Trailer loading

Heather has included a page for loading as it is often asked if she can help with this, and the answer is yes, but people need to understand that it’s rarely about the trailer! There are two main points to consider:

• Asking a horse to enter a lorry or trailer (let alone travel!) goes against every instinct he has – thus the apparently preferred method of “human goes into trailer and tries to pull horse in” is a loser from the word go!
• Challenging situations depend on trust – if you don’t have enough of this you have a relationship problem – and this is usually where the issues really are!

Loading is a big issue which needs to be approached sensitively and often – NOT just when you want to go somewhere! When helping your horse to load, there cannot be an agenda to “get it done” as you can only go at the horse’s speed, and it “takes the time it takes”. The phonecalls Heather gets often begin something like…

Desperate Voice of Owner: “I’ve got to travel my horse on saturday… it’s friday today and I cant get him near the trailer! He’s always been terrible at loading…. What should I do???”

Well…… is this the place to mention I wouldn’t have waited til now….??

Depending on the particular reason for your horse’s reluctance – and this might be one of a hundred reasons, e.g. genuine fear or claustrophobia, dislike of rattling trailers (Ifor Williams are notorious for this!), dislike of the activity you generally take him to at the other end, bad driving on the human’s part (think about that one carefully – it really could be you!)  etc etc……-  it may sometimes be appropriate to only begin the activity the first time (with the owner then continuing to practise with the horse) and progress over several shorter sessions to allow the horse to consider what he has learnt and build his confidence. Ideally you want to make loading just “another thing you do” with no great importance attached to it.

No matter what anyone tells you – loading is NEVER solved by a quick fix!