Overcome your horse’s fear using Constructional Approach Training for Horses

You might come across a horse who is so truly afraid and standard protocols might look like they are working, only for us to discover down the track that all they did was delay the inevitable. We often find this out too late, when our horse has injured themselves or someone else has been injured. The reasons why the standard protocols that we all know may not be as effective as we think is because in order to overcome fear, we have to give our horse the reinforcement that our horse desires. We think we do this for the most part, but we may not be offering the reinforcer on our horse’s terms. In other word’s we need to give control over to our horse…. and this is where Constructional Approach Training for Horses comes in (CAT H for short). CAT H is NOT approach and retreat. We will show you the differences in this workshop.

There is an abundance of literature on the value of control, and we will talk about this in this workshop. CAT H is complicated in its simplicity. The difference is in the control – in CAT H we remain below our horse’s anxiety at all times. We present the trigger of fear to our horse under our horse’s level of anxiety – in other words at a distance where our horse is aware of its presence but does feel the need to leave in order to attain greater distance between themselves and the object (or person). The beauty here is that we never elevate our horses’ anxiety levels. By remaining below the threshold of anxiety and reinforcing a calm behaviour by giving the horse distance by US walking away when our horse offers a calming behaviour it gives our horse the control, they need to ensure that they remain calm at every step of the process.

We will take you through the steps of CAT H in this workshop and we also offer video coaching if you need it, through all the steps. In the first set of videos, we show you how to begin; we detail each step in a number of different ways; show common mistakes that are made and present the theory behind CAT H. We show two horses – Star; a Standie was afraid of an object and Dorado; a Brumby was afraid of people. In the second set of videos, we will dive into the theory in more detail and also show you a case example of Sharney who was afraid of people and also afraid of having her feet trimmed.

We will then take a deeper dive into the Polyvagal theory and apply it to our own individual horses.

From there we take a front row seat into some of our coaching with CAT H and moving into mastery and confidence after the interaction state. If you would like individual coaching this is not a problem and that which will be added here will give you an idea of how coaching works. Just drop us a line. In preparation for coaching, you need to provide a baseline video – you will see what this looks like in the coaching videos. But it is simply showing me what happens to your horse when he or she approaches the potential trigger of their fear.

CAT H is a wonderful tool that you can have in your training toolbox. You don’t need to wait till you come across a horse who is afraid. We are looking forward to helping you and your horse – so see you on the ‘inside’.

Please contact us if any of the videos are not playing for you