In the past 50 years, some of my best friends and mentors have been veterinarians, specifically equine veterinarians. Before I start this conversation, one of the things I want to encourage you to do is take a ride with an ambulatory vet who is going around to different farms and see what they have to put up with. The secret with horses is to learn how to teach them to become our partners. By nature, they're born skeptics, cowards, claustrophobics, and panic-aholics. So, our goal is to teach them how to yield and respond to pressure appropriately. This is what behavior shaping or modifying is all about.
It may be true that some veterinarians need some better corral side manner, and some farriers need some better anvil side manner, but at the end of the day, it's not their horse. It's not their responsibility to make sure the horse behaves the best he can. Before I get into the solution, I want to paint a picture of a scenario. A horse grows up, and every time the veterinarian shows up, it's for a shot, deworming, or some procedure. Pretty soon, it's easy for them to know what’s about to happen. When they see someone who looks, smells, and acts like a veterinarian, usually with a veterinary smock on or something like that, it doesn't take them long to get into high alert and then to self-preservation mode.
Think about this from the horse's point of view. One of the first things we can do is see things from the horse's perspective and start giving him good preparation. When the vet shows up for another horse, we can have the veterinarian just spend 30 seconds saying hi to your horse so that he doesn't associate him with a negative experience. Three bad experiences with most horses are all it takes for them to create an opinion that doesn't align with being a great partner in the human environment.
Most of the things that a veterinarian has to do involve some kind of puncture, some kind of handling of the legs, or some kind of sticking something in an orifice. So, these are the kinds of things we can do to prepare our horses. For example, we can teach our horses that it's okay for us to stick the end of the carrot stick and lots of other different things in their mouth.
Take an oral syringe and just gently probe around with it in their mouth. Get them used to that sort of thing. Then add some nice honey or molasses or applesauce and get it to where you can squirt some in their mouth. This way, every time they get a squirt, it's not a nasty-tasting dewormer.
Then move on to the other end. Standing to the side, lift and play with your horse’s tail and tickle them under the tail until they raise it. This way, when they get a thermometer, they don't clamp their tail as soon as it enters their body. Instead, they are confident and comfortable raising their tail and allowing you to hold it.
Beyond all this, teaching horses how to yield TO and FROM pressure on the ground, on cue, is probably the number one secret to success in every situation, including with the vet.
Statistics say that there are 56 million horses on the planet today. I would dare to bet that most horses do not properly yield to and from pressure on the ground. Some of them have a great nature. Some of them have a very skeptical nature. Some horses are cranky or push into pressure and are very rude and disrespectful because they've learned to be that way; they may have had this tendency naturally, but they've also learned to do that.
Ultimately, it's our responsibility as horse lovers and horse owners to teach our horses to yield to and from pressure, to make pressure make sense to them. It's our responsibility to prepare our horses for the veterinarian. We do this through prior and proper preparation and by winning all Seven Games with our horses. If you prepare ahead of time, the typical things veterinarians are going to do will make sense to your horse. This ensures a great relationship not only with your horse but also with your favorite veterinarian.
