The personal blog of Linda Parelli

Something that Pat does really well is getting right to the point. He knows exactly what the horse needs in order to become calm, connected and responsive – it’s only the secret of horsemanship! So as I come back into the teaching arena, more and more often I can see where this secret has stayed with Pat but needs to get out to all of you! And that’s my job.

When we warm up our horses, I have noticed a pattern (and I used to do this too): unless we’re dealing with safety issues, we tend to do all of our favorite things on the ground. That could be the Circling Game, Stick to Me, playing over some jumps, or on a pedestal perhaps. It’s fun, feels cool, and it makes sure your horse is calm. But I want you to start thinking a little deeper than this, because what I tend to see is horses that are mentally, emotionally and physically tired of it. Bored, bored, bored. And I’ll tell you one thing – Pat Parelli’s horses are never bored!

Recently I was presenting a seminar and I asked the audience if they knew what their horse needed when warming up. The response was basically, “Huh?” Hence this blog!

As Pat so wisely says, “Cause your idea to become your horse’s idea, but understand your horse’s idea first.”

“Yup,” we all say.

But do we really know what this means? The Seven Games and Parelli Patterns are so powerful that they will teach a horse to pretty much do whatever you want, but the attitude with which you apply them is what makes the difference between doing it “with” your horse versus “to” your horse. We’ve all seen these wonderful techniques used with an arrogant or forceful attitude, and that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about you and me – well-intentioned, kind, educated horse lovers who are trying to do the best for their horse but sometimes have no idea that they’ve passed the point where the horse actually thinks it’s interesting and it’s no longer really effective. Yes, they are safe and obedient, but they are not necessarily exuberant.

When you warm up your horse, think about this: What is your outcome? Let me give you a simple formula:

1) Calm

2) Connected

3) Responsive

CALM – You need your horse calm so he won’t buck you off, run off with you, be hard to control, or act nervous and spooky. So if you achieved the outcome of CALM, your horse is safe to be around and easily ridden.

CONNECTED – You want your horse to be connected, which means that he is more connected to you than the stables, the herd or the gate. When connected, he sees only you and is not concerned with anything else going on; he might notice it, but he’s not absorbed or distracted by it. Like being out to dinner with someone: you hope they are more connected with you than anyone else! That is up to you – to us – to achieve.

RESPONSIVE – When you ask your horse something, does he comply, resist, or respond with enthusiasm? So many horses react defensively or resist and argue, so getting that eager and willing response is something most of us dream about. Left-Brain Horsenalities™ are often more challenging, but right-brain Horsenalities™ can also get less responsive and interested once they are no longer afraid of things and know the drill.

Now that I’ve figured this simple formula out, I’m excited to expand on it and write a larger article for an upcoming issue of our members’ Savvy Times magazine. That article will also present the “how.” And who knows, a members’ DVD on the same subject could be pretty cool too. I once taught these concepts to a group in a 2-day course for the first time, and the next day, the results were astonishing. It was a completely different picture – the horses were calm, connected and responsive. And the humans were ecstatic. I told them that Pat would be proud!

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I remember when Pat first talked about using “reverse psychology” with horses, that the less direct-line you are with a horse, the more progress you make.  I really thought I understood what he was talking about until I started performing in public demonstrations with him.  We would each be given a horse that had various issues, including trailer-loading problems, and within 90 minutes to 2 hours we would have the horses calmly negotiating various obstacles and loading willingly into the trailer.

One day, I had a particularly challenging horse.  Every time I even thought about going near the trailer, he would react badly and try to pull away, so I finally thought “I don’t care if you ever get in the trailer,” and just played with his confidence and responsiveness to me around the obstacles.  All of a sudden, he started wanting to go to the trailer.  It blew me away but it really opened my eyes… even though I thought I wasn’t concerned about the trailer when I was playing with these horses, I really was.  Somewhere in the back of my mind I had this thought that by the end of the session the horse would be loading.  This horse taught me how not to even go there and once I mastered that in myself, my results with horses have skyrocketed in every area.  I’m really not concerned if it happens or not – I focus on the relationship and getting the horse to really trust me and take as long as it takes.  Then, we can do anything.

This past weekend, we staged a unique event in Reno – Pat Parelli Presents: Wild Horse Taming…Naturally.  Pat and seven of his mastery students undertook the taming of eight wild mustangs over three days in front of both a live and webcast audience.  It was riveting watching horses and humans learning, but best of all was what I heard Pat repeatedly saying: “Remember, we are taming them, not starting them,” but it still took some time for that to sink in for everyone.  It was hard not to keep thinking about saddling and riding.  At one point, we asked Pat for his definition of taming and he said, “That the horse has no fear of the human, and until then, you should not be trying to train him.”  HUGE.

John and his horse, sharing a moment.

The day we were traveling home, I received a wonderful email from one of our 3-Star Parelli Instructors that is right on topic and I want to share it with you.  It is a more detailed example of reverse psychology applied to trailer loading that I had mentioned in one of my archived blogs (Texas Event – Done) a couple of years ago.  She described the technique so nicely that I told her I’m going to paste it into my next blog!  What she describes below is truly reverse psychology because there is more emphasis on the ‘come out’ than the ‘go in’, and that’s what helps it truly become the horse’s idea.  Enjoy, and thanks for sharing, Nathalie Lagasse (Belgium):

“The trailer loading strategy I developed was to only send the horse in when she is completely outside, wait (allow) and see how far she gets, and then ask her back out all the way with Porcupine Game (a firm, steady draw), and then resend.   Of course I also take into account all the other stuff I learned from Pat & you in the general preparation, retreating on a good try and doing something else, etc.

Kalley, taking the time it takes.

So whenever I ask the horse back out (with a steady feel on the rope) she has two choices: come back out (if there is still unconfidence) OR decide that she knows the game and actually push forwards into the pressure. I then release when she moves forwards. And while in the beginning I might release on just a tug forwards with the nose, I soon release only when a foot actually steps forwards. This way it is always totally the horse’s idea to go all the way in, and I have learned about the feeling of taking contact and releasing into forwards movement (that’s what Game of Contact is about too!) I’ll even keep a slight drag on the rope when they go forward, which usually encourages them to go in even further – it is really reverse psychology. ‘OK, you didn’t go all the way in, so come back out please, no don’t go in further, noooo, darn it, my horse went all the way in the trailer.’

The fun part for me is that I have been doing it this way with my horses for years now but hadn’t really tried it much with others. Last weekend I saw one of my friends still having to take an hour to load her horse, so I asked her if I could play with her horse and the trailer. It worked great, and she said ‘this actually looks much nicer than what I’d been doing’ (she’d been asking him to go further when he was halfway in by tapping his butt), the next days she tried it herself, and another friend who visited was extremely impressed with the change and said that Milo looked like a little toy car that you wind back and then it runs forward ”

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