(upbeat music)
- Good day, I'm Warwick Schiller,
and today I wanna talk to you about horses
that wanna push into you with their shoulder.
It's a pretty common occurrence
and lately I've been talking a lot about only
asking yes questions,
meaning only asking your horse to do something
they can actually do.
And in a perfect world,
that's a great way to go about things.
Like if I'm working with a horse and training a horse,
or retraining a horse,
I always like to try to ask yes questions.
So I set the situation up through,
and now I'm gonna get a yes answer.
That builds their confidence in your decision making skills.
You get a lot of trust out of it,
but that's in a perfect world
and sometimes you have things pop up
that you cannot, you don't have the tools to fix,
and you've got to work on it.
And recently we had a clinic here
and there's a lady at the clinic
and she had a big Friesian and all he wanted
to do was stand on top of me,
he's not being mean or malicious
or trying to push me around,
but he wants to stand on top of me,
like a foal wants to stand up against their mother
and use the mother as a bit of a backstop.
And the first day handling him,
I was trying to get him off me
and he's pretty much oblivious to anything you might do,
like humans on the ground.
There is no response to anything you asked.
I pulled the flag out and I was trying
to get him off with the flag.
I just couldn't get him to move even with the flag.
So I asked a lot of no questions initially,
trying to figure out what could work.
And eventually, I settled on a technique
that actually saw Elsa Sinclair do at a horse expo
in New Zealand last year.
And all you do is you just say,
"I am not gonna engage in that behavior."
So all you do is, let's say this horse
was trying to push into me with his shoulder.
All I would do is just turn and walk
that way towards his hind end, like towards right there.
And they try to push into you
and try to push you into you and try into push you
and they can't catch you.
And eventually they go, and they'll stop trying
to push into you.
And, there's a bit of a clip here
that shows a couple of times
when I was working with him.
- (mumbles) sometimes I wield.
- So right here, he's trying to push into me.
So I'm gonna walk around here
and he's trying to run into me,
trying to run into me, trying to run into me,
trying to run into me, trying to run into me.
And right there, he just gave up trying to run into me
because he couldn't catch me.
Does that make sense?
He was trying to push into me with that shoulder.
Now this horse doesn't have a much response
to my asks, so trying to get him off of me, doesn't work.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so, see right here is trying to run over me
and I'm gonna go, I'm not interested, Solomon.
So there's certain things you can't pull harder.
Where's Amber?
With your backup the other day I heard you.
So he's trying push into me,
I'm just gonna step back here
towards his flank and say,
"You can push into me all you like, Solomon.
Come on, do it. You can do it.
Do it, run over me, come on.
Come get me big boy."
And he's like, "Nah, I'm not done (mumbles) run over you."
So it's Solomon, is now standing still.
He's been trying to run over me
while I've been telling this story
and I've just been avoiding that.
Not avoiding it, but it's going not interested,
not interested, but I've been doing it in such a way
that he can't run over me.
(plane engine roaring)
And I've been stepping in, like right here,
his shoulder's coming towards me,
so I'm gonna step backwards in towards his flank.
(plane engine roaring)
And he's still trying to come over here
and he's still trying to come over here,
and he's still trying to come over here
and he's still trying to come over here, and,
(plane engine roaring)
Remember I told you the story about the lady
that tried to get a horse to side pass me (indistinct)?
Okay, why did it stop side passing?
'Cause it didn't work.
Why did he stop trying to run over me?
'Cause it doesn't work.
(plane engine roaring)
And he wasn't that bad,
'cause he was mostly trying to
just stay in real close to me.
But sometimes those horses
would really drop their shoulders into you
and try to mow you down,
but the secret to it is you're gonna walk back this way,
straight back there where they can't catch you.
If you've ever seen a bull fighter,
like a rodeo bull fighter,
when the bulls come at them,
they'll usually they'll fake them out
and act like they're gonna get in the way.
But then they step this way and they step right
in there and those bulls can't get them
because they can't make that turn.
If they step over here that bull can make
that turn and get them.
So if you want to do this, don't walk a big circle
'cause you'll get run over.
Walk in really tight back in there.
But probably the biggest part of this whole thing,
the absolute biggest part of it is your internal energy.
What you cannot do,
you cannot be standing here and the horse goes
to push into you and you try to stop them
from pushing into you and then run away, okay?
Because that, once again, that's getting a no answer.
You're asking for something,
you don't get it, and then you run off.
So you can't have any shrinking back energy.
You can't be like, Ooh, Ooh, Ooh,
you can't have those pictures in the head.
Basically what you've got to be able to do is go,
I'm not interested in engaging in that behavior, okay?
It's not a scared energy, it's not an angry energy.
It's none of those energies.
It's like, nope, I'm not interested
and you just turn and you walk this way.
You just walk around and around and around
and around and around.
And at some point in time, they will stop moving their feet
and that's when you stop.
And it works ridiculously well,
but it only works well,
if you can come at it mentally right,
'cause otherwise they are pushing you around,
and that will come out in some other behaviors
that they have.
So you've just got to make sure
that you just decline their request
to engage with you in that way.
You would just go, no thanks, not interested,
but you really can't have that
I'm concerned, I'm worried or that sort of thing.
So if you have one of those horses,
you may have to prepare yourself
a bit mentally ahead of time and have a mental rundown
of what you're gonna do so
that you don't have those instinctive reactions.
But it's a great way to get a horse
that wants to push their shoulder into you,
to not push their shoulder into you anymore
without actually making any corrections
or doing anything.
So anyway, that's just a little bit of a clip
about horse that pushed a shoulder into you
and I hope it helps.
See you guys next time.
(upbeat music)