Monarch’s Story – A Rescued Ex-Rodeo Bronc
Monarch at the kill buyer lot.
July 1, 2020: I couldn’t get his face out of my mind. I had just made the decision to adopt an unhandled mare through a rescue organization. I made the comment that I wish I could afford a second horse, I thought that would help the mare feel more comfortable. The person I was talking to sent me pictures of this big guy, said his time was running out and he was close to being shipped off on the slaughter truck, and said they would do fundraising if I wanted him, too. I agreed. The next day I was told he had been sold and our hearts sank a little, but I was glad he found a home. A couple days later I heard back that there had been a misunderstanding and he was still available if we wanted him. At first I said to see if anyone else wanted him, but I couldn’t get his face out of my mind and called back a few minutes later to say we would take him. That’s how my journey with Monarch began.
I wasn’t set up for horses yet. After 30 years of living in the city, I was just getting back into horses again. We borrowed some corral panels and quickly set up two quarantine pens. A few days later Monarch was delivered. He was a day late thanks to him chewing the guide light wires in the trailer after he was loaded. I knew then that we had a horse with “character.” I was told he is an ex-rodeo bronc, a dud that didn’t want to buck, and he was probably 5-6 years old. I think his teeth look like he’s at least 7, and he looks like he has some soreness in his back and hind end, which could be the reason he didn’t want to buck, but he also has such a sweet look in his eyes when he’s relaxed, he’s a smart, sensitive horse, so maybe he just didn’t like the job.
Whatever the reason, I knew I was taking on a restart project, and I knew he would probably be a little harder than an unhandled horse with minimum human exposure, but really had no idea just how far “in debt” he would be in the “trust bank account” until after he arrived. Far worse than being an unhandled horse, it didn’t take long to realize that because of the abuse this handsome guy carried a lot of emotional trauma.
He had no idea what apples and carrots were, it took a couple days of leaving them in his feeder before they started disappearing. Then I started offering them to him in my hand. I started in the least threatening position possible, by sitting on the ground outside the pen with my arm propped up on the panel bar, it took almost half an hour the first few days, of him stretching as far as he could reach, and walking in circles while he was thinking about it, before he would take the apple from my hand. It slowly took less and less time for him to take the apples, and then I worked up to offering it while standing. He was learning that he had to take the apple before I put his pellets in his feeder…that’s what he really wanted.
Routine is his friend, any little thing different throws him off. If I tried to give the apple from a different part of the fence he didn’t want it. If I wore a hat, a coat, or another person was around, or anything out of the ordinary it was like starting all over from the beginning.
Lizzy and Monarch on his third day here.
Monarch wasn’t extremely fearful of people, he would let us get close, but he just didn’t want to be touched. The first week we did the approach and retreat method, and moved him around the pen, practicing changing directions. Too much pressure and he would start to feel defensive. He hadn’t shown signs of aggression and I didn’t want to push him into behaving that way, looking into his eyes it didn’t feel right anyway to push him that hard. The pens were not ideal for pushing a horse around either, I was actually warned not to push him too hard or he might try bolting through the panels and have them collapse on him, and since I didn’t have a round pen set up yet I decided to take it slow and work on building trust.
I’ve spent hours sitting in his pen with him, standing next to him while he’s eating, inside the pen and out, just being with him. After about two months we started to notice some nice changes. He was walking up to the fence and waiting for his apples in the morning when he saw me coming. He was standing right there while I poured his pellets into his feeder instead of standing back a step or two. He was less worried about the muck rake getting close to him when I’m cleaning out his pen. He was starting to throw his head over the top of the pen waiting for his hay, and not as reactive when I’d throw the hay net over and tie it on, he was even starting to eat from the net while I was tying it on rather than standing back and waiting until I was done. It was about this time he started eating grass from my hand as well. I don’t know if the movement of the grass scared him from taking it from me before, or he didn’t know what it was, or maybe it just didn’t have a high enough value to merit coming that close yet.
I’m always doing little things to challenge him to think instead of react. I’ve dangled the ends of a rope down from the tree, and on a stick over his hay net. I’ve stretched the rope across the panels in front of his feeder so he has to touch it or go under it to get to his pellets. I’ve propped the training stick and string through the pen so it points toward him high and low, especially low where it might bump into him while he was eating bits of hay off the ground. Once he was used to that I sat outside the pen by his hay net with my arm and hand sticking through instead of the training stick, and I pushed the good bits of hay just under my hand until he was comfortable enough to bump into my hand while eating.
Got it!
The string on the id tag is cut!
