Relationship Based Horse Training

04/11/2024

Couldn't agree more.....once we're "woke" with horses, we can never go back and it also makes it harder for us to watch them be handled by those who have yet to see the light.

The Communication Gap

I didn’t know anything about animal communication when I first started trimming. I just studied from various trimming sources and applied what I was learning. I would simply repeat things If the horse didn’t limp afterward. This was the basis of my learning until about 18 years ago when I was trimming a nervous horse one day and asked my wife to come and comfort him while I trimmed. She always had a calming way with horses. I remember very clearly trying to trim this horse’s hinds. This was where he had the most anxiety. There was a moment where he stopped struggling and got very relaxed. I wanted to take advantage of this stillness and get as much done as possible but the world seemed to have stopped and the peacefulness and presence was too distracting. I turned to look and see what was happening and noticed my wife and this big brown gelding staring into each other’s eyes. I asked her, “ What are you doing? ” Stephanie replied, “ nothing. “ I said, “ you are definitely doing something. What is it? “ she said, “ I’m just looking at him. “ I said, “ It’s more than that. “ She knew I wasn’t going to stop asking her so she said, “I’m just telling him that I see him.“ Right then I could see that he saw her too.

I’ve spent the rest of my life trimming horses with that awareness. I’ll admit that there were a few years following that day where I used that awareness as a technique to get horses calm for trimming, but over time I realized that they weren’t only calm, they could communicate what they wanted me to do with their feet. My learning curve took a steep upward trajectory and I got a lot better at solving their problems. The next problem that presented itself was that sometimes the owner was the problem and I didn’t know how to tell the owner that or where I got the information from. I guess you could call it intuition. This awareness soon became a bigger problem for me. The horses started giving me more resistance and acting up when they knew I knew what they wanted me to say to the owner and I didn’t say anything. Eventually I would try to find the most tactful way to say it for them…for the horse. I remember the first time I actually talked back to a horse and said, “Ok, I’ll say it, but it’ll probably be the last time I see you.” The horse’s response really surprised me. They kind of energetically shrugged their shoulders, as if to say, “I’d rather they hear the truth than have my feet fixed.“ That was literally the end of my old way as a trimmer. I got fired a bit after that. I even made some enemies. I also learned that my desire to really see things as they are and be seen as I am was greater than my desire to be liked. Call me woke if you want, but I never went back. Once you see it, once you feel it, you can’t go back.

01/11/2024

I've said this a lot, especially when it comes to gaited horses. The best thing that we can do, as instructors, is to set things up so that they CAN be felt. Then when you drift in and out of the correct feel, you at least know what you're supposed to be feeling. As your cues get better and better, you'll feel it more and more.

01/11/2024

Interesting. Perhaps the barefoot movement has something to do with this?

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30/10/2024

well said

Please share with your horsey friends!

29/10/2024

This is perfect for the horse or human relationships in our lives.

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE EMOTIONS OF OTHERS

In my life, taking responsibility for the feelings or emotions of others has been one of the hardest things to get my head around🤯. I also owe it to horses for teaching me all about it.

Taking responsibility for how someone feels means you believe you can impact their emotions. It can also mean you end up using other people’s emotions as a gauge of whether you are a good person or not.

When you do this, two unhelpful things can happen:

1. It can make you manipulative, dishonest, and resentful.

2. It can set you up to be manipulated, controlled, and also resentful.

Both of these introduce stress and problems into your life.

You need to recognise that you’re doing this and learn to let go.

➡️What Does Taking Responsibility for Others' Emotions Look Like?

It looks like trying to keep someone happy, telling them what they want to hear, lying, hiding, or avoiding doing or saying things so you don’t rock the boat, upset, or worry them. This is people-pleasing.

It’s also letting someone push your guilt and shame buttons. Constantly feeling judged and defensive as you try to justify and defend yourself, avoiding conflict, and creating problems. Feeling controlled and resentful, and like you’re constantly not good enough or even a failure.

➡️You Have to Let Go

If you engage with others with empathy and integrity, you have to let people experience the emotions and feelings you may trigger within them. This is at the heart of having healthy personal boundaries.

When you worry about how someone may react to your thoughts, beliefs, wants, desires, or actions, your integrity and ability to make good decisions become compromised. This is because your motives become skewed; your goal shifts to avoiding upsetting the other person or trying to make them happy.

You end up doing and saying things you don’t want to do or say—like withholding, lying, and deceiving. You feel compromised, create trouble, grow resentful, and might even feel hopeless or like a terrible person.

