Mastering The Chicken Dance
MASTERING THE CHICKEN DANCE
Naborr
This past weekend I worked with one of our newest additions to the team, a 7-year-old bay Arab gelding. He came to us severely underweight and without much in the way of "complete" training and handling. He’d previously been at a facility which specialized in training Arabs for sale/performance homes, but “flunked out” and was sold to a woman who added him to her herd of other rescues. In this environment, he struggled to find his place in the herd, had limited access to forage, and as the smallest guy on the block, was unable to push back when driven away from limited resources.
When he came to us, he was covered in bite and kick marks, underweight (body score of 2-3 out of 9), “dull” energy, and unsteady on his feet. He was tested and treated for worms and ulcers, and when he was strong enough, he was sedated and his teeth were floated (filed down, much like us people going to the dentist). He was put on a Veterinarian approved refeeding program, and he gained weight at a steady pace.
While being rehabbed, he was in his own space, his personality began to blossom, and he became curious and quirky. He started out with a high level of food aggression towards other horses (understandable) but soon became buddies with a senior gelding on our property named Stormy who resided on the other side of the fence, and over a period of a few months, Naborr as he came to be known began sharing his hay bag with his trusty new friend Stormy.
Slowly, But Not Quietly
In the midst of this was Naborr’s reintroduction to human interaction. As I often see with new arrivals, when approached with a halter and lead, the most frequent option chosen out of all those available is “nope” and in some cases “not today Satan!”. I don’t ever take this personally, but I do start out with a self-check to make sure my energy and focus are in the right place before proceeding further. With the freedom to choose, “no” is allowed just as much as “yes” and “I don’t know” and “show me how” and “that’s too much” and “please stop” and “scratch right there” and all the other requests horses make of us. Whenever I encounter a horse I know little about, I remind myself often that I don’t know this horse’s association to people, and/or to the tools we bring to the conversation. My goal is to remain neutral, curious, and open. As time has moved on, Naborr is offering more curiosity, interest, and even offering to come alongside me more than he had originally, and this is a good sign! With him reaching a safe weight to begin adding pressure and stress to his day, we started working with him slowly, but not quietly.
Wait…pressure, stress, NOT quiet…did I trigger anyone?! I’m sure I did, so I’ll expand a bit on this without going too far down a rabbit hole as this can be its own blog topic all together, so I’ll say this much: We do not build mental or physical muscle in the bubble of quiet safety. Kid gloves, no pressure, nothing to startle or excite, everything perfectly serene and quiet make for a nice soft landing, but they do not prepare us for the world beyond our walls. Naborr is young and full of life. He has stamina, a quick mind, and will need us to be good stewards to him by helping prepare him for “stupid human tricks” and other surprising and unexpected craziness of life in partnership with humans if he is to have a fulfilling and rewarding life for the next 20+ years. This requires us to expose him to pressure, stress, and unknown situations that he will have to think his way out of, not just react to. We are asking him to develop his skills of discernment and appropriate response. So, as I was saying…
From what I can piece together, he spent many years away from human interaction and with a sensitive and curious personality such as his, he is intrigued by us, but easily startled, and easily pressed outside his comfort zone by things we do every day without realizing it may be “too much” for many horses like Naborr. A sudden change in thought or direction, moving swiftly, tossing your arms in the air, slipping, shouting, dropping something loud, a barn cat coming from the shadows….the list goes on. This poor guy is in a state before he even gets to lunch.
Que The Chicken Dance...
