Just saw another article about the feral hog problem across the South. If you live in rural Texas you are undoubtedly familiar with it. If you live in town you may not have had have a fifty acre corn crop devastated in one night by a pack of feral pigs. Or, you may never have experienced leaving your front teeth in the steering wheel of your John Deere as you dropped into a “hog waller” of the size of a pick up truck that you couldn’t see for it being grown up in knee high Bermuda grass. Well, anyhow it’s true. Texas loses no less than fifty million dollars a year in crop losses alone as a  direct result of feral hog damage. Feral means, once domestic, now wild. There are millions of them, reproducing at an alarming rate in every county in Texas and about five other southern states.Their only predator is man. And, we only take a fraction of them each year from night-hunting, trapping, and hunting with dogs. They are getting ahead of us. The dollar value of their damage is rising. There was a time when they had natural control by large predators such as pumas, jaguars, wolves, and bears. (Oh my). I’m tempted to import a big bad- ass cat from Fort Davis just to get even. Which reminds me of the furor produced by reintroducing Alaskan gray wolves into Yellowstone park in Wyoming. There was an initiative to poison hogs on a wider scale that has recently been stopped. One person complained that their livelihood was hunting and trapping hogs, and poisoning would put them out of business. The problem is that we can’t hunt and trap enough to even begin to keep up with these intelligent, cagey critters and their incredible reproductive rate! That in turn reminds me of a meeting held in West Texas years ago about coyote control in an area populated by sheep and goat raisers who were losing lambs and kids. The lady giving the talk went into lugubrious detail about vasectomizing  male coyotes. Finally one old rancher raised his hand. He rose to stand, cleared his throat and said, “Ma’am, I don’t think you understand our problem. These coyotes are eating our sheep not mating with them!”

So we want our mount to have a strong back. I think by this we mean that we want the horse to support our weight on a back that rises or “bows up,” to push upward against the saddle. The word “bows” I think gives us the key. A bow takes on its shape because of a tight bowstring. In the anatomy of the horse, the “ bowstring” is his abdominal muscles. If you think you can hold a 1000+ pound animal together in “bowed-up” collection with your less than  200 pound frame you might check and see what hallucinogens have been sneaked into your Egg McMuffin.

The horse’s body works in response to his brain, much like ours. We train horses using communion with that brain. The difference between schooling the horse and schooling the human is that school teachers have a shortcut. They can talk to their students. For instance a gym teacher can explain sit-ups and the kids can at least try to do them. Teaching your horse to use his abdominal muscles is more complicated because we have to devise a language of pressure, or touch, and release.Then we have to find a way to form an association between the signal and the behaviour. In addition, if the horse experiences discomfort, he has no desire to “be tough“ and “push through the burn!”.

Development of this signal and response pattern begins as early as our first contact with the horse at liberty in the small arena (or round pen). Horses very widely in their response to humans, but mostly they avoid us at first. What we do is move toward them (pressure) and when they move forward in avoidance, we back away or turn away (release.) After many repetitions, they figure out that we mean for them to move forward. As we move toward them we “click” our tongue or “smooch”. After a lot of repetitions they will move forward in response to the click or smooch even though we aren’t actually moving toward them. That is the result of associating a physical pressure (moving toward them) with a sound(click). The reward is when you turn away, releasing the pressure. You haven’t even touched your horse yet, but you already have a language starting to develop. When that begins to happen, you give the big reward: you quit and turn him out. Preferably all you have to do is open the gate, so there’s no need for a halter. You just quit.

The equivalent of the human sit-up comes when you step forward, causing the horse to stop and turn around to reverse direction. He has to rock back on his haunches and “bunch up” to reverse. Only a few “turn arounds” need be done at first. When he does a couple smoothly, you quit. Turn him out. He has now been given a beginning pattern for using abdominal muscles to raise his back. The journey has begun.

It’s about as much fun as a root canal. I’m talking about the rancher’s winter. This morning it was 13°F. I pulled on longjohns, heavy socks, jeans, wool shirt, fleece lined vest, insulated overalls (bunny suit) silk neck scarf, ill fitting stocking cap, and insulated gloves and went forth into a frozen world. All day it was take off gloves to unlatch the gate, put gloves back on. Then carry feed buckets, stumbling over frozen hoof-waffled dirt in insulated rubber-soled “packer” boots. The horses exhibited erratic behavior, refusing to pass the blue plastic tarp stretched over the back gate of the barn to keep out some of the bone penetrating north wind.

Then sitting on the tailgate of the Ford 4 x 4 while puttering along shaking out range cubes (cake or mascarote) for cows, as they clacked horns together, and slammed into my dangling legs, some of them absolutely convinced that the only cube in the bag worth eating is that very last one.

Riding out to check for new calves (found three) into the wind is certainly not the joyous “pootling about the estate” that it was a month ago. Even mounting my horse in all those clothes is a challenge. Possibly the high point of the day was clambering like a drunken black bear into the cab of the John Deere 4040 to put out half ton round bales. At least it would have been if I weren’t continually climbing in and out of the cab to catch gates before the mares bolted out of their pasture!

Finally, I got back in the house and reversed the process, doing “rancher striptease” back to indoor clothing. I stoked up the fireplace while  the water heated up on the stove to make hot chocolate. Oh, yes, the life of the drover in winter!