Rehabilitating abused equines
Touch is one of the key issues for rehabilitating abused equines. Horses have a strong sense of their own personal space and only their most trusted companions, human or equine, are welcome within close range. Horses become even more protective of their personal space if they have experienced physical abuse.
Rehabilitation involves helping the horse learn that human touch can be a positive rather than a negative or painful experience. To achieve this, our handlers work in two stages. Firstly, they use long-handled tools to touch a horse whilst remaining outside the equine’s personal space. This may take weeks, or even months, depending on the individual equine and the level of abuse they have experienced. Once the equine has become used to being touched and accepts the contact as a positive experience, the handler will start to work slightly closer to the equine until such time that they are able to replace the false hand with a real one.
Redwings uses round pens as a safe area to work with horses while they are being rehabilitated. A circular pen plays a very important role in the rehabilitation process because it means the horse cannot feel cornered, which is when they may feel the need to display aggressive behaviour. If the horse feels he has a route to keep moving forward, he will try to use this as an escape route and very rarely resort to aggression in these circumstances.
The health of staff and our horses is paramount and none of our team ever work alone with a horse. Although the handler needs to be the only person in the pen with the horse, a colleague is always located at the unpinned entrance to the pen ready to let the handler out if things do take an unexpected turn. Our staff always wear, hard hats, gloves and steel toed boots and if for some reason a horse had shoes on, these would be removed prior to rehabilitation work if possible.
