Teaching Clarabelle to Lead with a Rope

In THIS POST we showed how we began the slow and arduous task of breaking Clarabelle.  Animals (and people) have strong wills.  Like our other animals, we want Clarabelle to lead easily with a rope and the best way to do that is to start when they are young.  That is when you can impose your will on them instead of vice versa!

These animals will grow to be easily five times your weight and will be able to drag you all over the pasture.  It is much easier to teach them good habits while they are young and manageable.  I liken it to the story of the elephant.  When the elephant is small, they place a rope around his foot that is anchored into the ground.  The young elephant tries and tries, but cannot break free. He sort of gives up and when he is older, even though he can probably break the chain that he's anchored to, he doesn't even try, because of what was instilled at that young age.  There's a lesson buried in there for parents somewhere, but we'll not go that direction today.

In the earlier post mentioned above, we recounted how we tie Clarabelle up each day to a tree or a fencepost for about an hour.  She pulls and pulls, trying to get loose, but it's to no avail.  She soon begins learning that she can't win in this tug-of-war contest and stops pulling.  At this point, she'll lead easily back to the barn when I put her up for the night.  Well, after doing that for a couple of weeks, it is time to take her for a walk.  It is not easy.  This is not a task for someone expecting great results overnight.  Here's what I usually get at first:

As Stubborn as they Come

I pull hard on the rope and she pulls hard back.  It first seems like a stalemate, but I'm not giving up. I'm still a little bigger than her, too!  I pull for a little while hard, just enough to where she remembers pulling against the tree or the fencepost.  She remembers that she's not going to win the tug-of-war, and then I give her some slack on the rope.

Let's rest a little bit, Clarabelle.

While there is slack in the rope, I rub her neck and speak gently to her, touching her belly, her legs and back.  In a little while she's beginning to equate slack in the rope with favorable, pleasant times and a taut rope as unfavorable, unpleasant times.  I never whip her or raise my voice to her.  I want her to attribute times walking with me as a good experience.  I give her praise when she walks.

In time she's walking a couple of rounds around our property, with pep in her step. Sometimes she even lifts her tail and wants to run out ahead of me, but I pull her back in.  I want to teach her that she is to follow me.  With each passing day, she's improving, and it is very rewarding to see progress being made.  The weather has cooled off somewhat in the late afternoons when we have our little strolls.  People wave as they drive by on the road and we wave back (or at least I do), as we watch the sun cast long shadows across the grass outside the fence.

Me & Clarabelle on a September Afternoon

With perseverance and hard work, Clarabelle's stubbornness is just a shadow of what it once was!