This is Red. He has his own area within the
sanctuary and this was my first session with him
and whilst you see the visuals of my first
session, I think it would be a really good idea
that Simone explains what Red's story is.
So Red's story is he was one of the first horses
in the Tonto national forest that was actually starving.
We've had a really really bad drought, really bad winter with no precipitation
last year so while we normally have a skinny
season and a fat season for wild horses the rains always come in time and they
didn't so there was no forage for the horses out
there. We started to get worried but whenever that happens in nature
it is the weaker and the injured animals that you're going to see
lose the most weight so for example some of the lactating mares
were starting to look bad but Red was truly the first one that
started looking just like a skeleton. I mean it
was really bad and so we had seen him
close to the side of the road and we had just been hired by the
Arizona state AG department and they had seen him too and they were like oh my
god there's a starving horse by the side of the road
and so we then started to feed him out in the wild
and he was responding good to that but because we just had that contract we
really had to honour that and he was just
at a one you know and a one on the scale means
like it's close to death at that point just
on the scale of it goes from one to nine
and five, four to five is sort of the perfect weight isn't it
and then above that is too, too fat and below that is too
skinny so one score is really awful yeah.
Really awful yeah! And you can see it in the video where we
captured him and so we took our time, much like your methods which we
didn't know actually yet by then but it's
those similar types of patience and love is what we've always
incorporated even in catching wild horses so that's not a very stressful
event. So at first we just kind of get them used to our presence,
we feed them some in the wild and then we use a human round pen to lead him
towards where we have some paneling and then when we get them in that paneling
we close the paneling. At that time we just
patiently lead them into the trailer so that we don't get wild horses bashing
their necks on panels and such so that took us a long time, I think it
was a six hour rescue and that's 40 of our people
being there for six hours in the heat. It was 115 degrees at that time
being that patient so it was a long rescue but then once we had them
really all it took was to re-feed him very slowly. He can't do that too fast
either and figure out what was really wrong with him,
that he did get that skinny because most the other stallions were not
so he was an exception so we found out that he really has a problem in his
colon in his gut and that stems from sometime before
that when he was colicking a lot in the wild, we had seen him colicking in the
wild a lot so he was already just you know not up to you know, he was just
not up for staying healthy enough with that
little forage so today he looks fantastic and
we know he still has that little gut problem but now that he has good
and healthy nutrition you know he can cope with it.
So he's doing great and we're very thankful that you're working with him.
You know he's a wild stallion and you know he has
some issues so it's really lovely to see how he responds to the
love and the patience and how you're teaching that to the
people that are going to be working with him.
Yeah it's been a pleasure and privilege and I've learned
a lot from Red. He's a great soul. You always learn a lot
from the sensitive ones and there's always so much to learn
as well. Am I right by saying he was the first horse?
Oh that's correct, at this facility, yes he was.
Yeah so he's your ambassador isn't he? Yeah he we had barely built the shade
structure there. Yeah, yeah so he was the first one
So the first part of my session was to find the present moment which was
an acceptable distance away from Red and it just allows me to get a really
good feeling of how i'm going to be able to help him.
Red certainly gave me some lonely feelings.
He is on his own there and rightly so because he is a stallion and all of the
other horses on site are mares but it also gave me quite a lot of
intuitive understanding of how to help him the
most. Now I went straight away afterwards and
got a little bit of grain and I wanted to
share with him that he can come towards me
for a little bit of grain. Now the idea of this
is i'm going to be working with trusted cooperation.
Trusted cooperation works in gratitude so I'm going to do actions
with him, his reward would be the grain which is
the gratitude for doing what I'm asking and we will be working with the present
moment so that we can always keep a listening state.
Now I started this process which is the ask is that he can follow me, the
well done is that he's got to me and the reward is a thank you which is
the grain. So you can see I'm just very gently asking him to come over.
Now i'm doing this the other side of the fence
for a really good reason because that boundary between us will just give Red
a little bit of confidence before I go in and start the same process
with him and I in the same place.
This then soon progressed that I could be in the same
area as Red. He picked up on what I was asking
really well. Now you can see that Red does have
a fly mask on and it's really interesting because
the first time we went to the salt river and of course we were working with
Cheyenne and Nakota I did see Red and i went over and said hello to him
and he was really suffering with his eyes. He had
an infection that was going on and of course nobody could get
close to him to touch him at that time. It was really hard for me to give
any other horse's time apart from Cheyenne and Nakota. As you
must appreciate in that story we were really putting our full attention to
them so I never had a chance to work with Red.
Since we've been away and came back they did work with the shoot.
Now the shoot is that, it's a little narrow shoot which they put Red in. It's
just behind me as you're looking at the visual right now
and at the beginning they had to put him in there so that they could have
the fly mask on. This was progressed quite naturally with one of the
volunteers who's donated a lot of time to Red.
A lady called Rosa who can actually put the fly mask on and off by having a
bucket of food in between her legs and it works as a little bit of a
distraction taking the fly mask on and off.
So I guess in my intuition part food is going to be a great motivation for Red
and wouldn't it be lovely that he didn't have to go into the shoot
to have his fly mask put on and off. So this is a combination of what we're
going to be working with. Because we're working with trusted
cooperation, it is done in a very different way so in
other words the food is not a distraction to have
something done but it is a reward basis for doing
something and there is a massive difference
between the two because once I can establish that Red
knows that an action happens like at the moment
I'm asking him to come to me, an action happens,
when he achieves that he then gets the reward.
This is a very different place because rather than
distraction, it starts linking in to animal intelligence
and it's his intelligence that i want to work with
and it's his intelligence that will allow me to progress.
Many things not just the fly mask but also a halter and
also being led with the halter and of course all of this I know
that it's not just about me working with Red,
it's also going to be really important that I can share this
with Rosa and also Tracy the manager of the site as well
because between the two of them who totally love
Red and supporting them to support him I know that's where the real change is
going to happen. So coming back to our session right now
you can see that i'm actually trying to go for a little bit of a touch. So
walking, he's got that straight away, that has not taken long.
He's really listening to the line that I'm pulling
between him and myself, we get the reward ready
and I'm after that I can just touch him before he gets a reward. Now you can see
he's pretty sensitive to that and he moves
away quite quickly so that gives me a great opportunity to
know how i'm going to progress to help him
with the fly mask without being in his little chute.
So that progression will be that I start to touch him
and then that touch will turn to a scratch.
That scratch will turn to being able to take the fly mask off
and then often on and all the time that he understands that he's going to get a
reward for that. So a bit of a plan straight away it
didn't take long for the intuition to look at how we're going to work with
Red. I think it's going to be great fun for
him. He does feel a bit sad, he does feel a bit lonely
and I think it's gonna just be great to have a little bit of spice in his life.
I would really like all of this education for him
to be really good fun, to add a little bit of value into his
life. So this was our first session, he's
a lovely boy, I did hear many other stories about Red when he was in the
wild. So this time he is letting me
just touch him but it was a little bit of distraction because he was eating at
the same time so that is how I'm going to develop that
but yes there's lots of stories about Red.
He never really had a band of his own so he never had any females of his own
but he was very much a bachelor boy and he had lots of male horses around
him. He was also before he became ill and
lost all of the weight, he was a very strong stallion and
revered. So this was our first session of course,
I'm ending it with some present moment just
so that everything I've taught him just in this first session is going to
be retained and ready for what we do the next day.