One Step Forward, Two Back

We tried to accomplish some more gun training with Journey, one of our horses with a gunfire phobia. We had progressed pretty well with him over the last week. We were able to shoot a .22 starter pistol off his back without any real trouble. He went through the saber course a couple nights ago while his rider fired the .22 and didn't seem to have any issues. Until today, that is. I had his rider take him through a barrel course with the .22 but also attached some balloons to the barrels. We had all kinds of problems then. For some reason Journey attached a different meaning to gunfire when coupled with balloons. I stopped what we were doing and moved to another area and asked his rider to ride him around for a while until Journey calmed down. I then attached balloons to the railing around the arena and had his rider continue moving about the training area. Journey was still having trouble with the balloons even though his rider no longer had the gun so we changed our tactics a little. I asked the rider to focus on getting Journey to listen to him even though he was afraid of the balloons. That is, whenever Journey began to show signs of fear, the rider would give him a different task to take his mind off of the balloon. When it became possible for Journey to pass the balloons without incident we added the gun back in. I began to fire the .22 again as Journey rode around the arena making sure not to pull the trigger when he was passing a balloon. As Journey began to disassociate the gunfire from the balloons, I gave the pistol to the rider and asked him to fire as he rode but not when he was passing a balloon. After a while Journey could complete the circuit around the arena without reacting to the gunfire or the balloons. We called it a day at this point but will work some more on overcoming this balloon problem.