Guest Blog Post # 36: "Desperation, Exasperation, & Motivation" from the famous Bad Eventer!


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I could hear it in her voice.

 
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The voice mail was nearly identical to one I'd left my mentor a few years ago..........

"Oh My Lord, what am I going to do with this horse??!! She is KILLING ME! Nothing works, and I'm going crazy, PLEASE CALL ME!!!!!!"


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The horse she was talking about happens to be offspring of THE KNUCKLEHEAD to beat all knuckleheads. 

See "How I was Outsmarted by a Warmblood" for more about that Knucklehead aka The Evil Twin aka The Warmblood aka The Horse with No Name......


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Did you know The Evil Twin has LOTS of babies? All 3 are his!



I had made that same phone call myself a few years ago, about Daddy Knucklehead himself. Apparently the ability to push their person right over the edge............

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runs in the family. 

This horse managed to outsmart me & outlast me on every level. The worst part was I had been a fairly solid green horse trainer for YEARS when he crossed my path. 

Give me a sensitive, nervous, scaredy cat and I turned them into reasonably brave, solid citizens in short order. Nearly every time.

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This gelding was TERRIFYING when I got him, now he's husband safe!


But The Evil Twin...... He wasn't sensitive, nervous OR scared. 

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Before long *I* was the sensitive, nervous, scared one............. 

And HE was dominant, in charge, and bored. 

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He's the horse that changed my views on motivation. 

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I'd always had horses that responded well to exercise, patterns, repetition, and structure. The more times you repeated an exercise the more confident and agreeable they became. 

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But THIS horse............if you did something ONE TIME. He got it. 

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It was etched in there permanently, and if you did it twice he was bored and looking for something else to do with his time. 

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He is the REASON for the phrase........ Less is More. 

When I figured that part out we finally started getting somewhere. 

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I also learned that I had to find other ways to motivate this horse because his "willingness to please" was nonexistentvery short lived. 

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Hopefully I gave my desperate caller some ideas about motivating her knucklehead...... or at least talking her off that cliff that I know so well!!


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