“Well, it was disappointing,” he said.
“It was just like, are they ever going to get used to us? Are they ever going to even be interested in us? Are they ever going to come close enough so that I can make some sort of contact, establish some sort of relationship with them?”
Their fear caused a lot of doubt for us.
“I was afraid of failing,” Greg said.
Clearly our guanacos were not going to be emotional support animals.
They weren’t going to be the kind of animals that supplied us with unconditional love and sweet soothing cuddles either. We figured that out really quickly. But It was still up to us to learn to work with them. Despite their fears, and despite our own fears, we needed to be able to take care of their vet needs, and shearing, and all those kinds of things that inevitably require haltering and leading these animals.
Now, I consider myself a fairly brave person. I have facilitated workshops to hundreds of people for multiple days in a row. I have climbed very high mountains and rafted class-5 rapids. I have given birth to three amazing children without pain medication. And Greg, let’s just say that guy has been so courageous in the face of possible failures. His favorite sport is baseball, which he fondly refers to as a game of failure.
So, given our track record, I thought for sure we were up for handling wild animals. I thought if I did get scared, I could just will my fear away, no matter how bad it got, and in the end, all of us would come out the other side being just fine. Besides, I don’t have a lot of tolerance for my own fear. It just gets in the way. The best thing to do, I have always thought, is just to forge ahead. “Fake it ’til you make it.” And eventually, you are no longer afraid, or (more likely) the thing you are frightened about has ended. Done. You don’t have to face it again until the next thing comes along.
As for Greg, here’s what he’s done to cope with his fear in the past.
“I don’t think I would have looked inside and tried to figure out how to find some sort of calmness,” Greg said. “I think I would have tried to project that outside of myself, and think that it was the situation that was causing the failure in a better situation, or better techniques, or better or whatever would make it better. Or maybe I just would have thought the animals were impossible, and it wasn’t me.”
Now, we both watched other women, who were smaller in stature than us, show no fear and be completely competent in working with these animals. One of these women was Paige. We boarded our guanacos with her before we moved to Whidbey Island. Hers was the ranch we’d drive up to in the Sierra foothills to visit our guanacos.
I remember thinking, “You know, she’s such a badass. If I could only be so brave and not freak out, then maybe I would be a better guanaco handler.”
“Paige’s animals did not flee when she was near them,” Greg added. “They seemed much more relaxed. And she seemed she exuded confidence.”
She really did. And we noticed.
“Oh yeah,” Greg said. “She just was so confident around the animals, and they seemed to respond better to her.”
What I remember is driving up there to learn how to handle them, and even the night before being a complete ball of nerves. I’d go through all the worst-case scenarios about what would happen, and how we would get injured, and how the animals would be freaking out, and I would try to muster my courage and even I would try to pretend like I was Paige and would be confident instead of scared.
Then whenever we got there, I would get the feeling of, “Okay, we have to do this and we’re going to do it and it’s just going to be horrible, but we’re going to get it over with.”
Then we’d go up there and the animals would be so scared, and everybody would be mulling around and going fast. Their fears would be on high alert. I literally felt sometimes like I couldn’t stand on my own legs. I was so afraid. I had the kind of knee knocking that comes when you’re so cold, you can’t stop it.
“I remember everyone being so wound up,” Greg said.
Wound up is exactly what we were. So wound up, even though I decided I wasn’t gonna be like, right, and practiced and breathed and all of that. And all I can say is I was so relieved when it was over. And I wanted it to be over fast.
“I bet the animals were too,” Greg said.
We had a lot to learn about our guanacos and about fear.
The first step was starting to understand what was going on for them. And to start to appreciate their level of fear. Which in turn helped us deal with our own.
So we turned to Marty McGee Bennett. She is a camelid handling expert. She’s worked with camelids for 50 years and has a lot of experience with their nervous systems. I asked her to help us see the world through a guanaco’s eyes.
I asked her, “If we’re going to interact with animals or even just watching them, what should we know about their nervous system?”
“I think that because camelids, and I guess particularly guanacos, which I’ve worked with several times in my career, they are for sure different than llamas and alpacas.” Marty said. “I think people don’t fully appreciate how incredibly afraid they can become. They just know that the human being goes in, and they think I know that I’m not going to hurt them, and the animals should just know that. But they don’t. They don’t know that.”
One thing I can tell you as a therapist is that our nervous systems are wired to perceive danger. It’s our survival instinct. It makes sense, whether you are a guanaco or a human. The faster you act in the face of danger, the more likely it is you are going to survive. Also, fear is contagious. We depend on others to help alert us to danger. If someone in our family or in our herd is afraid, it triggers our own fear. Our survival instinct automatically kicks in and tells us to watch out. It’s like the flu; even if you don’t want to catch it, you end up being exposed, and your body just reacts. This means that you just can’t cover up your fear. Even if you try (and believe me I did) the animals are going to feel it.
