Catching and Haltering

One of the problems Jalila’s owners had targeted for me to work on when they sent her to me was that she was difficult to catch and it took a lot of patience and time to get a halter on her. The haltering process I witnessed involved holding the halter out and allowing her to put her nose through the opening several times until the crown strap could finally be brought around behind her ears and buckled into place followed by a bowl of oats.
With tension and pain on the wane, Jalila was always came right over to me when I approached her pen, but having a halter in my hand definitely aroused her suspicion. She had some obvious negative associations with halters, so I tried using a catch rope, like I would use with a foal as part of introducing the haltering process, and Jalila was perfectly accepting of it. I could walk right up to her and put the rope around her neck. She didn’t become apprehensive until the noseband was laid in place and I realized that her nose was extremely sensitive. When I added the fleeces cover to soften the contact of the rope, Jalila was fine with the idea and, once I put a fleece covering over the noseband of a regular halter, the problem was solved. Three facial swirls? Complicated?

​Once I added the fleece padding to soften the contact of the rope over her nose, Jalila accepted it. It took some time before she accepted it without anticipation, but I could tell that Jalila was thinking about what we were doing with that thing over her nose and willing to learn something new.