Q:

Our clients have a wide range of horse handling styles and skills, and even among our own group we have different ways of doing things and opinions about the various "carrot and stick" approaches. So all this tends to add to the confusion and frustration of the moment when dealing with a difficult loading situation.

We have also been discussing the many different factors that cause these situations; for example, most of the horses are not "old pro" shippers. Some only trailer for this sort of urgent situation. Some we know have had bad experiences loading or unloading. In some cases the condition of the vehicle itself is an obvious part of the problem. We need to be able to improve our success at loading client-owned horses here at our facility.

We have been seriously considering hiring someone with really good horse-loading skills or sending a staff member to specialized training at one of the horse handling clinics to be the designated "loading assistant," who would eventually train the rest of us in one "best method" that would become our standard