Phase two: Past&Present

It took a few weeks of working with Herbie for Connor to come up with a working theory as to why she was rolling under saddle. The vets had excluded underlying pain or illness, thankfully. 

Instead, Scout and Connor went digging into the mare's past. There wasn't much to find, but some sleuthing from Connor found an old post on social media. A teen who had tagged a local riding school, whose clunky website showed but one blurry picture of the mare. She was in the background of another shot, a row of horses with auxiliary reins. 

The sire had a section introducing current horses as well as one for formerly owned ones, but the mare was oddly missing from both. Connor theorized she'd been sold or surrendered quietly due to her issues making her not usable for the school. This did explain some smaller issues in her musculature and posture, typically stemming from the use of auxiliary reins. But the biggest problem remained her rolling under saddle. 

“I think she's sort of a people pleaser” Connor's statement was both confusing and yet made some sense to Scout. Connor continued.” She doesn't hate going along with us, but doesn't really like it either. Like being dragged shopping when you don't wanna. But she does because she's so eager to please. So it's not great but not the worst and you go along. Maybe it's fun sometimes. But she's been doing that everyday for who knows how long. You get on her to ride, that's when it's all too much. She's done, had enough. Would rather be yelled at and whatnot than continue another step.”

Scout contemplated. He eyed the topic of conversation. Herbie was her usual self- ever pleasant and with no corners to stub upon. 

“What do we do?” He truly had no idea. How was he supposed to fix that? In that moment he was truly thankful for Connor's presence and advice.

“Dont know exactly. Maybe restart her training. Positive reinforcement for sure. Friends, forage and freedom too. Its a first for me though, this kinda inbetween state she's in” said Connor, shrugging. “I know someone though. We're gonna have to stick our heads together ”

So much for Connors all encompassing expertise. But where his ended, others could be relied upon. The two were going to defer to the resident (mostly) recovered people pleaser and Connor's wife. The original horse girl of the family. Patient zero so to speak.

“Az knows?” Scout wondered who they'd ask if she didn't. They were quickly running out of experienced horse people.

“She sure does.” Connor had absolute faith in his wife's capabilities, especially when it came to horses. “We'll figure it out together.”

And that is how they came to huddle near the mare. Scout, the man supposedly at the helm of this makeover ship. His teenage daughter Maén, who naturally was invested in this whole thing. Connor, who had enough horse knowledge for himself and Scout and lastly, Connor's wife Azura, from whom he'd learned a majority of everything he knew.

Azura held her trustly clipboard, on it a stack of paper, the top one labelled “positive reinforcement.

“You want her to know that she can make choices and to actually go through with them. And more importantly, you want her to associate you and the time spent with you positively. It's not that she greatly dislikes people or expects something bad to happen, but as Con said, it's not very pleasant either.”

“Yeah.” The man in question nodded “ I reckon she just needs a little push towards the right direction, since she's not gone off the deep end. And some horsey friends to adjust and get her a life outside of being around people. We’ll introduce her to Fern, for starters. We're also gonna work on improving her muscles and posture.”

“So we're gonna rewire her brain?” Maén questioned, having pulled one of the pages from the clipboard. It was pretty out of context without the remaining explanations and instructions. 

“Pretty much.” Connor agreed. He'd done this training before and was glad that the solution was a familiar one. 

“Boundaries though?” Scout didn't really grasp how to teach this to a horse.

“I think it'll begin to come naturally once she regains some sense of agency. But I've also got more on it here.” Azura filtered through the papers and nodded. Yup. All there, well, with the exception of the one Maén was trying to decipher. 

Connor cracked his knuckles, it was time to get to work. “The very first step is to teach her not to push for treats.” 

“I see” Scout had read up on training methods beforehand, but it was nice to have a comprehensive guide. This entire project , it was… different and kind of exciting to learn something new. 

He had yet to find a way to really get in touch with Herbie, it didn't help that he wasn't too great at such matters. So far, his somewhat clumsy attempts to connect to her had rolled off like droplets of water.