Henry Shows Us Who He Is

Henry Shows Us Who He Is

Henry is living the easy life, right now.  I have only been doing light ground driving and leading lessons.  He is getting daily handling, foot cleaning and time with his big brothers.  The other day, we decided to take him for a walk on the street.

It wasn't the first time we have done this, and we also have spent a lot of time at the end of the driveway watching traffic.  Henry's previous owner told us he was good with traffic, and nothing Henry has done so far has proved otherwise.

We had no intentions of going all the way to the trail.  Our barn has 2 driveways.  We crossed the street, walked him over to the other driveway, turned him around, recrossed the street and came back.  It was a hot day, so I decided that that was good enough.  

When I started leading him down our driveway, my sister cautioned me and said there was a motorcycle coming.  I thought, "Good.  I can see how he is with motorcycles."  I turned him around to face the street.  That is when my sister said it was more like 10 motorcycles.  I was maybe 15 feet from the road.  The trees alongside the driveway are pretty thick, so we couldn't see the motorcycles until they were right in front of us.  They were very loud and scary.  I glanced over at Henry, and his head was way up in the air and his eyes were really big--but he just stood there as the motorcycles went past.

I praised him and petted him, and then we turned around to walk back to the barn.  I have been in situations like this where the horse will freeze, but when it is time to move, he will get all prancey and excited.  Not Henry.  He put his head back down and walked down the driveway like nothing ever happened.

And now I really know who Henry is.  He is a sensible horse who is more likely to think before he acts.  Maybe he picked up on the fact that Ellen and I weren't afraid of the motorcycles--if so, all the much better.  He has been a very unspooky horse, all along, but this was a great test.

I took a business management class 100 years ago before I ever had horses, and the professor was teaching us how to motivate people.  It was the first time I ever heard of behavior modification, and little did I know that I would come to use it all the time; though with horses and not people.

There was one thing he said that always stuck in my head.  "You can change a person's behavior, but you can't change that person's character."  Well, Henry showed me his character, and I really liked what I saw.