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Penny - "Fifty First Dates"
Our neighbor adopted this yearling filly from High Rock HMA at Napa Mustang Day and we agreed to keep her in our BLM-spec pen and to halter train her.
Like Dun Colt, Penny was worked at the adoption as part of the volunteer training demos. Edona Miller noted that she was "a handful."
Penny is a very sensitive, reactive horse. She sure, even after several months of positive experiences, that we intend to eat her. Although we were able to get our hands on her within a few days, months later she is still more reactive and skittish and less trusting than we would like. Once caught and in a halter and lead rope, she changes and actually learns her ground skills very well - but remains on the lookout for danger, seldom really relazing except for a few fleeting moments at the end of a training session.
Luckily, Penny is drop-dead gorgeous, and when she's sweet, she's wonderful. We are all in love with her. Sometimes the ones you have to work the hardest with are the ones you love the most. She IS making permanent progress, but it is certainly slow!
 June 2007 |  June 2007 |
 July 2007 |  Here's Peny with Dun Colt, her "room mate" for a few weeks. The dun colt made immediate progress and within three weeks was in his new home, where he is now "Zapato." |
August 2007:  Penny decided she no longer wanted to be haltered, so we had to start over with the makeshift halter, like a new wild horse. |  And we had to resume desensitization exercises, to try to help her relax. |
 Look, Penny - it doesn't hurt! |  Here she is starting to loosen up |
 |  Lunging a circle - she's so very light and responsive - that's the good thing about her temperament. She responds to the lightest touch! |
| Late October - Early November, 2007: | |
 |  OMG! Not the dreaded Halter! |
|  |
 |   Wearing a halter means you get to go out and do cool things |
 |  Aw - ain't she sweet? |
 Things were going so well, and then Penny decided she'd rather be wild after all |  |
 But she did work through it |  |
_small.jpg) Summer 2008: Here's Penny in mid-summer, enjoying the tall grasses that are still green, down by the swampy corner of our place. |  |
| However, she does seem to have what my friend Betty calls "Fifty First Dates" Syndrome as a repeating pattern. She goes along just fine for awhile, then one day she acts like she's totally wild again. Everything scares her, the other horses get her all stirred up, she acts like she has never seen people before. When you touch her she flinches, and it takes a few minutes to talk her down to where she can relax and enjoy being touched or groomed. Still, go to halter her and she turns her head away from the halter. If I didn't know her history I would swear she was an abuse case. But she isn't. It takes a good several consecutive sessions to get her out of it. Each time she's a little better than before, so it seems to be some kind of "knot" that re-surfaces from time to time. |  You can see by the worried expression that she expects it to hurt when I touch her ever so lightly. |
 | Finally in February of 2009, her adopter and owner, Bob, an elderly lifelong horseman, came over and said he was ready for her to go to his house to live with his nice QH mare. She trailered very nicely, and immediatley hit it off well with his mare, "Snicks." We have checked on her several times, and she is doing very well. Bob gets along very well with her, and she and his other mare do well together. Maybe our herd of 10 just had too much going on for her very sensitive nervous system. She seems very happy and content in her new home. It's almost like she knew she didn't belong here. She has always gotten along well with Bob when he would visit - maybe she just wanted to go "home." |
