Phase 3 | Fulfilled Promise

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Nearly 5 Months after Sokrates arrived at our stable, we can proudly say that he is feeling good. We worked with him very closely throughout the whole time, which resulted in his anxiety and pawing being – to everyone’s surprise – fully gone.

Last week, he was finally ready to be integrated into our big main herd. After the first nerve-racking moments, the group accepted him pretty quickly. Sokrates feels very comfortable around them now, and is seen grazing and playing with the others.

As we progressed in liberty ground-work, we started to go onto many liberty adventures.

We went onto trails, with him walking in front of me and listening very good to my verbal cues. Those adventures boosted his confidence massively, and helped us to grow our bond even more. We both enjoyed those trails a lot, and learned to trust each other even more.

His hooves completely regenerated, being healthy and in the perfect shape without any broken corners anymore.

And a silent progress was made, without us even noticing at first; Sokrates had worked through his grief. With time, he has learned to accept and live with the fact that his Owner is gone from this world. Of course, the grief will never be gone fully, but now he was able to look back onto the time with him, and feel happiness instead of breaking down.

Over the time, it became the new standard for us to see Sokrates being relaxed and calm all the time. He dozed and rested, instead of anxiously pawing nonstop due to stress.

With our groundwork getting better, we focused on more advanced exercises.

I started to work on Dressage and Jumping with him, slowly introducing more and more difficult movements. With time, we even participated in our first competition.

The big renovation of our loose housing area that had been going for a while now, is basically finished. As soon as the work is finished, we will transfer Sokrates and his new group into it to be their permanent home.

-> Loshenka Makeover Phase 3 Literature:

"Phoenix!!" I called as soon as I saw my best friend Phoenix, who was leading their Rescue mare Saturn over to the shower box and cleaning area. Walking over to them, with Sokrates following close behind me, I smiled and asked "Did you had a plan today, or would you enjoy going on a Trail together?" Sokrates walked over to Saturn, grooming and snuggling with her. "I'd love to- No! Sokrates! She’s dirty, leave it!" They exclaimed and we both laughed and went to go grab our brushes to prepare our horses for the trail.

Now, 5 Months after Sokrates arrived, everything seemed perfect. A lot had changed since our first big milestone; the night where I saw him resting in his stall, without any signs of pawing. Looking back onto the first morning after that important night, I still couldn't believe that this really had happened. I had called Corwin and Phoenix over first thing in the morning and showed them the recordings from that night. I cried happy tears and we all hugged full of relive. As soon we reached a socially acceptable time of day to call someone, I immediately called Heather. "Good morning Jac-," she begun, but I immediately interrupted, nearly screaming at my phone in excitement. "Heather!! Heather oh my god you won't believe it; he didn't pawed this night!!!" After a few minutes of Heather laughing and me calming down after repeating the fact, that he didn't pawed this night for a few hours, at least 20 times, she said "That is absolutely amazing and the best news I could have hoped for! It really shows that your work with him is paying out and that we are on the right path for him. Tell me everything, how long was the time where he didn't pawed? Do you want to send me the recordings?" I was beaming with happiness and told her that the recording had picked up around 2 hours where he was just dozing. Here and there, there was some pawing during that time, but just very, very little in comparison to his normal amount. I send her the recordings over, and we analyzed his behavior together. After that morning, we all were filled with new hope and the confidence that we were heading into the right direction with Sokrates. So, we continued…

Over weeks and weeks, Sokrates and me grew closer and our bond got stronger with each day. It really was a time full of up's and down's, but the mini steps into the right direction we sometimes caught on our cameras was worth it. Everything we did was so worth it, and we would have done everything to give Sokrates the life without anxiety that he so deeply deserved. It really was a journey that sometimes took our last nerves. Especially I often felt overwhelmed, with him being the first Rescue I was responsible for myself. He was my horse, instead of being a rehabilitation mission of the whole stable team. After every ever so slight glimpse of progress, there was a huge step back, leaving me worrying heavily if I had done something wrong. It was a time full of late-night reading sessions, many many tears and anxiety. Sometimes I joked with Liam and Phoenix that every bit of anxiety we're managing to get out of Sokrates' head transferred into me. But with a lot of time, love and patience towards him -and me-, the progress came. And with even more time, the progress stayed. It started small, and barely noticeable. With the weeks progressing, his expression softened, and his body loosened up.

