By: Matthew M. Brendal
What was your most difficult experience loading a horse into a trailer?
Loading a horse into a trailer is a task that often requires a high level of horse practicality.I use the word practicality to mean a combination of practice and know-how. You may have the know how to understand the concept, but you also need experience to be truly competent.
I received a frantic call on my answering machine. I knew it involved a horse, so I returned the call immediately. I had visions of a horse in grave danger or gasping for its last breathe. No thank goodness, it was a young woman who was a client of mine. I had helped a few times with her horse and did hoof care for her.
Her emergency was simple thankfully. She had just bought a horse and she couldn’t get that gelding to go into in the horse trailer. That situation can be a bad start to a long day. They had tried for several hours loading the horse with no luck. When I arrived it was the perfect Oklahoma summer day, 100° in the shade, and 99% humidity.
Let me break this down from the beginning. What things did they do wrong from a practical point of view? Practically everything. The new horse owner did not know that the horse was a bad trailer loader before they bought him. They brought a small two horse trailer in which the divider could not be removed. They did not use a high tensile strength rope halter and yacht braid lead rope. The had used nylon web halters and cotton leads. This particular horse had broken at least one halter and a lead rope before I got there.
When I got there I immediately replaced the old halter and lead with a rope yacht braid halter and yacht braid lead rope tied into the halter. I also was armed with a horseman’s stick. Then I lead the horse towards the trailer. He was doing fine until he got about two feet from the trailer, and then he bolted at a dead run backwards. I wasn’t really prepared for that since he had been pretty gentle up until that point.
I started with the technique of every time he misbehaved I moved him in circle a couple times in each direction. I did this at a place about 15 feet from the trailer to set up a “punishment location.” My strategy was to make the trailer a good place, a place of rest and comfort. If the horse had bad perceptions about the trailer I didn’t want to confirm them by making it a bad place.
I had some minor successes that helped feed my patience. I thought, okay he has his head in the trailer! That made me think I was only minutes away from getting him into the trailer. But this horse was sly and very trailer sour. He knew all the angles to put his body to make it more difficult for me to get him into the trailer. Plus he had this really bad habit of bolting at a dead run backwards. He pulled the lead rope out of my hands a few times. He was very quick. He was also getting belligerent towards me and had reared up several times. He also began to charge me when I took him to the area to circle him. He was a tough horse and was testing my leadership abilities to see if I was worthy of him submitting to me.
It was crunch time. I had been working with this horse for about an hour and he was winning this battle of wits, so far. I figured it was time to put an end to the bolting backwards. I don’t like doing this unless it is a last resort. I got inside the trailer on the left side and placed the horse between me and the divider. I then dallied the lead rope around a well attached part of the trailer and asked the horse to come forward pulling gently on the lead rope. Well he did what I expected and what had given him some success by bolting backward. This time however was very different from the many times before. He hit the end of the rope with everything he had but he couldn’t get away from the trailer. He sat back real hard and struggled for all he was worth. Then he stopped and came forward a little. I let him relax for a moment took another dally and asked him to go forward again. He pulled back just as hard. He was probably wondering why this halter and lead didn’t break like the last ones did. They went about 7 or 8 more times. Then I asked him gently to come forward with a pull on the lead rope and all of a sudden he just walked into the trailer like he done it his whole life. He didn’t try to back out of the trailer, he just stood there calm as you wish. It took me an hour and a half to get that horse into the trailer.
Lessoned learned.
- Not all new horses are expert trailer loaders.
- Use high quality equipment. Some equipment is expensive because it’s worth it.
- All trailer loading situations are different. Not all tactics work every time. Have many.
- Have a sound plan for all horse evolutions before you start. Don’t expect everything will always happen as expected.
- I praise the owner for asking for help and not losing her cool.
- Proper preparation is the solution to every question that starts with, “What if?”
Fundamental Horsemanship is TLC = Trust, Leadership & Communication.
