The yard was unusually busy and filled with anxiety when I arrived. Amongst the chatter I managed to glean that not long before lunch one of the livery horses had collapsed and been rushed to the vet school. Her life was hanging in the balance.
The cause was every liveries worst nightmare… an encysted red worm burden. It was so severe she had been given less than a 50% chance of surviving. Even if she did survive she would have permanent damage to her intestine that would mean careful dietary management for the rest of her life.
The horses at the yard, as with many yards, were turned out in groups and the groups never mixed. So any horse not in the group with this mare were most likely going to be unaffected. That didn’t stop many of the liveries going in to an emotional meltdown. My head was spinning and my stomach turned over as I digested the news. This mare shared a field with my youngster!
Regular worm counts as well as wormer for red worms and tape worm are part of my horses worming regimen so, in theory, my youngster should be fine. If only that was enough to stop me worrying.
The whole yard was put on ‘lock down’, grazing was off limits and horses were all stabled. An emergency worming programme was put in place and every horse had to follow this programme over the course of a week. It’s bad enough having to worm a horse a few times a year, I wasn’t about to disagree given the potential risk for my youngster.
My horses started out great with their week-long wormer regimen. They weren’t happy about it, but we were coping. Then around day 3 the yard owner decided that he would ‘help me out’ and he decided to worm my youngster before I arrived at the yard that day. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, but all seemed well.
Day 4 came around and it was time for the wormer. I prepped the tube and opened my youngsters stable door. He had one glance at the wormer tube and reacted as if I had thrown a snake in to the stable with him. This was not his usual reaction and I heaved a sigh as I could only imagine the scene the previous day with the yard owners approach to worming my youngster.
I pot the tube away and calmed my horse. Then went to find the yard owner. As my horses reaction had indicated, the previous days wormer administration had not gone well at all and it seemed that an approach along the lines of ‘pin it down with 4 men and a boy’ was taken. This was devastating news to me. My horse as showing me that a lot of emotional damage had been done in a very short space of time. Damage that was going to take more than one nights training to resolve.
There was nothing else for it. I had to quickly put a training plan together in my head as to how I was going to worm my horse that evening. It had to be done. The risk of not doing it was just too great. My approach was that of microshaping. I looked for the smallest approximation of the behaviour I needed from my horse to make this procedure as emotionally and physically safe as possible.
I wanted to tease apart what aspect(s) of the wormer was an issue so i broke it down in to steps to find what was OK and I could build from there. Starting where things were not OK was not going to lead to better things. I asked if I could open the stable door (no wormer in sight), yes, click and treat. Could I go in to the stable, then touch him, could I build up to touching him around his nose and his then his mouth. As long as he was calm and relaxed with each step of the process it was reinforced a number of times before moving on. At any time if he gave any indication that things were not OK then I took a step back in the training plan.
The next steps involved the wormer itself; could I stay on the other side of the door and simply hold the wormer tube, click for calm behaviour, wormer tube away and treat. We built this up gradually so that I could step in to the stable with the tube in my hand and he stayed calm.
It was surprising how quickly he learned that staying calm and relaxed about the process was preferable to getting anxious. Anxiety could easily have escalated but by approaching the training a small step at a time, by repeating each step and following Karen Pryors 10 Laws of shaping behaviour the end result was being able to worm my horse without force.
After just one nights training the behaviour was definitely not as good as I would have liked it to be, but we had a few more nights to work on that.
Over time I polished the behaviour by asking the horses to voluntarily bring their mouth to the wormer tube, open their lips and place their lips over the tube.
The final bells and whistles to the process was to teach the horse a cue where they knew “this time I plan to give the wormer”. If they were not ready they removed their mouth from the tube. If they are ready their mouth stays over the tube. Giving wormer paste to our horses is a necessary evil for most of us. However, we can give the horses control over the worming process and allow it to be their choice when the paste is given. We can make it a more positive experience for the horses.
The good news is, my horses are still in control over their wormer paste, neither of them were affected by the outbreak and the mare… she survived!