We had started with weekly treatments of acupuncture, massages and physical therapy to help him letting go of deeply stored stress and tension in his muscles and nerves. He visibly enjoyed the sessions a lot, standing there deeply relaxed, accompanied with lots of chewing, yawning and stretching. Looking back onto that time, I had later realized that I should have started a lot earlier with those treatments. I had underestimated the power it has, to give him the chance to release his tension that he had stored so deeply inside of his muscles and tendons over the years full of stress. In the end, it was probably the main reason for him to be able to let go and relax more. I had learned so much throughout the time with him, and one big part was the realization... that he needed time. He was hurt, mentally, and so full of pain and grief. He needed the time and room to grieve and process the loss of the human that meant so much to him, and he needed me with him to softly guide him through that experience. He needed someone to listen and understand. I saw it in his eyes when it was a bad day, and helped him regulate himself through his emotions with T-Touches. He pushed into my touch, until the tension slowly soothed away, with him chewing, yawning and rubbing on me to show me his gratitude. We spend so many hours just standing together like that on the paddock, with me massaging him and putting soft pressure onto his tension-points to help him work through it. Visitors and private Owners of horses living in our stables called me strange, and started to giggle when they saw us in one of our T-Touch sessions. It was difficult for me to ignore at the beginning, and we had many moments where other people approached us and tried to give me advice and calling out things that they labelled as "mistakes". Knowing that the whole rescue team and Heather had my back and agreed on my gentle methods, made it slightly easier. I heard endless comments like "He's just lazy and you being so gentle won't ever change anything" and "The way he is rubbing his nose and head on you all the time means that he is showing you how dominant he is, he will get so dangerous if you continue to allow that behavior!", either said directly into my face, or just going around as the shadows of stable-gossip. With time, my self-confidence grew, and it got easier to ignore the comments. I learned a lot due to the time, and not only those discussions and negative comments were a challenge, but also Sokrates himself was one. His problems itself was a big challenge, but also the fact that Sokrates was always a mirror of myself was a very big challenge for me personally. Whenever I started to get upset at comments, anxious about his future or sad because of some outside factors, Sokrates got upset, anxious or sad as well, and the training session was difficult to recover. It took a while for me to learn and adapt, but especially the breathing exercises from Heather helped us work through emotions together. I loved seeing him relax after a disturbance in our training, while we synced up our breaths and calmed together. With time, I understood and learned that whenever something didn't work out well, I first had to reflect on myself, my behavior, body language, action and mental state, before turning to Sokrates to search for the fault within him.

With time, we continued to work on our liberty groundwork. I had perfected my voice cues, and he started to really listen to them like a champ. Our trust in each other grew stronger and stronger, and with time -and many shared training sessions of us and Phoenix and Saturn- we started liberty work around other horses. We had slowly begun with doing our normal groundwork while Saturn worked on the lunge with Phoenix in a very far corner of the Arena, with me then removing my lunge. At first Sokrates was always going through a small emotional rollercoaster for the first two minutes, but then started to being super focused on me and my body language again. Saturn had her very own opinion on the topic: She wanted everything, except focusing on Phoenix. So, we spend the sessions with a lot of jokes, laughs and patience, while Saturn started to learn how to focus with the distraction of, for example, a super annoying classic champagne boy in the other corner who dared to exist without a lunge while she was trying to show off her fancy trot.

