As a little background, he's always been extremely trailer-phobic, mostly due to my early inexperience with horses and listening to what the "cowboys" said about how to get him in the trailer, but we worked out our compromise in my old 2-horse straight load and have been fine with it for many years. Then a couple of years ago, I bought a 3-horse slant and he refuses to get in it. It was no big deal since I still have the old 2-horse, but I would like him to learn to get in the new trailer. So I've been working with him every afternoon for a month or so and have managed to get him to THIS point...
It's been a long ordeal, he'll get in there now, but won't stay when I go to close the divider and you'd better not be in the way when he goes to get out or you'll get run over. I don't want to tie him in there before he's comfortable with it because he's so big that I'm sure he'd just pull the tie ring down and probably hurt himself. I tried something similarly stupid last year by putting the butt bar up when he got in there. You can see where it is in relation to his butt, but he was in such a panic that he managed to squeeze out UNDERNEATH it and peeled all the skin off his backbone from tail to withers in the process. So we just kind of quit after that until now.
I've just been taking it extremely slow with him, feeding him in there and removing all pressure when he gets in, even part way. It's helped, but he's still very nervous in there. I've been trying to progressively get him used to the sound of the gates by squeaking them and banging them a little while he's in there and he's gotten better about not just flying backward at the first squeak. This week, I've managed to get in there behind him and ask him to step over a step or two and have partially swung the divider towards him and back away, but you can see him draw up when I do it.
I'm not sure what the next step should be though. I'm afraid that if I do manage to get the divider gate shut that when I go to open it, he'll knock me down and run me over in his panic to get out of there. I don't think I should close the back door with him loose in there, he'd probably have a fit. So I think I'm just going to have to keep going slow until he's more comfortable about being in there and being able to get out when he feels he needs to. But if any of you have any suggestions, feel free to express them.
In the meantime, this is what happens when I get done and forget to close the trailer back up...
This is 3 horses in the space designed for 2, and sometimes it's 3 and a half. And they don't wanna come out either. After having all the problems with Tennessee that I've had, I may have gone overboard in training the others to be easy loaders. ;o)