When I first started, I would go and my knees would knock, and I would get heart palpitations, and I couldn’t control it, I wanted it to go away so badly. And I didn’t know how to proceed. Basically, I was trying to follow Marty McGee Bennett’s directions, but my whole adrenaline was going because these were huge animals. They didn’t like us. They didn’t want to do anything. I asked Marty what she tells people when they see that their own anxiety is creating this anxiousness with their animals.
“It really is like the beating heart of it, really,” Marty said. “And what I would say is that you can’t know what you don’t know, you can’t just magically know it. And you also can’t fool them. Not one bit. The worst advice is when somebody says, and I hear this all the time from the cowboy, is you just go in and act like you know you’re the boss, and just show them that you’re the boss. It’s impossible. The animal knows before you ever even open the gate that you’re nervous.”
I’ve found that if I walk normally, which is actually at a good speed, not like a slow creeping kind of speed, the guanacos are fine. They chill. They don’t pop up. But if I changed my pace where I’m either like, some creepy weirdo who’s like trying to see somebody’s fiber, or trying to sneak a little pet in to feel them, or something like that, they look at me like I’m a completely different person. Here’s why Marty thinks they can pick up that.
“I’m sure that there’s something specific, you know, there’s a way that you hold your shoulders there, there’s a way that you’re breathing, there’s a way that you’re walking. Just like if you’re at a cocktail party and you can pick out somebody who’s kind of creepy. You might not be able to say exactly why that person gives you the heebie-jeebies, but you just know that they do. And I’m sure there are people who work for governments that can tell you exactly what that is. But I do think that maybe it’s the way you’re trying to act like you’re casual, when that’s the last thing you look like.”
For the record, I’m a regular person. Not some creepy partygoer. The bottom line is you can’t fake it with guanacos. You can’t fake it that you’re just some regular person walking over to pick up some hay or something, when you’re going over to them to treat an injury, or touch their fiber.
“I think it’s actually better to announce it,” Marty said. “Just say, ‘you know what, you’ve got a booboo and I’m wanting to look at it. And if you I would really like to just go over, I just like to go over and have a look at I won’t put my hands on you. And I just like to go have a look at it. If that doesn’t work, what we’ll do is herd a bunch of you into a pen and I’ll do it that way.’”
My “fake it ‘till you make it” approach wasn’t going to fool the animals.
In fact, it was just creating a hyper-vigilance in all of us that was making things worse.
Marty’s teaching videos taught us a lot about handling guanacos. And I learned an entirely new way to approach my own fear. First there’s the acknowledgment that it exists. We learned from Marty that we needed to appreciate how highly tuned in our animals were to their escape route. If they felt trapped in a corner, or in a pen, or a field, their fight or flight fear response would get triggered, and working with them would become dangerous. If this happened we were in a no win situation.
Marty puts it this way, “I noticed that the more I became aware of it, the more that I was aware of where I stood, how I entered an area, even the field, even a big field. And what I came to realize was that the animals appreciated how much I knew and how much I demonstrated that I was aware of what they were worried about. And that went a long way towards making them not have to be hyper-vigilant or even vigilant. So just looking at a group of animals and knowing the likely way that they would like to get away from you, if they needed to, is really important.”
So there’s that sort of seeing their world through your own eyes. Because you know what they need: they need to know an escape route in order to feel safe.
“Exactly,” Marty says. “When I was a relatively new skier and I was skiing with my husband, who’s a very good skier, and we would do terrain, he would say, “Oh, yeah, I can just see there’s like a yellow line that I can see where I’m supposed to go.” And I’m like, “I don’t see a yellow line.” In the same way, when I go into a catch pen or into a field, that’s what happens to me; I see this kind of place where I know the animals want to go. And either as a group, or individually, particularly in a smaller area. If I walk into a barn, or I walk into a catch pen, and there’s a group of animals, I can really see the ways that all of the animals are likely to go, even if it’s not the same direction. It’s just from years and years of paying attention to it.
So we tuned in. We watched. We allowed ourselves to notice the lines of escape, just like Marty suggested. And, as we began to attune to our guanacos’ fears, we began to understand how to avoid being physically harmed, as well as how to communicate reassurance to them through our proximity, physically.
Greg put it this way, “I think about what I’m communicating to them physically, because I finally got the idea that I was communicating all this stuff to them by my body language, by my positioning of my body. By where I was holding my hands, by how I was looking at them. I was communicating to them in ways that they understood as communication. And I needed to communicate reassuringly to them in ways that they would understand this communication. That was sort of like when I finally got it. That was like, ‘Oh, damn, why am I so stupid that I haven’t seen that before?’”
