The Soul of a Horse (15 page)

22

Cute Hitching Posts

I
remember it well.

My first encounter with a hitching post.

It was a Saturday-afternoon matinee at the local movie theater in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was six years old.

Roy came galloping into Tombstone on his beloved Trigger, scattering townspeople left and right. Trigger slid to a dazzling stop in front of the local saloon precisely as Roy’s first boot hit the ground. One loop of the reins over the hitching post was plenty for this brilliant steed. Roy then checked both his pistols, spinning them on his trigger fingers at least twice before they landed perfectly, and simultaneously, back in their respective holsters. Then the King of the Cowboys strolled calmly though a pair of swinging doors into the boisterous smoke-filled saloon, accompanied by the tinkling sounds of an old upright piano.

These weekend adventures were always the same. Inside the saloon, the noise would dissolve into silence at the sight of the tall silhouette in the doorway, itchy fingers only inches from the carved-pearl handles of his matching revolvers. Folks would creep quietly away from the half a dozen filthy, bearded, drunken villains crammed around a poker table in the back. No one wanted to get caught in the cross fire.

Roy was outnumbered six to one, but he would walk slowly, spurs jingling with every step, toward the table in the back. The villains would begin to spread, obviously planning to get the drop on him. Things did not look good…but I was never worried about Roy. I was worried about Trigger.

Even then.

I remember vividly wanting to know what was happening outside. Poor Trigger was tied—okay, looped—to the hitching post, standing, waiting, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to eat. Just standing. Or worse, perhaps being stolen. After all, he wasn’t even tied with a good knot.

Years later (a
lot
of years later) I was telling Kathleen this story one night while we were doing the dishes.

“No one would dare steal Roy Rogers’s horse,” she said. “They’d be afraid for their lives.”

“This was no ordinary horse,” I argued. “And there he was just standing at this hitching post while his leader was inside for however long it took to first negotiate with then kill half a dozen notorious bad guys.”

“What’s your point?” she asked.

My point was that, as a kid, standing in one place for long periods of time would’ve been no fun for me. So it stood to reason that it would be worse for a horse. Horses like to move around pretty much all the time. And they like to be with their herd, not standing alone at a hitching post. Come to think of it, I even wondered why the saloon was always full, but Roy’s horse was the only one tied out front.

The whole concept seemed harsh to me. Tie your horse up and leave him as long as you wanted whenever it suited you. Never mind what the horse thought. Or felt. I totally bought into Roy’s love for Trigger. Lock, stock, and barrel. So he wasn’t supposed to treat him that way. He was supposed to care more. And back then I didn’t even know that hitching posts like these could breed some pretty nasty accidents.

My first real-life experience with a hitching post was at a riding instructor’s place where the family was taking riding lessons, just after we had acquired our first three horses. Seems backward, doesn’t it?

I led the horse Kathleen would ride from his corral over to the hitching post where he would be tied while being brushed and saddled. It was a standard hitching post, just like the two we had installed at our place. You know, the cute kind, with two upright posts and one horizontal post that stuck out maybe a foot on either side of the uprights, like those in front of every saloon in every western movie ever made. But in the real world there seems to be a design flaw with this type of hitching post.

“Watch him closely while he’s tied there,” the instructor said. “If he gets a loop or two wrapped around one of the end pieces, the lead rope will get too short and he’ll freak out.”

“Gotcha,” I said confidently, wondering,
If that’s the case, why are the end pieces even there?

I had no sooner gotten the thought out of my head when the scenario unfolded exactly as the instructor had described it.

The horse leaned across the horizontal post to sniff something on the other side and in the effort managed to loop the rope over the open end of the hitching-post rail. Twice. Suddenly he realized he was down to about two feet of rope and went instantly nuts. He pulled back so hard that he jerked the halter clip right off the rope. Thankfully he was an older, well-trained horse and as soon as he realized that he was no longer confined by the two-foot rope, he stopped, snorted, and just stood quietly, waiting to be retrieved.

That could’ve been my very first learning experience in the horse world.

Could’ve
been.

The very next week I tied Cash to one of
our
cute hitching posts, with the ends sticking out, just like the one at the instructor’s. And believe it or not, he did exactly the same as the horse at the instructor’s place.

Almost exactly.

He didn’t pull the clip off the lead rope. He jerked the entire hitching post out of the ground, concrete and all! This was one scary moment. Cash was dragging a seventy-pound hitching post around the yard, scared to death and wide-eyed crazy. And I was the same. I had only read about keeping my adrenaline down. I had not so much as even practiced it. I finally managed to get a hand on the rope and somehow calmed him before he seriously hurt himself, or me, with his dangling anchor. I was so terrified, I don’t even remember exactly what I did. But I do remember what I did next.

I went straight to the tool room, scooped up the Skil saw, and cut off the ends on both of our
cute
hitching posts.

No longer cute.

But infinitely safer. Such an incident could never occur again.

So many horse owners I’ve spoken with have recalled the same type of accident.

Why,
I wondered,
doesn’t everyone just cut off the ends?

When I ask, the responses are mind-boggling. Everything from
Oh no, the hitching post is so cute this way
to
It’s not that much of a problem; just happens every once in a while.

Once is enough!

