11/04/2024
This post might help owners, students and those interested in horses understand how horses think.
This post is for horse trainers who have trained 50 or more horses. If you haven't trained a whole lot of horses, I don't think your experience will be very relevant because this topic is something that takes time and many horses to understand. Perhaps questions might be more appropriate than comments for most.
Students of authentic horsemanship understand that equine perception and human perception are very different. The difference begins with the two very unique ranges of vision. Horses can see 360 degrees around themselves with a 3 degree blind spot or net 357 degrees of vision. Humans can see 190 degrees with two 15 degree blind spots or net vision range 175 degrees.
This is a big difference in human versus equine vision, but vision is only a part of the perceptive difference. Equine hearing and smell also exceed human abilities by large margins. However, the biggest perceptive difference is based in how humans are predators and horses are prey. This difference in perception must not be underestimated. It's huge. With this vast difference in how humans experience the physical world compared to horses, it is a wonder that people can train horses at all.
It has been 76 years since I got my first paid job working 2 year olds on a ranch. I lunged them eight hours a day, rain or shine. In the time that followed, I am guessing I've worked well over a thousand horses. From my years of experience, I have a theory about equine perception that is beyond vision and beyond perception of the physical world. My theory is about how horses experience time differently that we do.
I do not believe that horses have an innate sense of time. Whereas humans are obsessed with time. Time colors almost all perception we humans experience. Can we get to the appointment on time? Will our children be born early or late? Am I wasting my time? I wish I could spend more time with, at, or doing X.
Horses don't think about time. As far as I can tell, the only sense of time horses have has been learned from humans. I worked for an obsessive trainer who insisted that all their horses had to be feed at exactly the same time every day. If I was two minutes late feeding, all the horses would be kicking the doors off their stalls. If feeding time is randomize even a little, horses don't do that. Likewise, lesson horses know how long a lesson is. These are examples of horses living human defined lives by the clock. But horses left primarily alone are always in the present moment with no past or future cluttering their minds.
Some might say that horses remember past experiences and that this is evidence that they can and do think in terms of the past. I don't think so. I think that horses store past experiences as data that gets logged in their memory, but it is only data, without feeling or thought, stored just as a computer stores data to be used as decision input for future present moments when triggered. When those triggering moments occur, horses do not think about past data in the ponderous ways humans do. When that triggered moment arrives, the data causes action, not feelings or thoughts. This is my theory because it is what I have observed over decades.
I first started thinking about horses and time after reading Ray Hunt. He said that when training a horse, you cannot start at square one. You must start at square zero before square one. I have been thinking about this for decades. My interpretation is that Ray Hunt saw that horses are always in the moment.
When we start a training session the horse is already present and has been present with us since we got them from their stall or pasture. Horses are present while most of the time we are not. We're thinking about what we plan to do, about what's for dinner, how we were disappointed yesterday about something, and so on. We are rarely in the present and the horse is almost always in the present.
Therefore, I believe Ray Hunt was telling us to be in the present with the horse before we begin to train. I think his advice is to help us not fall behind the horse's process of learning. Infact, it is best to be a little ahead of a horse you are training. The prospect should be curious about what we will do and working to keep up. But if you are behind a horse in training that is already present at square zero in the moment and you playing catchup, you will always struggle as a trainer.
Whatever horses might be doing, they are on the edge between this moment and the next, as seen in the picture below. We try to change horses to make them more to our liking in terms of their perceptions. For example, we don't like the "flighty" way horses can be hyper vigilant. We drug them, stick rubber balls in their ears, try to train away their constantly present perception. We want them on our timeline, but they don't know how. Humans tend to be future focused on "I expect a good ride" because future thinking makes us comfortable. Meanwhile our horse is in a present state of not knowing and being ready for whatever.
Horses are different than humans in more ways than we are similar. I believe that these differences scare or worry most people. Nothing takes us out of the present moment quicker that fear. I'd say that it is impossible to train a horse properly if the trainer is experiencing fear. Anthropomorphized false ideas of the horse do not remove fear. Instead, we must learn how to become more comfortable with equine perception. This is possible, but it takes time.
