The Tao of Spartacus Jones: Romancin' with Brandy

Next day, Brandy still had her halter on her – but she was wearing it like a necklace.

I didn’t think it feasible to try adjusting it was on her.
She literally wouldn’t stand for that.
So I decided the best thing was just to slip it off of her again.
Took some doing.
Every time she lowered her head down to the grain bucket, the halter slipped down her neck to her ears and she didn’t care much for that. After a few times, I was able to time it right, and caught the crownpiece for her so she could slip out of it.
I positioned the halter in the bucket again and let her eat most of her grain through it. Then I removed it and let her finish up the last nibbles while I touched her jaw and forehead….

Between meals, I keep bringing her apples.
Increasingly, I “hide” the apple so she has to do a lot of close-quarters nuzzling and touching to get it. I offer her touch on her jaw and neck.
Sometimes she accepts it easily.
Sometimes not…

After another time or so with the halter-in-the-bucket set-up, it appeared that we’d reached a plateau. I was beginning to feel quite tempted, at certain moments, to “achieve” getting her halter on her and I don’t want to get sucked into that.
As a change of pace, I backed off for a feeding.
No halter.
Just lots of touch. She seemed all right with that.

While I was trying to figure out what to do next, I happened to run into an old acquaintance of mine -- Don Warner, by name --who’s a damn good horseman and has worked with a lot of young ponies.
I’d been fortunate to have seen his manner with horses a few times and admired it, and we’d had some good talks about the connections between horses and everything else. He’d taught me some basic roping techniques, too and I’d had a chance to try “team roping” at his ranch, where he does quite a lot of it.
Then we’d just sort of lost touch. You know how that goes.

Anyway, it was good – as well as a pleasing piece of synchronicity --- to see him again.
I mentioned Brandy to him and he suggested an approach he’d actually told me about before. I’d even done once it to get a catch rope around a reticent gelding.

It’s a very ju jitsu sort of thing.
If, for example, you want to slam a guy’s face into the bar, you don’t just grab the back of his neck and push. He’ll resist, pushing back and now it’s a wrestling match. Instead,
you grab him by the back of his collar and PULL, as if to pull him backwards off the barstool. His natural reaction is to resist by pulling forward. As soon as he starts to do that, you reverse your pull, going along with his energy and direction, adding your push to it. In a sense, he slams his own face into the bar.
Using your opponent’s own reactive force against him.
Elementary, Watson.

Here’s how Don caught me it applies with horses.
In the case of the reticent gelding, he would tolerate some light touch on his neck. Instead of trying to get a rope around him --from which he’d bolt --- I gently pushed him away from me.
Naturally, he pushed back.
When he did, I yielded away from him.
I did this a couple times.
Then, when he pushed back, I yielded a little, but left my hand in position and when he pushed back, he put his neck right under my hand and toward me so I was almost hugging him around the neck. --- something he’d not have allowed me to do otherwise.
After doing this a few times, I repeated it with the end of the catch rope in my hand, and when he pushed himself under my hand, I just let the rope fall over his neck.
Once we got to that point, he was fine. He allowed me to loop his nose and away we went.

I’m a little chagrinned that I didn’t think of doing something like this with Brandy, because, as with all magic tricks, the solution is obvious, once someone explains it to you.
The next time she and I got together for dinner, I took this tack, capitalizing on her high motivation to eat her grain as an aid, the grain, itself, a huge reinforcement.
And I experimented a little.
If I just reached out, say, to touch her poll, she might shy away. But if I pushed her away first, when she pushed back to reach her grain, she was perfectly all right with that contact.
So we danced this danced through dinner and made appreciable progress, I think. She accepted substantial and sustained touch all around her head and neck and some even down toward her chest.

This feels like a good direction to go in right now.

sj