Speaking of fancy trot, Sokrates and me started to implement more challenging exercises into our training. Until then, we tried to focus completely on being as calm and relaxed as possible, removing tension, breathing and being calm together. But since Sokrates had started to show a slight improve on his pawing, I wanted to take the next step. We started to work more focused, implementing gymnastic exercises, working on building his muscles and then continued with working more upright and collected. With time, we worked up to walk - canter - walk transitions and he started to really pick up his learning speed. Walk to canter transitions in more and more smaller circles started to become his favorite exercises. We put in the time to work on basic dressage movements, with me teaching him the side step exercises slowly and with a lot of patience. I always focused on him having fun and using his brain, instead of focusing on achievements and pressure. After a while, we started being a real team. I was able to (mostly) flawlessly guide his speed, collection, fore and hindquarters in the speed and direction I wanted. We worked on half pass, full pass, travers, renvers and more. When we were training together, more and more often people stopped their things to watch us a few minutes. We were dancing, together. Free and at peace. And in those moments, no one else mattered anymore, we were just in the moment, just us, together, enjoying each other’s love and trust.

With Sokrates getting more relaxed around horses (Even though he still wasn’t the biggest fan of having company), and Saturn being (forced) to spend time with him, me and Phoenix in the same Arena during training sessions, Phoenix and I decided to start going on walks together, us walking next to each other, with each horse on the side furthest away from the other horse. And surprisingly, they were quite well-behaved together. Well- they both had their ears pinned, swished their tails and threw their heads annoyed into the air on the first walks, but they actually, to our both surprise, calmed down. After just 3 walks, they both had seemed to accept their fate. And after another few days of Phoenix and me tying them up next to each other, going on more walks and doing more training, we decided to let them run free together in the Arena for a bit. We didn't really knew what would be going to happen, but they seemed to get along so well -If you can call ignoring each other "getting along well"-, that we took the risk, and took their halters off, watching them bolt into the arena, bucking and snoring. Laughing, I rested my arms on the arena border, having a close eye on both horses. "I hope this will go well. I was so sure, already from the beginning, that we'll introduce Sokrates first to someone like Hermes or Miss Bell… and not another Rescue with her very own problems. Especially such a spicy mare like Saturn.." Phoenix said, observing how the two horses trotted around each other, heads up high with swishing tails and the loudest dragon snorts ever. I just nodded in agreement, focused on how they pinned their ears, got close to each other and then one slammed their hoof and they bolted away again. After a few minutes of this happening over and over again, they both calmed slowly, sniffing around and then both going their ways. We deemed that as an success, grinning from ear to ear and sitting down to drink a coffee while watching them getting used to each other.

After we repeated that a second time, we decided to put them into boxes next to each other, and give them an hour socializing time on a paddock together each day. As much as I would have loved to have them living together fix, we were worried about Saturn maybe hurting herself due to Sokrates' pawing holes into the paddock. Even though his behavior was slowly starting to get better, the journey was still not over yet. We had made a lot of progress over the weeks, he had gotten much calmer and more self-confidence, and his pawing now reduced significantly week for week. During the nights, he now nearly every day had a pawing-break of around 2 hours where we were able to watch him lay down and sleep relaxed. During the day, he was more and more calm, focusing his mind on the toys we had gotten him. His favorite was a round spinner mounted on a fence post on his paddock, with 3 individually spinning treat-balls. He also really seemed to enjoy his herb-cocktail-bar we installed him, which were 3 buckets of water, each filled with different herbs, that are very beneficial for a horse’s diet. But even though it looked like he was getting better every day now, there was still pawing. For him, I would have labelled it as "minimal pawing", but I knew that I had to be honest to myself, as it would be "a lot of pawing" for other horses. I remembered that at one point, Heather said that it will probably not be possible to completely remove the pathological stereotypies from Sokrates, as it has been so so long already in his life where he stuck to that method of self-regulation. I had started to accept that. He already was so much happier, calmer and better than in the beginning, so I had deemed that as a victory either way.

