Chainmail boop

Tango is a delightfully game horse, which is perfect for her job as an equestrian mount in the SCA. However, she has some sensory issues when it comes to sound, and specifically things like bells and metal-on-metal. This doesn’t work well in a setting where many of the participants have bells on their garb, or wear armor and chainmail, and clang swords together. We found that we needed to introduce Erin’s helmet as one element, suspecting that the shininess was also an issue for Tango. After being able to get her comfortable with approaching and touching the helmet on her own, as well as working on picking it up and moving it around with her standing there, we also wanted to see how much of her sensory issue with sound was a negative association with the sound, or the sound itself. We first set up the chainmail on its own, and counter conditioned it both by having it in our hands at a distance, and by having her approach it on her own. Then, we set the chainmail on the helmet to approximate the metal-on-metal sound she will encounter at an SCA event. In the process of that, I wanted to see if she would touch the chainmail herself, and thus make the sound herself, to see if that would give her some control over the stimulus. She was able to touch it, and to make sound with it! However, Erin had also gotten some ear plugs, and we trained those in a separate session before Erin took her horses to a large event. Tango did so much better with the ear plugs that we’ve concluded her sensitivity is truly a sensory issue, and further training, while it could be moderately helpful in some situations, isn’t the best course of action, particularly for bells, which she seems especially sensitive to. The takeaway from this is that while training can solve any number of problems, management has to solve the rest. You can’t train through excessive pain or fear - as determined by the horse, not the human - and therefore you must make management changes, or even the best training will ultimately fail the horse.