You have to let people experience their own emotions and feelings. Let others own their emotional response while you own yours.

➡️This Doesn’t Mean Being Insensitive to People’s Feelings

Absolutely not.

It means that if you act with integrity or make someone accountable for their actions, and they get upset, you let go and allow them to process it. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort without trying to fix or change it. Sometimes that might mean ending a call or walking away, but it will also surprise you how often what you thought would be uncomfortable wasn’t uncomfortable at all.

What you’ll discover is that if you respect them and they ACTUALLY respect you, they will process it and reach acceptance. If they can’t, then this is a red flag🚩 that this person may not be healthy to engage with in your life.

In your life, you are responsible and accountable for your own actions and emotions. You are not responsible for the actions or emotions of others.

The moral of this story is: focus on managing your own actions and emotional responses… not those of others.

➡️The Same Problem Can Exist Between You and Your Horse

What does taking responsibility for a horse’s feelings or emotions look like?

It looks like avoiding doing things that might worry your horse or have worried them in the past. Trying to shut a horse down when they become worried. Becoming obsessed with analysing a horse and how stressed or worried they might be. Micromanaging a horse and focusing on correcting any sign of negative emotion or feeling. Being overly concerned about whether the horse loves you or is rejecting you.

When you do these things and try to control and manipulate a horse’s emotions or feelings, you cannot create a healthy relationship or partnership with the horse. You’re setting yourself up for problems.

Why? Because it makes you inconsistent, hampers the horse’s ability to learn and process emotions, and ultimately undermines their sense of security with you.

For instance, many horses need time to develop their balance in canter. Feeling unbalanced in canter can create worry in a horse. Practising canter and clocking up time cantering is how the horse can develop balance and gain confidence in the gait. If you avoid cantering to prevent worrying your horse, they can never get confident with canter!

Or if you worry about your horse becoming anxious in different environments and you never take them out anywhere, they’ll never learn how to process changing surroundings. You then set them up to become more anxious about even small changes in their home environment until they stress out about leaving their paddock.

➡️Sensitivity and Responsibility

We need to be sensitive to the feelings and emotions of the horse, and we need to set them up to learn without overwhelming them. But we must also understand and accept that a horse’s emotional response and stress levels will change as they learn and grow in confidence. A certain level of discomfort is normal in learning. Learning doesn’t take place in comfort zones—it occurs when the comfort zone is carefully stretched. You must accept and allow this.

Avoiding and protecting a horse against any kind of upset creates a paradox—you end up creating what you fear: a horse that can’t handle anything and becomes even more stressed and insecure because of your attempts to control and protect.

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Image📸: This is me in the round yard, remaining a calm consistent presence as I allow and accept the emotions of this horse as his body learns to coordinate his canter this direction. Because I allowed this without trying to fix it, stop it or punish it…within 8 minutes he was more balanced, loose and relaxed❤.

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23/10/2024

Exactly! Because you're always training them each and every time you handle them.....either something good, or something not so good ;). If you don't want to put the effort into it, buy a side by side.

23/10/2024

I'm not sure if this makes sense to non horsemanship people, but in essence what he's saying is that it's the release that teaches.

22/10/2024

This year's winner of Road to the Horse sure reminded me of horsemanship skills that I had also studied. So I am not surprised that his first teacher was also my first! David inspired me to work hard with the tough horse that I brought to his clinic. I won't say it was easy, but I was determined. He was a horse no one wanted to own because he was so scared of everything and kept dumping riders. I rode him for 17 years and he transformed into the most amazing partner I could have asked for. RTTH in 2025 will feature 2 of my favorite English horsemanship riders. I don't normally like these types of competitions, but I know these competitors will put the horse above the win.

David is one of my favorite horse people. The first time I met him was at a clinic he was giving in England, and he began the clinic by asking "What is the first rule of animal training?" For each guess we had he threw us a candy from a bag he had. "Good answer," he said each time.

I've kept in touch with him over the years and he has always come through with great advice. He has helped me with everything from teaching a horse to lay down, to helping a tense horse become more relaxed and thoughtful about jumping.

What makes David so good? He has two things money can't buy: A great eye, and a lifetime of experience.

(He also has a pretty rad moustache that I don't think money could buy.)

I'm looking forward to our webinar together on October 29th - head to the link in the comments for more! Oh, and his answer to the first rule of animal training: "Always come bearing gifts."

David Lichman Parelli Professional

22/10/2024

Passed the 500 follower milestone today! Thank you! You can email me at [email protected] with your horsey problems. I'll do my best to help.

