Your fellow really does sound more and more like my old fellow, Shadow. I could de-sensitize him all day with plastic bags, etc. As long as the object was "under my control", he would stand there and go to sleep. But if he thought **I** was not the source of movement, then it became its own entity, and morphed into a scary, horse-eating object.
I could see this happen with a bag on a rope. At a certain distance, he would lose the connection between me and the bag, and it would then be "alive". Under that distance, he could see that I was causing the bag to move, so it wasn't scary.
With Shadow, sacking out had definite limitations. I started when he was just a foal, but it never 'took' because of the way he viewed the 'game'. He knew I wouldn't hurt him, but even at 25, a gum wrapper blowing in the wind was going to EAT HIM.
On Sep 3, 2009, at 1:55 PM, Barbara McCrary wrote:
Your discourse here does not represent what my horse does. Mine spooks only in safe situations (safe for him) and sometimes there is nothing there at all. I truly believe he does it for entertainment value. He had training over a woven blue tarp in an arena, and he learned to walk carefully over it. On the outside, if a blue tarp is sitting out in plain sight, it's a big horse-eater.
