My horse gets very nervous during trailering and at shows- she's definitely gotten better over the years but still, over 5 summers of showing later, she is still nervous. So, I thought for our first show of the season (which was the other weekend) that I would try her on Rescue Remedy. I gave her some in the morning hoping to keep her calm in the trailer (she kicks the crap out of the trailer when she's in it- but I think I may be onto something with that...so it's another topic). It seemed to work for the morning and she was actually quite well behaved during the entire day of the show. Normally it's like pulling teeth to take her away from her "friends" if they leave her to go ride or if I take her away and she calls like crazy. This time, though she still prefers to have a buddy, she was much easier to take away and she stayed calmer in general (no cow patties!). So I'm thinking this is great....
Then when I went to warm her up for our class she was so hyper (and I had already ridden her in the morning lightly to do our jump warm up). I rode her for quite awhile before our classes to calm her down (poor thing was sweating like crazy cause it was so humid but she would just not settle) but even when we got into our classes she was still SUPER hyper.
Someone later told me it's because I didn't continue to give her the Rescue Remedy throughout the day and that it has an after effect of making them hyper. I googled RR, but found no information stating such things (anything I found said RR has no side effects- it's just plant oils combined together which are meant to calm anxiety), and I even took some RR myself (cause I get nervous) and didn't feel hyper later (I was exhausted! ).
So, has anyone else used RR and found such effects? The other thing I noticed with RR is that neither on the box, nor online could I find information like how long it takes RR to start working, or how long it lasts for.
I'm wondering if I should use it again for our next show? The reason I'm using it is that once my horse gets excited/nervous it's hard to bring her back into focus- and it's not that I'm trying to "tranq" her in the showring, it's nothing to do with our riding itself, just that when she gets so high strung, she starts spooking at random things (like cars parked outside the show arena, or people standing near the fence...silly things) and also I'm worried with her being nervous that either she's going to develop an ulcer or lose weight from being so ansy/having diahhrea, and it's a PITA to watch her at shows cause she doesn't trailer tie so I have to hold her allllll day long with her screaming her head off and pacing about (not fun!).
And, if I do use it again, has anyone found a method that works best? Should I give it to her in the morning and then give her more again before we show? The info I found on RR says there's no risk of overdoes...but then again I don't know how long it lasts or how long it takes to take effect to know the optimal time to give before going into the show ring? I gave it to her at like 6:30am and wasn't even going to give it to her again later, figuring that if I could get her to start out calm, she would realize "hey this is OK" and she wouldn't get all strung out later. But now I don't know if taking the RR had anything to do with her riding behaviour. Her getting hyper and being a bit fast at shows is normal for her, especially for the first show of the season, but this show seemed a little more than her normal (in fact she was much better over fences, it was the flat classes she was trucking around like crazy- there will be another post about that too ). So I'm trying to figure out if there is any correlation between the two and if I should try RR again or not....
Sorry for the novel...lots of thinking out loud.