Highly respected vet and author Dr. Robert M. Miller says, “Horses categorize every learned experience in life as something not to fear and, hence, to ignore; or something to fear and, hence, to flee. This is extremely useful in the wild and utilizes the species’ phenomenal memory, but it often creates problems in domestic situations. It is incumbent upon those who must work with horses not to cause bad experiences that the horse will forever regard as a reason to flee.”

This is where our journey really began.

The hitching post.

The
cute
hitching post.

This was the first time we had questioned traditional wisdom, when applied against a rule of logic, and traditional wisdom had come up wanting. The first time I had come face-to-face with something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Something that could very easily be fixed to make the horses’ life better. Something that would cost no money and take very little effort. I talked to dozens of folks about it, including the riding instructor. But, to my knowledge, not one end has been cut off a hitching post.

They’re all still cute.

And this was just the beginning.

Dr. Miller adds, “Horses have the fastest response time of any common domestic animal. Prey species must have a faster response time than a predator or they get eaten. We (humans) commonly interpret the flight reaction as stupidity.”

It was becoming clear to me that we were not dealing with stupidity. Confinement without escape leaves the horse no choice but to react. To attempt to flee. Why does it make any sense to risk letting the horse categorize a tying experience as something to fear? It’s up to us to make sure that he has no reason to fear it. It’s up to us to cut the ends off the hitching posts.

Or, better yet, use a tie ring.

Remember the instructor’s horse? Once he was free, no longer confined, his adrenaline went down, and he stood still. Just waited. I’ve noted this type of behavior so many times. When the horse is thinking, everything he’s learned in the past is available. His memory is truly incredible. But when he’s on the reactive side of the brain, thinking is trumped by the need to flee.

The goal, then, becomes obvious.

So how, I wondered, could I teach Cash that tying did not equal confinement?

It sounded like a pretty stupid question to me. Tying
is
confinement.

Yet there are times when a horse needs to be tied. For hoof work, grooming, his own safety.

Or at least given the illusion of being tied.

Hmm.
Illusion.
Good word.

I earned spending money as a magician when I was in high school, and I’m still fascinated with what people will believe when they want to. Maybe horses would do the same. I hit the Internet.

There are all sorts of complicated techniques out there designed to cure a horse from what are commonly called pull-back problems. Fear of being tied. Usually embedded by some incident like Cash’s. Some of the techniques I found were so complex, they bordered on the ridiculous. Others didn’t really address the issue, or just nibbled around the edges.

Then I stumbled onto the Blocker Tie Ring on Clinton Anderson’s website. The simplest, least expensive, most effective little device invented since sliced bread. And its effectiveness relied on
illusion.

Yes!

One ring costs about twenty bucks. And solves pull-back problems forever, quickly and simply, because it addresses the issue from the horse’s viewpoint. Why everyone in the entire horse world doesn’t own a dozen of these is beyond me. Of all the folks I’ve shown it to, only one person had ever seen one before.

It’s a small stainless-steel ring with a pivoting tongue across the middle. One loop of the lead rope around the tongue, and that’s it. No knot. The tongue applies enough resistance to the lead rope to give the horse the sense of being tied, but if something scares the horse enough to make him pull back hard, he gets relief, not confinement. The rope slips through the ring just enough for the horse to realize:
Hey, I’m not confined. It’s okay.
Just enough to send him back to the thinking side of his brain.

Cash was afraid of being tied from the moment he uprooted our hitching post. The tie ring solved this problem in less than thirty minutes. He learned very quickly that tying no longer meant confinement. Following Clinton Anderson’s model, I would hold one end of a long lead rope with Cash on the other, and the rope in the tie ring. Then I’d run at him yelling and waving a plastic bag in the air. Certain that I had morphed into some sort of banshee, he at first freaked out and pulled away. He leaped backward several steps, with the rope sliding through the ring, maybe six or eight feet. The flight reaction. Flee first, ask questions later. But realizing he wasn’t confined, and that the banshee was actually me acting like an idiot, his adrenaline would drop, he’d eventually stop, and I’d praise him and rub him with the plastic bag. Back to the thinking side he’d go.

Then we’d do it again. And again. Soon he was no longer moving at all, not pulling back so much as an ounce. In fact, he began to give me that cocked-head questioning look of his as if to say,
Why in the world are you acting so silly?
He had learned very quickly that he was not confined and could move away if he had to, and that neither Joe nor the plastic bag was going to hurt him.

No more worries.

Except that Kathleen was afraid the neighbors were going to call the police about the crazy screaming guy up on the hill.

Dr. Miller says that horses not only respond quickly to flight stimuli but also are genetically disposed to return to normal quickly when they realize that what they thought was frightening is actually harmless. “If this weren’t so,” he says, “in the wild, they would spend all their time running, and there would be no time to eat, drink, rest, or reproduce.”

Watch them in the pasture when the sudden flight of a bird or a blowing piece of paper startles them. In an instant, they react. Flee. But, then, in two or three “instants” the adrenaline drops, they realize they are still safe, and it’s back to munching.

Just a few days ago, Cash was standing near the fence nibbling on a weed. Suddenly he reared and performed a perfect 180-degree rollback. In a flash! Something had ignited the flight reaction. But before his front feet hit the ground, he was already back to the thinking side.
Oops. Not a predator. At least I don’t think it was a predator.

He turned to the fence and stretched to see over a boulder. Needing a better view, he took a few steps to his left, then stretched to see
around
the boulder. It was funny to watch. His ears were up and his expression was full of curiosity. Not fear.

I walked over.

“What do you see, Cash?”