Temple Grandin, this lady gets it!

When the topic of animals come up at work, my boss has often talked with me about Temple Grandin and her extraordinary work with cattle.  It didn't surprise me to realize she applies her talent of understanding to horses as well.  As I have mentioned before, Diamond has serious traumatic history of which I know little about..I only see the aftermath.  In this article I found on Horse&Rider, they delve into how horses think.  Grandin is spot on.  Once I brought Diamond up here, I have always been adamant on me being the only one to care for him.  That's why I am so set on self care.  He trusts me and yet sometimes I can barely keep, as Grandin calls them, the "bad files" closed.  The staff is very understanding but has offered to turn Diamond out on occasion when stalls need maintenance.  So they still don't fully understand, but in my passive aggressive way, I tell them, "I'll just be here at such and such a time when they need maintenance and take Diamond out for a walk."  I need to be the only one to handle Diamond.  I have often followed up conversations like this with, "I just don't want anyone to get hurt."  People assume because he is calm and trusting with me, that he is generally a calm horse.  But he is not.  And that article explains why..

"For a horse, a traumatic fear memory is like a bad computer file. A rider the horse trusts can train him to close the file and hold it closed, but it's still there, and can re-open under the right circumstances." She tells the story of a rope horse that had become phobic about anything touching his hind end (the result of a bad accident). With his regular rider to reassure him, the horse would keep the bad-memory file closed. Then that rider went on vacation, and another person rode the horse in a pen with cattle. "One of the cows brushed the horse's butt and the horse panicked, crashed through the fence, broke his leg, and had to be destroyed. The less-familiar rider didn't know how to help the horse keep the file closed." 

I seriously want to print it out and keep copies with me to hand out when people want to talk to me about Diamond.