ID tag stuck at top of Monarch’s head
At the three month mark I was able to cut his identification tag off by using that method. He had gotten his id tag stuck at the top of his head from rubbing, it was stuck under his halter and looked tight under his throat, so I needed to get it off. I sat there with my arm sticking through the panel, scissors hiding in my hand. Fortunately they can’t see on top of their head, so all I had to do once he was comfortable with my hand there was to turn the scissors around and carefully cut the cord holding the tag. The touchy part was trying to remove it after that because it was tangled in his mane, luckily it wasn’t an issue, just had to move slow and remain calm.
October 6, 2020: Every weekend I try to spend a couple of hours with him, just hanging out without a lot of pressure. This last weekend I sat in his pen with him, first with a bucket of grass, and then just feeding him hay a handful at a time. He’s been here four months, and I felt like, for the first time, he was accepting me rather than tolerating me. He reached out and touched my knee voluntarily with his lip…first time! He was relaxed and standing close to me, even casually bumping my hand with his nose when getting a bite of hay (I think he was kind of doing it on purpose, playing a little, but if not he was at least not worried about it). He was letting me get in little strokes on his nose, too, while he was getting a bite. He could have been eating from a little pile of hay away from me, but he chose to be with me.
I’m not going to lie, the patience it’s taking to build trust is really hard at times. It’s so tempting to reach out and touch him when he’s that close. I did ask a couple of times but he said no, not yet. As long as I remember to “deposit” more into the trust account than I “withdraw” he’s good. My next goal is to get his halter off. Baby steps. I’ll continue to post updates as they happen.
October 10, 2020: I’m always surprised by how fast Monarch adapts to something new. Today I tied the training stick to the end of the big branch I used to hang the rope down from a couple weeks ago. The rope touching him no longer bothered him so I removed it after a couple days. I’m using the stick for something with a little more weight on it when he brushes against it. Like always, he was scared of it at first, but realized it wasn’t going to kill him within about half an hour. Because I had hung that up I wasn’t planning to do any more work with him today, but decided to go sit by him, pushing the good bits of hay under the fence, and resting my arm through the bars so he would come close to eat what I put in there. He always has the choice of saying no and eating from his hay net, I never make getting food from me his only option, I want him to feel good about the choices he makes. Going back to the analogy I used earlier of a trust bank account, good feelings are “deposits” in the trust account, so while I do need to push him beyond his comfort zone to help him build trust and confidence, I want to be making more deposits than withdrawls.
Today we made another nice baby step, he was allowing me to stroke his neck while he was eating. My fingers were cold, and he was nice and warm. He’s not all that comfortable with it yet, there were moments he moved his head away for a moment, but he didn’t step away, and he kept coming back. I only did this for a couple minutes, I like to leave things on a good note, but it was a really nice breakthrough and I’m hoping we might start progressing a little faster now.
October 24, 2020: The past week or two, between today and the time of my last post update, I started adding a little touch or stroke to Monarch’s muzzle and nose as he would take a handful of grass from me. The first few times he stepped back and looked at me unsure about it, I wasn’t sure if the grass carried enough value to warrant touching, but then he continued to step forward to take another handful. As he became more comfortable with it I would go up a little farther, or touch the sides of his nose. Last weekend I sat on the ground in his pen next to his hay net, I put some good bits of hay next to me and then just sat still and meditated. My goal wasn’t to try to touch him, but for him to touch me. I wanted him to think of me as being as safe as the hay net, feeder, water tub or the fence, he’s perfectly fine touching things like that, so in my mind I started repeating “I am safe. I am safe like the fence. I am safe like the hay net.” Every time I would start to do that he would work his way toward me, starting under the hay net, eating the good bits of hay that fell from the net as he ate. He did brush against me with his head a couple times as his lips scooped up the alfalfa leaves from the hay next to me. It took every ounce of concentration to remain as emotionless and calm and safe as the fence when he was so close I could feel his warm breath. He would back away and go back to eating on the opposite side of the hay net if I let my mind wander and heart speed up because of how close he was. He was relaxed as he walked closely past my feet on his way up to get a drink of water, one time stopping to calmly smell my boots, not snorting or jumping away like they were going to bite him like he often did when he got too close for comfort. He was also starting to occasionally let me reach out and briefly touch his muzzle without food in my hand, and without drawing back.
