Episode Two - Teaching (Unhandled) Foals to Accept a Halter

The speaker, Julia Hyde, discusses her approach to halter training horses, specifically foals or weanlings. She criticizes the aggressive methods used by some trainers, which she finds torturous and counterproductive. Julia prefers a slow and repetitive process, starting in a small space and gradually progressing each day. She emphasizes the importance of giving horses a way out and not breaking their spirits. Julia invites listeners to share their thoughts on this topic and expresses interest in interviewing someone about it. She plans to continue recording weekly episodes of her podcast. Hi everyone, my name is Julia Hyde and this is the second episode of the Horse Feed. I don't think many people listen to the first, quite frankly, but that is the way it goes, I suppose. I've just actually spent the last 20 minutes, if not more, trying to get a little intro tune coming on before I start talking, but unfortunately that didn't work very well, so I need to figure that out some other time. But anyway, this week I would like to talk about halter training horses, in particular halter training foals or weanlings. Mainly because we have an unhandled wild little weanling that came from Arizona and I've been working with him, halter training him, and he's not the first little one I've unhandled, or unhandled older wild horse that I've halter trained. But it got me thinking this time about the way that I've seen other people, well horse trainers, go about halter training these young horses or foals. And it all seems, and this is not everybody to be fair, but it all seems incredibly aggressive and almost torturing them and pushing and pushing and pushing. And these little horses are flipping themselves over, going crazy. They have way too much space to get away from people. Obviously they want to get away, I mean I'd want to get away. And so whilst I've been doing our little guy, Jamal, I tend to do it very, it's a very slow process. I'll do it on a daily basis, like day one I may, well I'll always do it in a small space for one, but I may rope them just to, obviously so I can get close to them. And nine times out of ten they do have a little bit of a fit, but nothing major. And you have control of them because you're in a smaller space. And then once I get them to calm down, normally the first time takes me quite a while to get them to that sort of calm place. But once I've got them there, then I release them, release the rope and let them go on their merry way, so to speak. Day two we progress a little more, day three a little more. And normally by day three I've actually got the halter on quite easily and I do it so they can go down or out to turn out or out to run in the arena with the halter on. And then when they come back, I then take it off. So it becomes a bit of a habit for them. And that's how they learn. They learn through repetition, repetition and repetition. But as I say, recently I have, I wasn't really whilst I was doing this, but a little time before I started I think, I came across a few videos, but one in particular struck me. I'm not going to go into the name of the person. Suffice to say that it was a man doing the training, but the lady was definitely driving it. And they started off pretty much with a, well this weanling was in a chute and they put the, obviously put the halter on in the chute, which is something I don't like to do because if I can't get it on myself, then without having to use a chute, which is just so terrifying for a horse, then I'll sort of wait until I can. But anyway, so this, so they get this halter on the fall, because the first thing it does is just run and flips over backwards. And I think it does that twice. And this guy is holding onto this rope, holding onto this rope until, I mean, I'm thinking to myself, go with him. I mean, I'm getting irritated just talking about it. And this foal is so scared. And they're narrating this. And as if they're sort of making excuses all the time as to why this is happening or why, you know, they didn't expect him to take off like that or they didn't expect him to go at that speed, just on and on and on. They also did it with other weanlings around. So, of course, the horse they were trying to halter was actually wanting to be with those weanlings, the other weanlings, you know, and rightly so. That's where you'd expect them to be. But they sort of persisted and persisted and persisted, still just holding this rope really tight and saying things like, you know, we're doing this because we want him to know that he's got no other option. But, of course, we need horses to have another option. We always need to give them a way out. So, yeah, so that is what brought me up to this. And it is one of the things that I see so much. And it bothers me. It bothers me that people will treat horses this way. I mean, I don't honestly think I would. Most people would treat a dog, their own dog or another dog like this. I mean, people would just be shouting out, you know, that's abuse, you know, stop. I can just see it. But with a horse, or certainly in this case in a foal, it actually, it seems that it's OK. You know, nobody shouts out. This particular person has got, I think, 10,000 views. And everybody, most in the comments are saying, oh, you're so good. This is great. This is blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm horrified. And then you start to think, is this me? And I'm like, no, no, no. No, this is not me. This is not the way to handle a horse. And so that is really the topic that I have today. I'd be really interested to know your thoughts about this. I'm trying to keep these sort of podcasts short. And I certainly would love to address them. You can email me at canhamfarm, and that's C-A-N-H-A-M-F-A-R-M at gmail.com. And give me your thoughts on this. There's way more than this one lady. I mean, there's men. It's horrifying. But you may not think the same. And then we'll call it breaking as well, breaking a weanling, breaking a foal. And, you know, we don't want to break horses' spirits, do we? We want to be gentle around them and for them to know what to expect all the time. I don't know. That's the way I do it. And I have yet to have a horse that has been a crazy horse. They've always been really good and never given me any problems. Anyway, let me know your thoughts. I'd really, really like somebody to perhaps interview if anyone's interested about this whole colt breaking, foal breaking, weaning breaking thing, or even a horse, you know, an older horse. As we've had, we've had two older wild horses that we've obviously, you know, had to halter. And certainly we did not do it like this. I mean, one of those flipping over would have just been crazy. So, yeah, send me an email. I'll say it again. I'll actually put it on the little thingy, you know, whatever it is that you have on a podcast, the email address. And let me know your thoughts on this type of thing. And as I say, I would like to have somebody who would love to come on air with me to talk about this too. So if you're interested in that, although we don't really have many listeners, please let me know. Thanks so much for listening again. And I will hopefully get some subscribers. You can listen to me go on again next week. Likely be uploaded on a Wednesday. But, you know, don't hold your breath. But it's definitely going to be weekly. And we'll see if we can find something controversial to talk about next week. So, as I say, hope to see you all. And thank you so, so much for listening. I'm just really enjoying doing this. I think it's a way for me to rant. So, yeah, that's it. I say goodbye. And see you later. Stay well. And treat your horses nicely.