Carolyn Resnick Horsemanship Blog: Horse Training from the ground up

Little Known Precursors to Aggressive Behavior in Fearful Horses, and How to Deal with Them.

I was watching Animal Planet with Victory Stilwell. She mentioned something about a little known fact about dog behavior. I thought I heard her say that a dog that will roll over on his back as a submission gesture in the future will surely bite you.

I started thinking of the things that most horse professionals do not know about horses. One of them is if a horse tries to look at you with only one eye with a stiffness in his body, he does not trust you. It is a fearful as well as an aggressive stance, and it comes with strong threat in the future to the person the horse responds to in this way.

The horse that will look at you with one eye or will switch his head around back and forth looking at you from one eye to the other may follow this behavior with biting, charging, kicking or striking at a later time, when you might least expect it.

Years ago, I had to clean out stalls as an every day chore when I was apprenticing… Read more

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Today I am sharing another question from my Insider Circle program. This is a common beginning experience. The student writes:

Three times I have attempted the circle game with my horse. The first time he behaved liked he invented the game. I thought, “This is easy.”

The second day with the circle game when I moved him off his hay he would walk a few steps forward then circle to my side and stand there looking at me. I would have felt bad chasing him off after he faced up to me, so I rewarded him instead. But, I worried that he thought that is what I wanted.

Then today when we were going to play the circle game I attempted to move him off his hay, he walked off in the opposite direction of the hay piles and stood about fifty feet from me, looking at me.

Looked to me like he didn’t want to play. So, I fed him carrots instead. I fed him carrots when he came up to me, then I chased him away and fed him carrots for moving away.
So, what do you think?

So let me first explain what the circle game… Read more

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Hello. Work is progressing well with my book and we are aiming to have it finished by the beginning of December. I’m very excited about it. We have been taking some wonderful photos for it so it will be more like a coffee table book. I will also be discussing horse and herd behavior and how it relates to our lives and society, so I’m sure you’re going to love it.

OK, on to today’s blog post and I’d like to share with you a little more from the Insider Circle. So one of my students asked:

I am working with a horse who really isn’t a perfect candidate for this. She is complicated and I knew that from the get-go….she is a Marilynne. She is the only horse accessible to me and I wanted to learn what you had to teach so that I would grow and be able to work with her as she heals. We are in the beginning stages of sharing territory and saying hello. She is learning to love both of these rituals.

I am still pondering how to help her overcome her fear of the reed. The look in her eyes when she sees

… Read more

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There are segments of time when things work out magically, and there are other times when chaos is present.

Today I was dealing with an upset on the ranch. Two horses had become very agitated with one another from having been switched to one another’s paddock. They worked themselves up so much that I was going to have to put them back in their original paddocks, because of the risks of them running around and getting hurt, as they were looking for a way to get to each other over the top of the fence. They got so wild we could see that we could hardly lead them back to their original homes, because they wanted to fight it out with one another and break away for being lead. Both horses have some unfinished training in regards to getting out of control when being lead in a time that they get angry with another horse. One is a stallion and the other is a tough gelding that exhibits behavior like a Stallion. He was the more difficult of the two.

The natural order of things is harmony, and if you let chaos go through its course, it will on its… Read more

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Hello again. First let me start off by thanking you all for the wonderful comments and stories you write after each of my blog posts, it’s brings me great pleasure to hear you are getting on so well with my Method.

However, as the popularity of the blog grows, I’m starting to hit a bit of a hurdle. As regular readers will know, I don’t find it particularly easy to read and write and this is especially true when there are long passages without paragraphs. So what I would like to suggest is that we try to keep each comment to 1 or 2 short paragraphs of no more than a couple of sentences each (like Marja did last Thursday on Comment #7) or better still like Stephanie did with Comment #13).

If I need more detail from you, I can then ask you for it. I trust you understand and appreciate your help.

Right on to today’s blog…

Working with a horse at liberty, you must wait for him to give you his full attention and interest in bonding, because if you try to make the horse do what you want, he will run off.

Why, then, would… Read more

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Expectations be gone!!

I have gone from ice boxes to refrigerators, from fans to air conditioners, from wild horses to Arabians and back.

I have experienced closets in homes three feet wide as being more that enough room, to walk in closets as big as rooms not big enough. I have experienced a running hose in the backyard at 100 degrees in the desert with my Mother’s dish pan as my pool and the hose as my fountain. Today I have a friend whose swimming pool rivals that of a theme park. I am now living in a culture that is less satisfied, where the games are only focused on being competitive. I prefer games that are creative and bring communities together working on a creative project or dance.

Today I love to watch cooking shows because of the art and culture of it and the history and the way to bring joy to friends though cooking.

All the shows are a contest built on speed and performance and frustration. Yes, frustration is part of the show and if frustration was not there, the show might be considered boring. It seems that frustration is a good thing in all… Read more

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I have a new haflinger mare named Marilynne that I have taken into training to help with the Insider Circle program courses I am currently teaching. When I brought her to the ranch no-one could put a halter on her because she would not allow herself to be approached. It was not an easy job for me to get one on her but I did and she is now here at the ranch with me.

Marilynne is a special case because she is very fearful and not the kind of horse that I recommend for beginners doing my course for the first time. I will have to proceed at a slower pace with her, which will help you to see the many details of my Method.

To her credit, Marilynne is smart willing, and easy to train if she doesn’t get scared. Her previous owners thought that she was difficult to train because she did not respond well to their aggressive training approach, which they subjected her to over a long period. They aggressively round penned her, chasing her at top speeds with her head tied to her saddle while lunging. As punishment, they left her tied in a stall… Read more

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