Today, as I sat there on the salt block and fed him handfuls of grass out of the bucket, he let me stroke his nose with one hand and then hand him the grass with the other, whereas before I was using the hand with the grass to touch him before giving him the grass. This time, after the grass ran out of the bucket he didn’t leave and go immediately back to eating his hay. This time he looked at me as I talked to him with a different look in his eyes. He reached out with his lip and started nuzzling my knee. He did this a few times, a little longer each time as he grew more confident, when he stopped I would keep talking and slowly put my hand up and stroke the side of his velvet-soft nose and he didn’t pull away, but instead kept his head low and just looked at me. At one point a couple neighborhood dogs started barking at a person on a bike and he turned around to check it out. When he did that I noticed some grass blades on the ground by the gate, they had fallen out of the bucket when I went in the pen. I walked over and squatted down to pick them up for him. He came over and took them from my hand, and then started nuzzling my shoulder, like my knee, he would do it a little longer each time as he built his confidence up. I almost got a kiss from him at one point, but he wasn’t quite ready for that yet, so I looked down and leaned into him with the top of my head and he started nuzzling my hair. I would have loved to continue doing that for a while, but my legs were hurting from being in the squatting position, so I stood up and walked back to the salt block, and he went to get a drink of water. Then Princess started running around in her pen, so I left his pen to go try to calm her down, and that was the end of our session for the day. I feel like we made a big deposit in his trust account today.
November 15, 2020: Monarch’s confidence continues to grow, little by little. I continue to challenge his comfort zone, I am now asking that he touches my hand or lets me stroke his nose before I reach for a handful of grass for him. I have worked up to a stroke or two in just above the noseband of his halter, he likes to shake his head like it tickles him when I do, lol, but my goal is working my way back to his cheek, closer to where the buckle to the halter is. He’s letting me get closer but not letting me touch him there yet. I’m worried that the green grass is going to die for the winter before I’m able to get his halter off, if it does I’ll have to find another high value treat to work with him I guess, maybe grow some fodder to use. He now greets me at the gate most days and barely moves out of the way when I bring the muck bucket in for cleaning or when I’m bringing in the bucket of grass. Sometimes he even walks over just to see what I’m doing or say hi, that’s something new for him recently. He’s also getting comfortable enough with me to get a little attitude when he gets annoyed with me trying to touch him where he doesn’t want to be touched, I think it’s cute, and it’s progress, but I also don’t want it to develop into a bad habit of biting, so I listen to him and try not to push farther until he’s ready. If I do ask too much and he steps back, I ask him to step forward again and I go back to what’s comfortable for a bit, always ending with a positive experience. It’s really all about showing him that I’m listening to him and he can trust me to make good decisions in his eyes, something he’s never had. I only work with him when I am grounded and in the moment, he can tell when my mind is wandering to other things and it makes a difference. Working with Monarch has been good for me, too, as I’ve had to learn to work on myself as well in order to connect with him…and isn’t that the one thing we all want with our horses, that special connection, a friendship, partnership, a horse that chooses to be with you. I had that when I was younger, and I’ve missed it every day after I moved away from parent’s home and my horses, in fact, for over thirty years the desire to feel that connection again has brought tears to my eyes many times.
I am very mindful of every move I make with Monarch, turning challenges into opportunities. He is smart, and he learns quick, so when I see something that triggers him I look for ways to help him build his confidence and think rather than react. One thing that makes Monarch uncomfortable is not being able to see me when I’m behind him, so I’ll challenge his comfort zone by keeping the muck bucket on one side behind him and walking back and forth to and from the other side as I clean his pen, and sometimes I’ll even stop and just stand there behind him where he can’t see me. He usually just shifts his body one way or another so he can see me, or walks over to his water if he gets too uncomfortable. Lately he doesn’t seem as worried about it, but he is always listening for me and he will turn his head just a little as he eats to see where I’m at if I’m out of sight too long. Tarps are another thing that triggered a reaction in him, as it does in many horses. When we started tarping the hay he was scared of the noise and the movement, so when I was feeding them I started grabbing a handful of the alfalfa bits right after moving the tarp off the hay and it didn’t take long for him to associate it with something good. At some point, on a calm day I will place a small tarp on the ground below the hay net so he’ll learn to walk on it, and then hang it on the side of the pen. Horses don’t learn when they are afraid, so I try to give Monarch the opportunity to choose to check things out when he’s ready, and placing them in his environment gives him that opportunity. I have found overfacing him with objects he’s scared of causes a lot of anxiety for him, and can set him back for days in trusting me.
