From: Shawn
Hi Jessica,
My name is Shawn and I have just subscribed to your list for the second time, after a year's leave. I also lurk on E-L and have been educated by your regular posts. Let me say first, that it's wonderful to have a *live* resource for horsy issues and commentary alike.
Now on to my question. I have seen a few horses being hobbled. My general understanding is that it's a "humbling" experience, merely allowing the horse to experience the worst that can happen to it. The eyes blink steadily showing calmness.....ears not pinned. And lets face it, the horse is a magnificent structure of muscle. It would not be difficult for it to stand up, hence throwing a 220 pound man off it's side. I want to make sure I explained it to my mother correctly because she, as well as other non-horsy people, was disturbed by the hobbling scene performed by Redford (who by the way was not my idea of Tom). Will you please shed some light on this act? Is it something that all horses endure during the time they are being broke or is it geared more for problem horses? Do TB's and other race horses get hobbled as well or is it more widely used among reining/cutting horses?
Thank you in advanced, I look forward to your private or posted response. As I mentioned, I just joined and I don't know if this is a topic that has already been addressed
Sincerely, Shawn
First, let's talk about hobbles for a moment. Hobbles are actually simple devices, and used to be part of a cowboy's gear. They still are in some places! Hobbles aren't horrible or cruel, they simply limit a horse's movement so that it can't wander too far away. Cowboys, in the course of their work, often had to spend nights outdoors, and in areas where there are no trees to put up a picket line, and nothing to which one could possibly tie a horse, it was important to have a way of keeping the horse in the same general area as the cowboy. Horses sleep comparatively little, about four hours total, and when left to themselves, they will graze and wander all night, and can easily be ten miles away by morning.
The apparatus you saw in "The Horse Whisperer" movie was designed for another purpose entirely: to bring a horse down to the ground and keep him there. This is an extreme measure, not to be used lightly, and in fact rarely used by trainers. It is certainly NOT routinely used by anyone, and is NOT a routine part of starting a horse of any breed. It does have a very specific, particular use. Most good trainers never use it; those who do will use it rarely and only when all else has failed, as an emergency measure and form of "crisis intervention", when the trainer is convinced that a particular horse is so far gone emotionally that there is no other way to reach it, and that the trainer has only one method left to try to save the horse: this last-ditch attempt at reaching the horse emotionally.
Once in a long time, an individual horse will be so traumatized by past events that it is absolutely convinced that all contact with humans is painful and threatening. When that happens, some trainers will opt to "drop" the horse, bringing it to the ground where it is completely vulnerable, and then handle it gently, all over, to prove the point that humans are NOT the enemy. This isn't a common practice by any means, but it is used occasionally, when a trainer judges that there is no other way to break through the horse's emotional barriers,reach that horse and PROVE to him that he will not be hurt, even when he is in the most vulnerable of all positions; that the human is NOT a predator and will NOT hurt the horse, even when the horse is in a position that is an invitation for a true predator to attack.
This is a technique that may be used on one horse in, say, several thousand. Many trainers may never encounter such a situation -- I've worked with several thousand horses and never yet seen one that came close to needing such extreme measures, but I'm willing to believe that such horses do exist, and if I were ever in a situation that convinced me that making a horse lie down and handling it on the ground were necessary to save that horse's life, then I might do it too. ;-)
Interestingly enough, the movie scene that disturbed your mother was not at all the same as the episode described in the book. (Almost every horse scene in the book was rewritten with Buck Brannaman's input -- the revised scenes were just as dramatic in their own way, but much more accurate.) In the book, the horse is thrown to the ground violently and forced to submit to the will of the trainer; this goes against all good training practices including those of Buck Brannaman! In the movie, the revised and more accurate version shows a horse being made to lie down, slowly, quietly, and with the use of leverage rather than brute force. There was no brutality involved, and in fact there was a veterinarian on site AND an AHA representative present when that scene was filmed. The days of tripping horses at a gallop to make movies exciting are long gone in the USA -- the new Hollywood has very strict rules about what can and cannot be done with animal actors. Horses that fall down must be trained to fall down on cue, and there is an AHA representative watching to be sure that no horse is hurt or frightened. In this particular scene, there WAS a problem, but not the one you would have imagined -- the horse was such a well-trained "lying down" horse, and so eager to show what he could do, that it was difficult to make it appear that the horse was being MADE to lie down. ;-)
Your other question was about the difficulty of keeping a horse on the ground. Actually it's not difficult at all, once the horse is down -- you can keep a horse down indefinitely if you're willing to sit on it. It MUST be able to lift its head and neck to start getting up, and if it can't lift them, then it can't get up. It's not about comparative weights: a small human can keep a large horse down by sitting on its neck! It's a matter of physics and leverage. ;-)
Jessica
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