Reducing the effects of adrenaline

[rlhnlk]

Hello

My mare is being just a bit of a twerp at the moment, with me having some time off over Christmas I've been riding in daylight and she's had her eye on anything and everything. I accepted a long time ago that she has trouble focussing and concentrating on what she is doing but this last week it feels like we've had an added factor of her getting her eye on something and her adrenaline levels rising and never coming back down. When she's like this she can totally zone out and it's like you aren't even there.

I've tried quietly halting when something has really caught her eye but half the time as we stand there I can actually feel her heart rate increase and then she loses the plot a bit so I'm thinking now it's best to keep her moving.

Has anyone got any good idea's for just helping her come back to earth?

Cheers for reading.

 

[BurntontheoutsideTurkey]

My share boy's like this. Today was hilarious, with hundreds of walkers out on the permissive tracks at the farm - last day of hols! Pushchairs, screaming kids, dogs, bright coats on the horizons, the usual leaves in hedges and twigs on the ground - all hyper-adrenalising. He is best kept moving, flexed away from object of interest. I do lateral flexions to keep his neck soft and his head down and a bit of lateral work to keep his attention on me. I keep him on the aids when he's really looky, as if he spins or goes backwards he's then twice as bad, but try to let him stretch and leave him alone as soon as the frightening thing has gone.

 

[SpottedCat]

I've recently had a reasonable amount of succes using equi feasts cool calm and collected supplement. It doesn't suit every horse, what it seems to have done for mine is mean he makes better assessments of a situation out hacking, which is the only time he's normally a plank! I put him on it for an entirely different reason but have been pleasantly surprised by the improvement hacking.