Risada showing the pain anticipation behaviour..

animal connection and beyond

Nov 30

This is a follow on from a post on August 21 2022 about Pain Anticipation with Risada; http://animalconnectionandbeyond.fr/2022/08/21/pain-anticipation-with-risada/ ; and a post on 16th October 2022, regarding why Risada still bites the farrier; http://animalconnectionandbeyond.fr/2022/10/16/why-does-my-horse-still-want-to-bite-my-farrier/.

This is a few clips of how Risada throws her body about when she anticipates pain. This is quite mild now compared to where we have been on this journey and as she does have pain in the foot we are working with this is amazingly controlled behaviour from her. I am very proud of how she has processed the work we have done and how we are moving forward together.

Unfortunately sometimes when horses behave this way it puts fear into the person doing the procedure, whether that is the farrier, dentist, vet, body worker, etc and then things can spiral and this also then confirms to the horse that her defensive behaviour was the right behaviour. Luckily the farrier I use works a lot with horses that have had their boundaries crossed in many different ways, and is very patient with both the horse and the person holding the horse.

In the video you can see that her thinking levels go up when a human thinks about doing something. Her thinking levels are not high when the work is being done. That is the beauty of using videos for yourself because you can see after the fact what is happening. When you are in the middle of it all it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint exactly the cause or timing of a behaviour.

Risada's behaviour comes from historical spiral patterns, where she has said no and the person attending to her has forced a yes one way or another, using controls. Now we use Trust. She confirms with me that it is all okay and her thinking levels, when they go up with the anticipation, are coming down very quickly. The next time they will not go up as high. It is a journey that needs everybody to be involved, and when everybody is participating in the conversation amazing things start to happen.