Chat
01-05-2017, 03:23 PM
There is a great deal of difference between an animal who is "nerve eating" and one that is simply ignoring you and doing his own thing. I should hope this difference is obvious to anyone attempting to train. Feeding horses to help them calm down in stressful situations such as trailer loading has fallen out of favor with the rise of "horse whisperer" style training, but I think this is a huge mistake. Eating does help a nervous animal calm down. But even a nervous animal should not drag you around or run over top of you to feed his nerves. A goat that does this is merely annoying, but when a horse does this he could seriously injure you! Self-control must be taught so that nerves and instinct don't override safety and good manners. And as a trainer, it is your responsibility to know when your animal is being nervous and when he's just being rude.
From reading about your experience with anxiety attacks and anxious ponies, Sabine, I can't help but think that your own nerves are the biggest reason your ponies are not comfortable leaving home. I have never had an anxiety attack myself. I was raised with a great deal of self-confidence and taught from a young age that I don't need to be afraid of things but to figure them out instead. I do my best to train our animals to be the same way. Our emotions translate enormously to our animals, and if we are timid when we train, our animals will be timid as well. In my years of training horses and riders, I've come to learn that anxious people nearly always assume their animals are anxious too and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, if we're constantly afraid of traumatizing our animals, we're going to be hesitant and ineffective in our training methods. Training takes confidence, and sometimes it even takes being brave for our animals when we ourselves are tempted to be frightened too--like when me and my horse encountered our first bear.
I see nothing cruel about taking your goat out and training him away from home unless he is completely unbonded to you and doesn't trust you at all. If you stay home, you have to separate him from the herd which he can still see. Separating the herd is one of the more stressful things you can do to a goat. But once you remove him completely, he immediately forgets about them and forms a new "herd" with just you and whoever else happens to be there. If you keep him home, he's going to look for the others, call to them, and try to get back to them or get them to come to him--not because he doesn't want to be with you, but because his instinct tells him that you should all be together. If they're not there then in his mind they become irrelevant and he no longer thinks about them or is upset or distracted by them. If it were more stressful to work away from home, then of course I would never suggest it as an intermediate step in the training process. You can't train an animal that is upset. You can work on calming him down, but you can't teach him anything. Since training an animal to willingly leave his buddies at home is one of the MOST difficult things you'll ever teach him, I never recommend trying it until his training is very well established.
From reading about your experience with anxiety attacks and anxious ponies, Sabine, I can't help but think that your own nerves are the biggest reason your ponies are not comfortable leaving home. I have never had an anxiety attack myself. I was raised with a great deal of self-confidence and taught from a young age that I don't need to be afraid of things but to figure them out instead. I do my best to train our animals to be the same way. Our emotions translate enormously to our animals, and if we are timid when we train, our animals will be timid as well. In my years of training horses and riders, I've come to learn that anxious people nearly always assume their animals are anxious too and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Also, if we're constantly afraid of traumatizing our animals, we're going to be hesitant and ineffective in our training methods. Training takes confidence, and sometimes it even takes being brave for our animals when we ourselves are tempted to be frightened too--like when me and my horse encountered our first bear.
I see nothing cruel about taking your goat out and training him away from home unless he is completely unbonded to you and doesn't trust you at all. If you stay home, you have to separate him from the herd which he can still see. Separating the herd is one of the more stressful things you can do to a goat. But once you remove him completely, he immediately forgets about them and forms a new "herd" with just you and whoever else happens to be there. If you keep him home, he's going to look for the others, call to them, and try to get back to them or get them to come to him--not because he doesn't want to be with you, but because his instinct tells him that you should all be together. If they're not there then in his mind they become irrelevant and he no longer thinks about them or is upset or distracted by them. If it were more stressful to work away from home, then of course I would never suggest it as an intermediate step in the training process. You can't train an animal that is upset. You can work on calming him down, but you can't teach him anything. Since training an animal to willingly leave his buddies at home is one of the MOST difficult things you'll ever teach him, I never recommend trying it until his training is very well established.