Well, it’s learning. It’s not only just being attuned. It’s learning to interpret what the animals are perceiving. It did feel better to understand how frightened our guanacos were. It also made me have a bit more compassion for myself around working with them. I could be in a pen and feel little fear as long as I was not asking them to do much. But when it came time for training or attempting to halter them, I still didn’t know how to manage my fear. If faking it wouldn’t work, if forcing myself in spite of my fears wouldn’t work, I didn’t know what to do. After all, the guanacos in a catch pen are large and wound up and kicking and are way bigger than I.
Again, Marty’s teaching was profound for me. It’s become something I’ve applied to everything that I am afraid of–not just training wild beasts.
I asked her, “In your work with teaching people camelid dynamics, when you do encounter somebody who is extremely fearful of their animals, or of working with the animals, or somebody who just doesn’t get this “just breathe” part, what do you do?”
“I spend a bunch of time on the training aid with them,” she said.
Marty is talking about a blow-up camelid head that she’s designed to help people practice on before they start training the live animals. You can hear all about the homemade guanaco head we practiced on in Season 1, episode 4, The Great Guanaco Escape. It was silly and fun, and really important to helping us alleviate our fears of working with our guanacos.
So newbies learn on the blow-up head. And what does that do?
“It lets them try it out five, or six, or 10, or 12 times,” Marty explained. “And then what I say is, “Okay, now you’ve done this first step 12 times,” But I do think there’s a way to make a bunny slope.”
So it’s the bunny slope idea, starting small and gaining familiarity and competence through that not taking the giant leap. There you have it. Not only did I need to stop faking that I wasn’t afraid, but I need to become more patient with myself. It sounds so obvious now, but this was a profound shift for me.
In our old life, in my career especially, I forced myself to do a lot of things I didn’t want to do. I was not very patient with myself, and my “say-do” ratio was over 100%. Think of me like a driven, overachiever who would assign herself difficult projects and expect quick completion. I had little tolerance for finding an easy on-ramp or taking the bunny slope. But this was exactly what the guanacos were needing me to figure out.
So how did that happen for me? I think it was by having baby guanacos that needed my training so that I could start completely fresh. There wasn’t any sort of pre-dated treatments, or ways that they’d been handled that I had to compete with, or erase, or try to ease. So starting with the babies, I think in learning about how they learned, which was so incredibly slow, more slowly than I would have ever thought in terms of handling, I was able to go that slow.
“So here’s what I’ve noticed with the animals,” Greg adds. “You have a way when you’re training the little ones, to “coo” at them as a reinforcement. I don’t know if you want to do it on the podcast, but they respond so well to your voice, to that cooing, high, soft voice, that it becomes really reassuring for them that everything’s gonna be okay.
If you listen to guanacos talk to each other, they actually do communicate with these sort of sweet hums—mother and child. And the babies sound like little stuffed animals. It’s the cutest thing ever.
“It really helps them,” Greg says. “I think more than you realize. I see their ears just attune to the coos you give them when they’ve done something that you want to reinforce the positive.”
I’m still making adjustments. I’m training our guanaco Claude to receive the halter, and I’ve been trying to show him the halter, and have him touch it as a target with his nose. I’ve tried that for a couple of times, and he’s not been understanding what I’ve been asking and it creates anxiety and fear in him. In response, he’s a little bit “kicky.” So I realized my response is not wanting to be kicked. It’s a response of tension. So I start thinking, “Okay, what’s the next smaller step from that?” And that was putting the halter in front of the hay, so that Claude would put his nose through the halter while he got a bite of hay. And he was completely fine with that. There was no reactivity.
I even felt excitement, and sort of relieved about that. And I think, for me, learning to tune in to those little teeny micro steps helped me do that for myself, as well as for the animals.
When you find your bunny slope you can build a sense of competence because you are succeeding and growing skills over and over again. Even the littlest success is a triumph. And you learn to adjust as you go so that each step is calibrated to the animal’s tolerance and your own tolerance. Pretty soon, there really isn’t failure, just information about how to adjust or what next bunny slope to take.
“For me,” Greg says. “Over time I just became more and more relaxed around them, and less reactive to their reactions. And that was the most important thing for me. No matter what they did, I was not going to react, I was not going to allow my feelings. I basically wasn’t going to have any fear feelings.”
I told Greg, “You didn’t push it down any longer or you didn’t have to act, even in the face of fear. You just I didn’t have it. I think that’s the gradual development. And that happened for me too. But I also think it happened for the guanacos. Right? Gradual?”
“You can see the fear in them and you can feel the fear in their bodies. And we didn’t react to that in any way,” Greg said. “We simply didn’t, sort of amp it up. We didn’t wind it up one step further.”
