10/03/2024
Do you struggle with your horse, emotionally?? If so, this is a must read‼️
What to DO?
I once decided I would try to help a woman who was in despair at working with her horse. I’d noticed her on several occasions on the verge of tears when she and the horse were just standing together in a round yard. I couldn’t see what the problem was, but she was very upset. She said she didn’t know what to do.
She put the horse back in the paddock and we had a discussion. She confided that she had low self esteem and anxiety issues, and that her horse sensed her fear so he didn’t trust her leadership. I said I didn’t know if I could help, but why didn’t she show me a bit of lunging. I was thinking quietly to myself that I was totally unqualified to help anyone with low self esteem. But when she started lunging I straight away saw what the problem was – and indeed, the horse became quite upset and nervous. Because…
… her rope was too long and frequently dropped in the dirt. She didn’t provide clear body language and input as to where she wanted the horse to be. The horse didn’t want to leave her, and worked around her in tight circles (she told me she couldn’t use the whip because the horse was afraid of it). The horse whirled around her in tight circles and stood on the rope, jerking his nose. The rope halter was much too loose and rotated around his head so the knot was near his eye. After about two minutes of him zooming around her in one direction, she stopped, turned to me and said: “You see! He senses my fear and becomes frightened!”
I have mixed feelings about some of the narrative about emotions that exists in the horse training sphere. I sometimes cringe when people talk about the way their emotions affect the horse. Such talk can be applicable in the right context, but sometimes people talk as if the emotional connection between horse and human is all that is required. Here was this woman who had judged herself as emotionally unworthy to provide leadership with her horse, when 2 minutes of observation suggested to me that her problem was a lack of technique and unsuitable equipment. The horse did not become agitated because he sensed a lack of desirable emotions in his owner, but rather he had no idea what she wanted – and neither did she.
The first factor of importance in horse training is not what everyone’s feelings are. It’s about establishing a clear language that the horse can understand. Work out what the horse does understand, and build from there in incremental steps.
So, what did I do to help this woman? Firstly I put my own lunging cavesson on the horse, because it was adjustable and could be made to fit. I showed the horse what the lunging whip meant. He very quickly understood he was to move away from it and make the circle bigger. I taught him the body positioning that meant: go straight, go on a circle, make the circle smaller, make the circle bigger, change directions. We worked on verbal commands – walk on, trot on, back to walk, whoa. As the horse came to understand this vocabulary, he was given plenty of breaks and praise; he became calmer and calmer. I then trained the woman in the techniques I’d been teaching the horse. It took a few sessions, but this woman was soon able to ask the horse to walk, trot and canter calmly on the lunge. I watched how she responded to my advice very carefully, and she didn’t seem to me to be subject to particular nerves or anxiety. On the contrary, she became more confident as she learned what to DO. And so did the horse.
It was a happy outcome. In the time since then I often cringe a bit internally when I hear people talking about the horse’s emotional state in response to us, because I think it can often lead people astray. If things are going wrong in the training situation, if you believe that it directly relates to the horse’s, or your emotional state, there is a real risk that you mis-diagnose something that is actually a hole in your technique. If the horse doesn’t have the balance or training to canter on the left lead, don’t say that he doesn’t respect your leadership (I’ve actually heard this). This sort of thinking can make people take an uncharitable view towards the poor horse, who apparently knows what you want and is withholding it in order to show disrespect! That’s a misdiagnosis, it’s not fair, and it won’t help the horse to canter on the correct lead. It’s far better to know some techniques and exercises to help him change his balance to get the results that you want.
I think the first things you should be thinking about when horse training is what the horse needs to know, and how you are going to teach him those things. Try not put him in a situation where he really doesn’t know what to do and the holes in the training are so gaping that he starts behaving in undesirable ways. The good news about thinking in this way is that it gives you things to learn and DO. You don’t have to feel worried that you are not in a good enough mental state for your glowing aura to envelop your horse so that you and he can become of one mind. This is good news for me, because I don’t know the mechanism for that and therefore I can’t work towards it. However, when you build a shared language with your horse so that he’s really clear about what you want, from the outside this can look remarkably like a horse and human who are of one mind and really trust each other.
I guess I could summarise my point as: focus on the language the horse needs to understand and hone your technique in training and improving this. The clarity of this approach will help to put you and the horse in a good emotional state in relation to each other.
I chose this picture because I find this a really expressive eye. I think there is a lot going on in the horse’s emotional world, and he can really turn to you because he trusts you. But give yourself a break. Just work on the training techniques which can make things clear for you and the horse – don’t demand of yourself some kind of perfect emotional state before you begin.
