Trust

It's hard to come by.

It's especially hard to come by when you're a half-wild horse:  abused, abandoned, neglected, starved.  Even when you've found your way to someplace seemingly safe, they always want to do things to you.

Like that ugly green thing they want to tie around your head.

I'm not sure Ice had ever been haltered before he came to us.  He clearly isn't very familiar with such contraptions, at best.  Putting anything anywhere near his muzzle — nose or mouth, both of which had injuries when he arrived on Christmas Eve — spooks him badly. And as you can see from the way this one fits . . . well, it doesn't. Fit, that is.  He's still so painfully thin that the strap that goes under the back of his jaw falls forward.

Two days ago, I caught him with a rope, and with the two of us working in tandem, we managed to halter him for only something like the second time.  It took me twenty minutes to introduce him to another scary concept:  the stall.  Twenty minutes, endless verbal encouragement, and some grain and alfalfa later, and I finally got him all the way inside.  He ate some of the grain, some of the hay, but always with one wild, rolling eye looking behind him, chuffing, ready to bolt.  Ten minutes later, I took the nasty green thing off and let him run.

So today, I was home alone for a couple of hours, and decided that I'd try to halter him solo.  Today's plan was nothing more elaborate than walking — no scary enclosed spaces, just getting used to the green contraption.

Probably not the brightest thing I've ever done, trying to halter a half-wild pony with no one around.  And he was not happy.  He made that abundantly clear.

But he let me do it.

And after we'd been walking for a while, Wings came home.  This is why there's photographic evidence.

By the photo above, we'd already been walking around for twenty minutes or so.  He was perfectly calm.  Oh, he'd still stop every few minutes and shake his big shaggy , shimmying it up and down, trying to rid himself of the unholy green thing.  But he wasn't spooked anymore.

It's a beautiful thing to have a horse walk with you — not balking, lagging behind; not straining ahead and trying to bolt; just walking happily by your side, his head next to your arm, his breath warm on the hand holding the lead.

He didn't even seem particularly concerned about stopping the exercise.  Whether he's ever been through this before or not, trust is demonstrably an issue for him, yet he showed no interest in doing anything except walking with me.

He still has so far to go.  It'll be a long time before he's got enough weight on him to be anything approaching "healthy."  It'll be even longer before he's psychologically ready for breaking.  But we passed a milestone today.

We'll get there.


All photos copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.