How To Load A Nervous Horse

Reduce stress and load a nervous horse with these helpful tips. Get your horse used to transport and encourage them to step onto the ramp or inside the trailer.

Find out how to load a nervous horse. Whether your horse is nervous about loading due to a break from travel or has just never got on board with the idea, we found great ways to reduce unnecessary stress. So, pack your travel essentials and get out and about this summer with these nerve-busting tips!

Get Used To The Trailer

Spend some time getting your horse used to your chosen mode of transport. Groom, feed and tack up next to your lorry or trailer, making it a feature in their routine. This way, when you come to load, the sight of your horse’s transport won’t instil fear straight away!

If your horse seems confident enough, encourage them onto the ramp or, even better, inside the trailer for a few moments.

Positive Reinforcement

When loading your horse or using your horse’s transport in any activity, make sure you provide ‘positive reinforcement’.

Positive reinforcement is essentially rewarding your horse for good behaviour. When loading, positive reinforcement might look like a treat for stepping onto the ramp or just a scratch on the neck when they take a closer look.

Studies have shown positive reinforcement to be very valuable in horse training and one of the most effective ways to encourage learning. With the stress hormone cortisol hindering learning capacity, we do not want to use techniques to encourage good behaviour that may cause even more stress!

Teaching techniques such as negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment could put a halt to improvement, releasing less serotonin and therefore less good behaviour reinforcement! In addition, positive punishment and negative reinforcement have to be used extremely precisely to have the desired effect – poor use of these methods could make behaviour worse.

Internal lighting

Lighting in your trailer or lorry might not immediately come to mind as a solution to loading a nervous horse, but research suggests it plays an integral role.

At the 2018 French Equine Research Day, the researcher presented their findings on how different light intensities affected horses when loading. They found horses loaded with a white light (as opposed to an overly blue or yellow light) at 50% of its brightness, reduced heart rate, negative behaviours and time to load, more than natural light, other colours and other strengths of light. The researchers suggested this was due to the horse’s being able to see clearly due to the lower contrast between light inside and outside of the stable.

Next time you load, consider turning on the lights in your trailer or using a portable light to brighten your horse’s path.

Keep calm

You play a vital role in keeping your horse calm! Horses can sense panic, so if you are nervous or stressed, it’s more than likely your horse will be, too!

To conquer your nerves, make sure you get used to handling your horse around trailers. If you’re nervous about loading, grab someone confident to load for you whilst your horse still becomes used to the idea.

Tips to keep your horse calm whilst around the trailer include, playing classic music, grooming and using essential oils on equipment, such as lavender oil. All these methods have shown to significantly reduce heart rate and will help your horse to associated your mode of transport with positive rather than negative assumptions.

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