Babymustanghorse B (Brandi, because everyone gets 17 dumb nicknames) had her feet done yesterday. The choice was made to sedate her for a safer time for everyone, but she was perfect. I don’t have any video, which is too bad, But it also meant I got to be really present for her and for me. It was a really peaceful experience for me, and it seemed comfortable enough for her. We’re still quite a ways from a full trim without sedation, but this was a really successful beginning to the development of this skill. The hours invested in careful requests as well as not-training created the right conditions for her ability to accept a new person that also gave her an injection, to have her feet picked up and held as well as trimmed and filed by someone she’d only ever met once before, and to do those things with enough confidence and stillness to get the jobs done (she even got vaccinated and wormed).
She didn’t love it, nor did she actively cooperate (except once at the end when she was coming out of sedation and the vet was able to pick up a foot with Brandi offering to lift it).
This is the line of compromise between what needs to be done for the health of the horse, and what that horse is capable of at that time.
That line will always divide necessity and capacity, though where it falls is dependent on a number of variables, such as the horse’s base level of comfort in their environment and with novel conditions, amount of training, degree of health concern, aversiveness of the procedure, and safety of all the people involved, as well as the demeanor and skill of those people, just to name a few.
In order for foot handling to be successful, there has to be a great amount of stillness from the horse. In time, that stillness can come from a combination of training and other pleasant interactions (ideally - it can also come from behavioral suppression). Yesterday was the best possible blend of a small foundation of training and pleasant interactions, and sedation to humanely take away movement options. While everything we do with horses has the potential to be dangerous, this was the safest way to fill in the gap from capacity to stillness in this moment. We will of course continue to build foot handling skills and tolerance, and hopefully this experience was beneficial enough to set us up to be closer to meeting stillness with more skill and efficacy, and less restraint for the next time.