He regularly reaches out to touch me now when I’m crouched down, sniffing my arm or my hair. A couple days ago he took a break from eating at his hay net to come over to me for a photo shoot, it surprised me a little because he tends to be a bit camera shy (scared of my phone), but it was fun. Yesterday he finally worked his way down my face and shared breath a couple times. I loved it, I can still feel his warm breath and the tickle of his whiskers on my cheek. As he did it I was hoping he didn’t scream and strike out with a hoof like horses sometimes do when greeting and sharing breath…like he did last week when I let him and Princess meet for the first time through the fence. Even with all the progress he’s made I have to be careful around him, because he is still very overreactive to anything that surprises him, a movement, a noise, or even someone or something outside of the pen. When triggered, flight is his first response, he moves fast and when he does you don’t want to be in his way because he isn’t thinking when he’s in panic mode. However, I have to say that when something gets him a just a little excited or worked up and he’s prancing around a little bit, he has such a pretty movement, a little bit of extra flair thanks to the draft in him.
November 30, 2020: Last week, the day before Thanksgiving, Monarch was feeling a bit playful, he was nuzzling me, giving me kisses, and even let me kiss him back on the nose. It was such a sweet moment. He did it again, today. He is getting more and more comfortable with me now, sometimes following me around the pen when I’m cleaning, barely moving out of the way when I open the gate to his pen…especially when I have a bucket of grass. Yesterday I opened the gate to his pen and let him wander into the quarantine space between his and Princess’ pens. My husband and I were standing there watching the two of them, with our hands resting on the gate, and Monarch came over to us. He’d take turns playing with my fingers and looking at Kerry, trying to get brave enough to sniff his hand. Kerry picked some grass for him and Monarch ate it, came back over to me and nuzzled my hand, then reached out and sniffed Kerry’s hand for the first time.
I still haven’t been able to get his halter off, and he’s turning his head away when I try to touch his cheek. Today, when I kept reaching and pushed him too much, he gave my coat a little nip, asking me to back off a little. I could tell he wasn’t trying to be mean, he was just saying, “Hey, you’re not listening to me,” and a moment later he touched his nose to my hand, which seems to be his go-to comfort zone for now, and all was forgiven. He’s been allowing me to slowly go farther up his nose for a quick rub or two, today I was rubbing along the noseband of his halter, I think he was enjoying it a little even if he won’t admit it.
I opened the gate so he could go into the space between the pens again today. We are planning on moving the pens down off the hill, which gets muddy and slippery when wet, into the flatter area of the pasture. We’ve been debating the best way to do it since we can’t just clip a lead rope on Monarch and move him, so we’re hoping to be able to put Monarch in with Princess and the two horses will be able to get along long enough for us to get his pen moved. Then we’ll get them moved down to that pen while we move hers next to it. I’ll put the gate between the two pens so I can open it up and allow them the space of both pens and the company of each other, yet be able to separate them if they aren’t able to get along or when I want to work with one and not the other. That’s the plan anyway, we’ll see how it goes.
December 5, 2020: I was totally not expecting this to happen today. I did my usual routine of feeding the horses…give apples, then their pellets, fill up hay nets, clean out pens, fill up water, and feed a bucket of grass to each of the horses. The last few days I’ve been doing things a little different with Monarch when giving him his bucket of grass, I’m always changing things up a little in order to expand his comfort zone and grow his confidence. The past few days I was working on getting him more comfortable with me standing next to him rather than directly in front of him while giving handfuls of grass. I also backed off on touching his face before giving him a handful of grass since he’s developed a habit of turning his head after each bite to avoid me trying to touch his cheeks. As he grows more comfortable and confident, his voice gets louder. For him to trust that I make good decisions, he needs to see that I am listening to him.
He is still quite skittish, ready to jump back at the slightest movement or sound that he’s not expecting, the sound or look of my gloves today, for example, but as he becomes more confident he is finding the courage to let me know when he’s not happy about something. He will calmly walk by me quite close when he wants to, so today, after he was done with his grass and we had our moments of play, he walked over a few steps to his hay net to eat. After a couple minutes of me just standing there I decided to take a step forward, not closer to him, but from his head to his shoulder, to see what he would do. I could see him turning and tossing his head toward me in his shadow…a warning to move away in horse language, so I moved back up toward his head. I stayed there for a minute to make sure he was okay with me being there, before I figured we were done for the day and I went to leave. I always try to end our time together on a positive note, deposits in his trust account.
As I left, I opened the gate to his pen to let him spend the day near Princess, and then stood there to watch them for a moment. What happened next was unexpected. He came over to me and started playing with my hand, and he pinned his ears and drove Princess away every time she came near. I don’t know if he was ‘protecting’ me or not wanting to share? lol Today, instead of engaging with me for a few seconds before moving away he stayed and became more playful. I had to politely ask him a couple times to be gentle because he could hurt me with his teeth, and he would go back to just playing with his lips.
