The Gate Experiment -- Going Out on New Pasture

About a month ago we decided to open up a new section of pasture for the herd of four horses that Gunny lives with. This group has access to pasture 24/7, but the new section had some taller grass in it to be eaten down. Typically in this type of situation, horses will get very excited about going through the gate and onto the new pasture. This situation was no exception.

This particular gate setup went through a lane and then another gate opening so the horses needed to turn left after coming through one gate to go through the next. And because of this I wanted plenty of space as I latched the gate open. In the past, I would keep the horses away from the gate until I was done latching it and then move out of the way and give them a signal that they could go through. And usually there would be one or two horses that would have to run through the gate, maybe even throwing a buck or kick in as they went through and expressed their excitement.

I decided to try to do things differently this round. I wanted to see if I could get calmness from the horses going through the gate by paying attention to their emotional state at each step of the process instead of just paying attention to whether they were giving me my space or not.

The first day took me 20 minutes to open the gate. I walked out to the gate and the horses all came over and were jockeying for position by the gate plus there was an overall feeling of excitement and impatience that I could feel too. I stood at the gate and waited for each of the four horses to lick and chew and for the feeling of excitement and impatience to go away. Then I reached for the chain to unlatch the gate. The tension came back so I let go of the chain and waited again for the tension to go away and for the licks and chews. Next I was able to reach for the chain and unlatch the gate before the tension came back, so I latched it again and waited again. I kept doing each step of opening the gate and each time I felt any tension or impatience come back I would back up in the process and wait for a feeling of calmness to return.

By the end of that first session I was able to open the gate and three of the four horses walked calmly through. The fourth horse started walking then trotted through, attempting to speed up the two horses in front of him, and proceeded to canter around in celebration while the other three settled to grazing.

The next few days were similar but took much less time each day to open the gate. And by the third day I noticed that Gunny was intentionally making the horse who was insisting on hurrying, stop and walk through the gate. Gunny would do this by stopping partway through the gate and waiting until the other horse stopped and quit pushing on him before he would go through. And by about day five another interesting thing happened. The horses stopped coming out to the gate to wait for it to be opened. They would see me opening the gate but wait until I had walked away before walking out and going to do their grazing. And Gunny continued to be the “gate police” and insist that the one horse walk through too, even though I was at the other end of the paddock. The first few times he did this he would look at me as he stopped the other horse and I would tell him he was a good boy, but otherwise there was no “training” involved.

After about a month of having the pasture open daily, we have closed it once again to let it grow up again. But during that month of opening the pasture in the daytime hours it seemed that my experiment of waiting for calm and for the horses to process what I wanted by waiting for them to lick and chew created a situation where I was able to remove the emotional charge of going out the gate onto the more desirable, new pasture. And the thing that was really surprising to me was how little time and effort it took to have a hugely noticeable, positive effect.

Coming up from the pasture in the evenings proved to be interesting too. I will write about my observations on that in my next post. In the meantime I would love to hear if anyone tries this idea with their horse in any type of situation where there is excitement causing hurry or impatience. I am using the same idea as I approach the group with a stack of feed buckets and it is helping to make pre-feeding time be much more peaceful.