View from the North 40: It could be called mental therapy

I’ve never been good at training two horses at the same time, and yet here I am, on the verge of my rocking chair on the porch years, breaking two horses to ride, and they couldn’t be making it harder on my brain if they tried.

It’s not whether they are well-behaved and or trainable, or if they’re difficult, tricky, obstinate, or otherwise constitutionally against being trained to interact with humans in a positive and productive manner which requires them to do what the human wants. No, even if they’re being “bad” all of that’s just good fun, like figuring out a puzzle. Besides, I’ve trained the 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle horses, and these girls are by comparison not puzzling at all.

So if they are nice-tempered, trainable horses, what could possibly be the problem? It’s their personalities, their character — how they learn and how they respond; what motivates them and what frustrates them; what their tells are and what their learning time-line is.

I’m not good at training more than one horse at a time simply because breaking a horse, for me anyway, is about interacting with the horse’s personality, and I am not good at interacting with different personalities at the same time.

That part of my brain never developed, or it had early onset calcification, or its growth was stunted somehow by a form of brain rickets or something. And these two horses are at opposite ends of a personality diagram.

Chica, the little one, is a cat. Myah, the ridiculously big one, is a dog.

Chica has the personality of cat a that spent some time running feral on the streets. She has survival instincts. She is aware of everything going on around her. As a cat, she would kill something every day, just because you never know when you’ll have to hit the streets again and need a meal to go. This cat has seen things, dark times, so nothing much fazes her. She really only trusts herself, but if you make it into her inner circle — for cats, that’s called a clowder — she will lay stretched out in the sun with you, and kill for you, too. She would not waste time chasing a string.

I bought her as a yearling from a friend who gave her a good start in life, and she’s spent the last six years literally right outside my house and petted or handled every day. Not one day was spent feral and having to fend for herself. So some days I have to roll my eyes at this attitude.

Myah is definitely a Labrador retriever. One of those labs who loves to be with the humans and thinks she’s a lap dog — the 85-pound lap dog. And even though her weight cuts off the circulation in your legs and you know there will come a situation in which this behavior is a detriment, you let her stay because she dropped everything to run to you for loves. You kind of want to call her a doofy dog, but then you realize she learns readily and has a pretty wide sensitive-slash-neurotic streak in her. She gets insulted when you insist she do real work and scared by things like a new pile of dirt you hauled into the horse pen while she wasn’t there.

It’s kind of disconcerting to have an upset giant — a nearly one-ton giant — on the end of a rope, but then I discovered that I can appease her sensitive/neurotic response by talking to her as if consoling an upset 1-year-old human toddler. Every time I have to do that I want to call her a doof again.

As an example of their two innate personalities: Since the first day I started shooting archery next to their pen, Chica has come over to stand next to the fence, close to the action, to watch me shoot. Myah parks herself about 75 feet away and every time an arrow hits the target she tosses her head.

So here I am at the halfway mark between that first, and startling, membership application junk mail from AARP and actually being able to collect Social Security, with my body at peak fitness level for a day spent slaving away at a desk. And I’m getting back into horseback riding by breaking two adult horses.

I have the diminished emotional capacity of a hard-core, lifelong introvert to deal with diverse personalities and the two horses have polar opposite personalities.

What could go wrong?

Fortunately, I think of this as an opportunity to improve my fitness and to improve the neuroplasticity of my brain, specifically in the prefrontal cortex area that controls social interaction.

I also have newfound faith in the belief that the more important question should be “What could go right?”

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Plus, I’m just plain horse crazy still after all these years at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .