The Best Horse Sense

I was a little late getting out to feed the horses, and Sharkie was letting me know. She was banging on the fence with her hoof.

I realized that I hadn’t heard this banging for a while. She seldom does it any more.

Sharkie was a Premarin mare. She lived on a ranch in Alberta where they put pregnant mares into a barn in October, attach a collection device to their rear ends, and collect their urine. The drug company harvests the estrogen from these mares to make the hormone replacement therapy, Premarin (PREgnant MARe urINe). The mares are locked in the barn until April.

We have heard that the mares bang on their stalls at feeding time. I can’t imagine the cacophony of a 100 mares banging the stall walls with their hooves all at the same time.

In late 2003, Wyeth-Ayerst, the drug company, sharply reduced their contracts for PMU ranches. The number of mares on line went from 35,000 to 11,000 virtually overnight, so there were about 20,000 pregnant mares that were at risk of being slaughtered. Sharkie and Isabella were two of those at risk mares, and they came to live with us.

And Sharkie brought her banging habit with her. She would start banging on the barn door as soon as she saw us come out to feed and would continue until we threw her hay. Not only was it noisy, but it wasn’t so good for the door.

What Nancy and I figured out to do was stop the feeding process whenever banging was happening. If we got halfway to the barn and there was banging, we would stop in our tracks until Sharkie stopped her noise. We would continue only when it was quiet. The first couple of days, we would stand for more than a minute before she stopped. It was frustrating for her. She used to think that banging brought the food faster, but we were telling her that the food arrived slower with the banging.

Eventually, Sharkie learned to not bang on the door. But, some days she just couldn’t help herself. It was a deeply ingrained habit. Nancy and I got to the point where we didn’t even think about. If Sharkie banged, we stopped getting the food ready.

When Sharkie pawed at the chain link gate today, it doesn’t make as much sound as the door, but it reminded me that we seldom hear her bang. It took a couple of years to really get that habit out of her, but it has been (mostly) gone for several years. Sometimes she just has to show her displeasure, like today.

If we are dealing with another human, we can tell them, “Don’t bang on the door, or I will not feed you.” This works for children, and, I guess, some adults. With the language skills and reasoning skills we share, we can communicate with other people that way. We could not yell at Sharkie because she didn’t understand our words. We had to come up with a way to let her figure it out herself.

The important lesson that Nancy and I learned while we taught Sharkie is that we have to be consistent. If one time we kept preparing horse feed while Sharkie banged, then she thought her banging would work. It would set us back a week or two. The same lesson can be applied to human interaction. If you tell your kid “no” nine times, but give in and say “yes” once, then that kid remembers the one time you said “yes” and will keep asking. But, if the answer is always “no,” then he gives up hope of getting a “yes” a lot sooner. Consistency is the key.