even try it with everyone else? If he does, how persistent is he about it and how many times do they have to repeat the exercise before he keeps it closed? It's as much about how he learns and how he transposes rules from one human to another and how he respects us as it is about the actual behavior itself.

 

So far, the couple of times he's gotten it off in the field and they've been forced to halter him lately, he's been perfect for everyone else, so I have hope. But I won't know for sure until we push that button.