Heather had given us a new exercise for boosting his self-confidence and problem-solving ability; Liberty Adventures. I was very unsure when she presented that Idea. She had told me, that it could be very beneficial for him to go on long hikes and adventures with me- but with a twist. Because of our strong bond and trust during liberty groundwork, and him listening very good to my voice command, she presented me the twist. "I want you to let him lead the hikes. No rope, no lunge. Just him, focusing on maneuvering you two through the safe path, with him having to think on his own, leading both of you through unknown terrain, and you walking behind him, assisting him with voice commands." I really thought she was joking for a moment, but she looked at me dead serious asking "Is my expertise a joke to you?" So- the plan was set. At the beginning I led him on his neck rope, and then proceeded to walk next to him without touching the neck rope at all. He was very well behaved, and I started to let him roam a bit around me, which resulted in him happily bucking and trotting around, with taking some... interesting routes directly through the bushes. During those trails at the beginning, we really depended his.. well, you could say "recall", that turned out to be better as some of the Dogs around here. With time, I teached him to lead the way for both of us, navigating him from behind. He thought it was a super weird concept at first, with looking very confused back towards me all the time, which had me chuckling every time. I was very grateful for all the super long and super nature-y hiking trails around the stable. It did have some perks to be in the middle of nowhere, as I couldn't even imagine trying something like this close to roads or villages. It started to be super fun, and it was often the part of my week which I was looking forward to the most. After a while of Sokrates and me getting used to the exercise, Phoenix started to accompany us, first with Saturn on the rope, and later on Hermes back. We enjoyed it a lot, and Sokrates seemed to think that those adventures were even better with a friend. He even got used to Hermes surprisingly quickly, and we started to even maneuver more difficult terrain together.

After a few weeks, you could really notice his progress. He had turned into a very calm and self-secure horse with a lot of character, not being afraid to show off, while being very soft and empathic for his surroundings. He beamed full of life and curiousness, with his impish eyes sparkling brighter than ever before. His pawing had gone down even more throughout the weeks. To everyone's surprise, there were now even days where he didn't pawed a single time. The only time where he still didn't felt that relaxed and calm -resulting in pawing- was during the nights. So, we decided to shoot our shot, and finally put him and Saturn into a small open-housing area in his stall. It was a small outside stone paddock with 3 combined boxes, enough space to play, live and sleep for 3 horses. The group who lived there before was moved into a part of our nearly finished big open housing concept stable, which was under construction for the last 4 months. We kept a close eye on Sokrates and Saturn through the cameras, but they seemed to get along very very well. So, we decided to keep them in the shared space for a night to see how it would be going. During the night, Liam, Phoenix and me took turns in watching the cameras and sleeping, to be completely safe. Everything ended up being perfect, Sokrates practically didn't pawed, (Except one time but Liam and I had discussed that for a good half an hour, and while he was sure that it was Sokrates being stressed, I was sure he was just searching for a treat that had fallen between the bedding out of a treat ball) and our sleepover in my Bungalow ended up being extremely fun, with lots of talking, a long Movie and a lot of tasty food.

A week later, I had asked the stable's team for a meet up. Sokrates was now every day in the same open housing area with Saturn, and even shared his daily paddock with her. They seemed to get along absolutely perfect, and I could have sworn that I even catched a glimpse of them grooming each other already. The meeting was all about Sokrates's progress. We talked about that he didn’t pawed anymore and didn’t showed any other sign of anxiety and stress anymore. And it was true - We practically never saw him paw anymore, and it had been a long time now since his paddock looked like it was a playground of an excavator. "... And because of that, I thought.. maybe we could integrate him into our main herd?" I asked nervously into the round. "Do you think he is ready for that?" Corwin asked, smiling at me. I nodded. "Yeah, I think so. He is doing so well with Saturn, he is used and calm around Miss Bell and Hermes, he knows Rosé already as well as Timo. And the herd is very well socialized and implemented, I think they all would help him to find his place nicely in their group." I said. I had thought about it a lot before bringing it up, mainly because I really wanted to be completely sure first. But I was indeed sure that it would go well, especially with him being such good friends with Saturn by now. And after a bit more of talking and planning, it was decided that we’ll slowly integrate Sokrates into the group, also in anticipation of that herd, and hopefully Sokrates with them, being moved into the big open housing complex as soon as the work was finished during the upcoming weeks. That open housing area had been a very big soul project for all of us. We had converted a big indoor area into a big sleeping and living area, with closed off spaces, alone time boxes who closed automatically when a horse stepped into it, automatic chip-reading feeders, and a lot of mentally stimulating toys and activities to use. The surroundings got converted into a lot of paddock and pasture space, all with different undergrounds for healthy hooves and multiple shelters for the hot days. When the construction was finished, it would be big enough to give a home to 20-30 horses, even though we knew that we wouldn’t max the capacity out.