The real magic started when he let me rub his chin and he immediately almost fell asleep in my hand. lol A couple times of that and he was letting me rub under his jaw and up his cheeks…it was like a switch flipped. I rubbed down his neck and on his shoulder, but the place he really liked was under his throat. He would rest his head on my arm and almost close his eyes as I rubbed his throat. He let me rub his forehead, move his forelock out of his eyes, he even gently rubbed his eyes on my hand. I say hand because he would only let me use one, if I tried to use both hands he backed away. At one point during the rubbing I was able to unsnap the throat latch part of the halter. I was not able to unbuckle it using just one hand, and he wouldn’t let me pull it over his ears, so it just hung there loose.
After about 45 minutes of spending time with me he left to go eat and drink. I went in to warm up, worried that he would get a foot caught in the now loose halter, but hoping that he would find a way to rub it off the rest of the way. I don’t know how he got it off, maybe he shook his head or rolled, but it was laying on the ground in the center of his pen when we went out to feed dinner a couple hours later. Finally, the moment I’ve been working toward and waiting for, five months after arriving here Monarch is halter-free! I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, all these months I’ve felt so bad about how tight the halter was on him, rubbing under his jaw, preventing him from yawning all the way, I’ve had to cut his apples and carrots into smaller pieces because he couldn’t open his mouth enough to chew the larger pieces. We’re both free now. I don’t know if tomorrow will progress further or go back a step, but we’re in this dance together, and I’ll follow his lead as we continue on our journey.
Here’s a song you might enjoy, I fell in love with it the second I heard it in this movie, Taming Wild: Pura Vida. The words touched my soul like they were coming straight from Monarch.
December 13, 2020: We moved the pens down into the pasture area where it was a little flatter. Both the horses seem happier and more relaxed, and they’re enjoying the grass, taking more naps, but they had it eaten down within a couple days. We ended up moving Monarch’s pen with him in it, all four of us dragging it little by little. He ran around and bucked a little, but calmed down and focused on the grass once we got to it. Lizzy took Princess out on a lead and let her eat grass while we moved hers, she did great until it was time to go back in, then she acted up a couple times, but Lizzy held onto her and it was all good. That was another weight lifted off my shoulders, getting them off the slippery slope. The pens are set up in a more round shape as well, they’ve both been running around kicking up their heels, enjoying it. I can’t wait until we get the pasture fenced in and they have room to really move around.
December 29, 2020: Today Monarch let me pet him with gloves on. It doesn’t sound like much of a breakthrough unless you’ve seen how scared he’s been of them. Just last week he was jumping back halfway across the pen as Kerry fed him a handful of grass. It doesn’t take much sometimes…gloves, hats, an unexpected movement, and away he goes. I’ve been removing my gloves when giving him rubs, but as he gets more comfortable with me he’s been wanting to play more, so I decided I was going to start introducing new things to him to give him something more to think about. He’s a smart horse and he gets bored easily. He’s not too worried about the muck rake anymore, and even tries to chew on the handle when I set it down to pet him. I think I’ll try a brush next, and then I’ll probably take in the cotton rope draped over my shoulders. I wish I had a nice covered arena to work and exercise both of them in. There is so much joy in our moments together, I know he’s enjoying our connection as much as I do. He follows me around the pen as I clean, wanting me to rub on him, almost falling asleep to the rhythmic circles of my hands on his cheeks, chin, or under his jaw line. He puts his face in mine and we’re one for a few moments as I rest my cheek or forehead on him. The great thing about this is as his trust grows in me, he’s also trusting others more as well, it gives me great hope. He was letting my middle daughter, who rarely spends time with the horses, pet him, too.
December 31, 2020: Monarch stared at me through the fence and nickered softly to me as he watched me cleaning the mare’s pen. I grabbed the brush and put it in my coat pocket as I walked over to his pen, anticipating the playful moments that are coming more often from him, and after a couple minutes of face rubs it started. I pulled the brush out of my pocket and held it casually in my hand for him to see. He is more confident when it’s his choice to approach objects, so I let him take his time to sniff and touch it. He stepped back a couple of times but within five minutes he was playing with it, and letting me brush his face with it a little. He kept doing the flehmen response, I don’t know if it’s because the brush smelled like the mare, or if it was the texture of the bristles, but it was funny. What a great way to end the year!