Gun Training Again

Sometimes horses that have been trained to put up with gunfire regress and have to be retrained. I'm not sure why this happens but I suspect it has something to do with an association with some other trauma. Perhaps the rider was in the habit of yanking on the reins too hard when shooting or maybe he fired too close to an ear. For the past week I've been working with one of the troopers to retrain one of the horses who's been in the cavalry for about eight years but who had developed a phobia about guns. This particular horse had been accidentally shot in the neck with a blank cartridge a couple of years ago but his fear of gunfire predated that incident. That just reinforced it. We started the retraining with the usual method of having one individual fire a cap gun while another rode the horse around in an enclosed area. As the horse becomes more desensitised to the noise, the rider brings the horse closer and closer to the shooter. Once the horse is desensitized to the cap gun, the rider takes the gun and continues to fire while riding the horse. Once the horse is okay with that we move to a louder weapon--in this case a .22 starter pistol. In four short lessons we have progressed from a horse frightened by the sound of a cap gun a 100 feet away to one that can put up with a .22 being fired off his back without flinching. The trick to completing the training is to not get carried away with progress and push the horse beyond his comfort zone. If you start to have problems you have to take a step back to where the horse is comfortable before you can move forward again.