The next morning after the meeting, we put Saturn back in the big pasture of the main herd, where she was before we put her and Sokrates together, and then we moved Sokrates directly into the paddock next to the herd. After a lot of snorting and fancy trotting next to the fence, the group calmed down and everyone seemed to go back to grazing. After a few days, we decided to shoot our shot and release him into the pasture. Me, Liam and Corwin stepped into the pasture as well, to be able to split the horses if something would go wrong. Sokrates, dragon-snorting as always, trotted around the corner furthest away from the group. Said group was standing there, curiously eyeing the newcomer, and then going back to grazing. Saturn trotted over, neighing happily and sniffed Sokrates, which he commented with pinned ears and a swish of his tail. Saturn turned over and invited Sokrates to follow her, which he slowly accepted. They both settled on grazing together with a bit of distance to the main group, where Hermes, the rank-highest horse, observed them very attentive. Smiling over the success, we left the pasture and settled on getting some coffee and watching the group for the rest of the afternoon from afar. With time, we saw Hermes greeting Sokrates with his calm but strong confidence, and after a very short discussion and a short high pitched fight scream, Sokrates trotted away quickly and Hermes went back to dozing. "I'm very very glad it went so smoothly! I was very nervous, I wasn't sure if Sokrates is maybe too self-confident due to your hard work and tries to attack Hermes," Corwin laughed and leaned back in his foldable chair. I did a grimace and answered, "To be honest, I nearly expected it. But I am very glad it didn't happened. Although I would be really surprised if Sokrates never tries." The group just grinned and nodded in agreement. We continued watching the group peacefully grazing together, until the sun settled beneath the horizon and it was time to get the horses into their stalls.

I smiled at the memories, looking over to Phoenix who just finished tacking up Saturn. I removed Sokrates' halter and put his neck rope over his head. "Are you ready?" Phoenix asked, smiling. "Always!" I replied and we headed off to the beach. Walking between them on Saturn and Sokrates on my other side, it was this beautiful feeling of peace, home and happiness that overcame me every time we've headed off to a trail. On top of the dunes I turned around, letting my gaze linger on the dunes, the ocean, and my home - the stables. Phoenix stopped Saturn and turned to me, asking "Jace? Is something wrong?" I smiled, placing a hand on Sokrates' back. "5 Months ago, the first evening with him.... When I walked over to my Bungalow that night, I promised him that I will help him. That we will work through it together." I blinked away my tears, smiling when Sokrates nudged my arm and rubbed his cute nose on me. "I looked at the dunes when saying it," I paused, looking at Sokrates, standing relaxed next to me looking at the dunes around us. "... I kept the promise," I finished slowly. Phoenix dismounted Saturn, stepped over to me and hugged me, whispering "Yes, Yes, you did. He is at peace; he is at home. With you." Smiling, I returned the hug. After a moment, we stepped back and looked onto the stables. "His full name will be Dunes of Promise." I said, and Phoenix smiled. “You couldn’t have chosen a better name for him," they said. I wiped away a tear and took their hand. They held mine softly, and we walked together down to the beach in silence, listening to the hoof steps of our horses, the waves crushing against the beach and the sounds of the seagulls around us.

I don't know yet what the future holds for me and Sokrates, but if there is one thing I’m certain about, it is the fact that we will be together, walking into new challenges and adventures side by side, no matter what lies ahead of us. I’m endlessly grateful for the journey we’ve walked together so far, through anxiety, through growth, through the silent moments of grief and the small steps of progress, and I will continue to carry that gratitude through every chapter still to come.

Thank you for giving me your love, Sokrates.

- Jace Terell

Theme song: Birds by Imagine Dragons

Thank you for reading ♡