Learning Experience

Level 2 Trailer Pattern: Four ways to be more savvy

Posted on April 26, 2009 by horsegirlonajourney

We have a trailer parked here through Wednesday that is all set up to be safe to load horses in. I finally had a chance to play with the entire trailer pattern rather than just sniff and play around the two-horse straight-load that’s here but not stabilized for loading, nor does it have a ramp for the “nose-neck-feet” part of the pattern.

The trailer we used looks something like this only with a ramp:

I had never loaded Rocky myself until very recently, when the dentist came out in his mobile van. I’d seen Rocky load easily with his former trainer and unload nervously but trusting her to tell him when to step down. I’ve never seen him in a trailer with a ramp. Even as I committed the pattern to memory, I thought, Oh great, I’m now going to install a fear of the trailer into Rocky by getting too direct-line, making mistakes, and obviously not knowing what I’m doing.

But.

Parelli isn’t about training horses as much as it is about training people — and a trained person can then teach their horses things. Maybe Rock didn’t need practice around trailers but I sure do.

And I confess: Today was my first time doing anything with a horse and trailer by myself, much less loading him.

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Categories: Leadership, Learning Experience | Tags: trailers | Leave a comment

Reflections on why I didn’t ‘stick with’ horses until Parelli

Posted on April 16, 2009 by horsegirlonajourney

Seth and I talked tonight about the Parelli phenomenon, how Pat and especially Linda have created a vocabulary and a grammar for horsemanship that works so well for me. I said … man, if I’d known about this stuff as a kid, I’d never have fallen out of horses. That is, I collected models and read books and wrote stories and drew horses in the margins of my papers well into college, but my time with actual horses was sporadic and limited.

But then we worked the timeline and compared it to Pat and Linda’s timeline and I realized exactly why I was “away from horses” for so long, and why my experiences left me disappointed, afraid, and with a strong sense of failure. And why getting my first horse at 36 and getting stuck in Level 1 for a year and moving 400+ miles to a Parelli facility has been the right thing at the right time, all along.

What follows is a long “highlight reel” of my horse experience before Parelli and it’s probably boring if you’re not me, but I wanted it here for my own future reference. You have been warned.