Under the expert tutelage of Kim McClelland, we are helping him regulate his nervous system and expand his band of resilience. To do this, we are exposing him to situations, sounds, people, movements, stuff, horses, etc. that take him up the continuum of his nervous system towards fight/flight and then with *impeccable* timing (it’s a joke…I’m not perfect but I’m working on closing the gap), I HOLD – note: not increase – pressure until he thinks a different thought, searches for or perhaps even finds a way to self-regulate, and then the pressure eases. This is done in very tiny incremental steps. First, I may simply change direction while leading on the fly. This may cause his head to pop up, a thought of “what was that!” may cross his mind. In that moment, I keep that pressure – perhaps I keep turning towards him for example. As soon as he pauses, thinks, and either stays or drops his state of alertness -anything but escalate- I ease up, relax, breathe out, co-regulate, praise, and rest to allow time to process. As soon as I see signs of him *thinking* about it such as “wait…is this really dangerous?” “Should I be worried? Is this normal behavior?” I reward this. The next time I turn suddenly, we see an incremental downshift. Almost as if he’s saying “Oh, she’s done this before, and I didn’t die so…. maybe I’ll wait and see if the next thing she does is scary”. On and on we go, until nothing I do is scary. My favorite go-to by the way is the chicken dance. It works well. I also perform a perfect reenactment of the “stayin’ alive” dance moves…well, as far as the horses know anyway.
image courtesy of: music-file.dreamlog.jp
Is There Something On My Butt?
Naborr is so smart and curious that it only takes a few times within the span of an hour for him to figure out that me turning towards him is not a sign of aggression, and a hand on the shoulder is not meant for him to jump sideways, nor is a scratch on the rump. Towards the end of our little session, he was turning and checking me out with curiosity anytime I approached his side. He’d sniff my sleeve (or try to nibble it), bring his nose to my face, or even turn and look at the spot I’m approaching like “Is there something on my butt? What’s so fascinating back there?!” He started to follow an easy meandering walkabout with head in a neutral position, bobbing easily, jaw relaxed, eye soft and blinking, and letting out big sighs as we’d go along with occasional dance breaks along the way. It is important to note that I do not have a timeline here. We move at his pace - and every horse's pace will be different. Slow and steady wins the race. I'm not in a hurry for him to hit X milestones in Y period of time. As his nervous system adjusts, so do we, and onward we go.
Once his world gets bigger, and he realizes the scary thing isn’t life threatening, it will cease to be the scary thing, and bigger things will now be scary and smaller things will not. We cannot live in a bubble, and we shouldn’t ask our horses too either. I have seen many people who wish to give their horses soft, quiet, patient and calm worlds to live within. I love this, and honestly, I want to live there too! However, I know that life doesn’t always guarantee us these environments, and sometimes things happen, and our horses have to find new homes, new environments. Sometimes, even if we control all we can, we still have to take our horses to the Vet’s office, or perhaps we want to enter the show ring, or our nephew wants to start learning to ride, or maybe mounted shooting is in your future, or we need to evacuate a fire.
This is true for humans as well as horses. We can’t promise a soft, kind, polite, and protected world. Sometimes we have to enter environments that are scary, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. In these spaces, we need to have our wits about us, and the capability to quickly discern what truly is a danger, and what is only unknown to us and needs further exploration.
The Not-So-Bombproof-Horse
The faster Naborr was able to downshift, the more synapse we built in his brain, and the more elasticity we gave his nervous system to function within an unpredictable world. I never want a shut down or “bomb proof” horse. If there’s a bomb going off, I’d prefer we didn’t stick around. However, there are situations where we need them as close to bomb proof as possible, such as a mounted police horse. These situations are rare however, and that is specialized training for specialized horses who can handle that kind of pressure. Naborr will never be one of those horses, and I want to honor his unique personality and maintain his curiosity and sensitivity while still providing him with skills to feel safe and confident in an unpredictable world.
He still has a bit of a ways to go before he’s ready for primetime, but the more we can help him expand his band of resiliency the sooner he will be ready to tackle just about anything humans can throw at him – except a bomb. My hope for this little guy is he can land in a space where he is free to be his fun, quirky, curious and confident self. A home where he can have his person, and they can go on epic adventures together for the next 20 or so years. For this dream to be a reality, I must own my part of our agreement and help him find the confidence within himself to tackle life’s challenges in an unpredictable world so he can spend more time in a balanced and regulated state regardless of whether or not his human can execute the chicken dance properly or not.
In good health,
Sonia
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