What do Greg do instead of amping it up, or winding it up further?
“Well, I relax,” he said. “I mean, I’m just breathing. I’m relaxed, I’m not really looking at them eyeball to eyeball. I’m just being present with them. And I’m just there.
I want to tell you about this special day last year. It represents the culmination of this whole project of working with fear–in our animals and in myself. It was shearing day. Alma is our one and a half-year-old guanaco who was born here on our farm. From the moment she was born it was special because her mother, Angie, allowed us to interact with her. The other mothers have been much more protective of their babies. But Angie let us dry her baby off, and touch her, and sniff our noses to her, which is a bonding behavior. I took on the challenge of halter training Alma, and formed a beautiful relationship with her. Alma’s fear response to us is markedly lower than the others. On this day, it was her first time at shearing, and she had no idea what to expect; poor girl.
“She was both haltered and blindfolded and sedated,” Greg recalled. “And I was trying to lead her over to the shearing area, and she was not having it.”
I told Greg, “You were pulling, and trying to get her to go. And I think I saw that, and I’m proud that I was like, “Oh, wait, she needs me.” You know that this is scary. It’s unknown for her. And rather than somebody get behind her and push her really hard, which I think our friend John was ready to do on the other side, I said, “let me try this.” And so as soon as I got the lead from you, I stood next to her. And as soon as I said, “Hey, honey, it’s okay.” She completely relaxed. She couldn’t see people. So she was relying on my voice. And then I said, “Let’s go walk.” And she took a step. I didn’t even have to really pull. I told her where, which direction we were going in. And I had to prompt her a couple of times, “we’re walking.” But it wasn’t a situation where we had to overpower her and tell her fear didn’t matter. She just knew that she was going to be okay.”
That day was validating for me. It let me know that learning to work with my fear, while working with the babies paid off. Greg feels the same way. We both learned to work with the guanacos better, and we have skills now.
I asked Greg, “How do you think that has changed your relationship to dealing with your feeling of fear of failing, or that same kind of fear?”
“I just don’t experience it anymore,” he said. “It’s funny, not just with them, but I think in general. If I fail at something, I just sort of think, “Well, there’s another day and that’s okay.” I don’t mind owning the fact that I failed. I don’t mind experiencing failure. I would prefer not to, but I don’t mind it when it happens. And I think that it’s just carried over into other tasks, other things we do here. Other things that I do in life. It just feels less forced. I think that feeling of safety has just sort of generalized for me in some sort of way.”
So how about me?
As I told Greg, “It has really made me sensitive to how much I don’t want to force myself. Just the way I don’t want to force the animals into situations or doing things that cause undue stress or fear. Not that I will always want to feel safe, but just sort of stretching or growing, that it feels comfortable. Comfortable or slightly uncomfortable. Not so much that it feels overwhelming. And so I think I’ve become nicer to myself in that way.”
In the end, if everyone can just keep relaxed, and our fear quieted, it’s a beautiful thing.
I asked Marty the ultimate question: “What do you want your animals to do when you walk into their pen?”
She said, “The biggest compliment to me about my husbandry behaviors, and the way that I am with my animals, is that they basically do nothing. They allow me to come in and just be there, and they don’t all pop-up and run to the exits.”
It’s been four years now since we started at that Sierra Foothills farm when our guanacos would flee from us; fleeing as far away as they could get. The fears Greg and I had are significantly lower, and the way we handle the fear that is there has drastically changed. I told Marty this:
“I think of you, but my most favorite thing is to go into the barn in the morning, when they’re all lying down, and they’re chewing their cud. And I say, “Hi, girls.” And they don’t even look at me. They just keep chewing and they just keep relaxed. And I might add jokingly, “You guys want breakfast in bed or what?” You know?”
“That’s really quite an accomplishment with guanacos,” Marty told me.
So here’s the thing: Fear is tricky. You may not have a herd of guanacos on hand to practice a new approach to dealing with fear. But, maybe you can remember some of what we’ve learned, and things will shift for you the way they shifted for us.
Here is my list of lessons from the barn:
- It’s impossible to pretend that you aren’t afraid.
- You can’t fake it
- You can’t force it
- Better to be honest and just own your fear.
- You have to be patient and friendly toward yourself and stick to the bunny slope until you are ready for the next step.
In the end, you will have so much trust and knowledge that your barn will likely be full of sweet cooing and praises, just like ours.
Thanks for listening. If you’d like to hear more stories about our farm life and what we learn when we live close to nature and use our hands to make things from what we raise, be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast listening app–or, if you want to be notified every time we post a new episode, you can sign up for those notifications here on our website, afiberlife.com.
I just rescued a couple of guanaco crosses and highly enjoyed this!