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22/10/2024

Amen!

22/10/2024

Well said.....

22/10/2024

I've seen this happen a few times over the years, where owners just couldn't bring themselves to "upset" the horse. Learning is stressful for any living creature because we're stepping out of our comfort zone. There are lots of things that you can teach with food based rewards, but many that you cannot. Horses need to feel safe. That is their #1 concern. For them to feel safe, they need to trust their (human) leader. We don't earn that with a cookie, we earn it with demonstrating our knowledge of their language and using it to show them we are capable of being the leader of the herd.

THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL DISCOMFORT IN TRAINING

I will make an assertion that might surprise or upset a few people. That is, horses do not need to bond with people. As long as a horse’s basic needs of food, water, and companionship are met, they couldn’t give a farthing if they never saw a human in their entire life.

But people are different. Most people want to bond with their horse. They get upset if they feel their horse doesn’t want to be with them. To fulfill this need people repeat the mistake over and over again of avoiding doing enough to help a horse change its thought because they don’t want to upset their horse or induce anxiety in the horse. They don’t want to do anything they think might cause their horse not to like them. But this is making horse training more about people's concerns than the horses. It is both an ignorant and selfish approach to training.

Some people who read my essays about training principles and watch my videos come away with the mistaken view that my training and my clinics are all rainbows and cuddles. But I am not that sort of trainer. I am the sort of trainer who will do as little as I can to get a change of thought, but as much as necessary too. That means that sometimes I am applying so little pressure that people can’t see what I am doing and other times it means the pressure gets to earthquake proportions, with most of the time it is somewhere in between. I try very hard not to apply more pressure than necessary to change a horse’s thoughts and provide them with clarity. To do more than that verges on punishment. But to apply less pressure than necessary to change a horse’s thoughts and provide clarity verges on emotional abuse.

In the past, a small number of people have expressed confusion and even concern about how much pressure I applied to some horses. They felt what they saw me doing was inconsistent with the ideas I espoused in my essays. So I want to say a few things about this.

Firstly, as I have written in my book, The Essence Of Good Horsemanship there is no such thing as kind or gentle training. All training requires a certain threshold level of anxiety in a horse to stop one behaviour and replace it with another. This is equally true for training that applies the principles of negative reinforcement (R-) and positive reinforcement (R+) The amount of anxiety required to make a horse think what it is doing is no longer a good idea is the same for every horse. However, the amount of pressure a human has to apply to reach that threshold level of anxiety can vary hugely. So just because one horse will change its thought with a wiggle of a finger and another horse will require a whirlwind of energy from a swinging rope, does not mean one method was more aggressive or violent than the other from a horse’s point of view. They both added the same amount of worry in the respective horses to create a change of thought.

Secondly, when it comes to horses the end mostly does justify the means. By that I mean, if a horse finishes a session in a better emotional place and with a clearer understanding of its role than it had in the beginning, then it is hard to judge what happened as inappropriate or wrong. Remember this is about how the horse feels, not how the human feels. If I can get a good change in a short time by using a strong feel or achieve the same result over a much longer time using much less pressure, I get it done sooner rather than later. I don’t feel it is fair to leave a horse feeling crappy any longer than necessary just because I don’t like using more pressure. I’m not saying it is wrong to do less and take longer if that is where your skill level is, but I am not letting my horse flounder any longer than I have to simply because I want to avoid being firmer and clearer.

The reason most people come to a clinic is because the things they have been doing with their horse are not getting the results they have been seeking. An owner puts trouble in their horse and leaves it there until it becomes habitual, then gets upset if a trainer has to apply more pressure than they would like to get the horse to think of changing their idea and behaviour. They look at the trainers as being cruel and aggressive but don’t see fault in themselves for creating the situation in the first place and leaving their horses troubled for days, weeks, and years.

Horses don’t care about how much pressure we use provided there is clarity and quieter/calmer emotions at the end. Horses don’t care how they got there, just that they feel better because of it. So a horse does not carry the worry that pressure might induce any longer than it takes for the change of thought to come through. Once the change of thought occurs the emotions are quelled and clarity is obtained. A horse does not fixate on the applied pressure any longer than that – whether it is barely perceptible or highly charged. The amount of pressure required to get a change is not what is important to a horse. The pressure only becomes a problem if we don’t use it with enough clarity to change a thought or if we use more than necessary to change a thought. You only have to watch horses interacting in the paddock to realize that it is not pressure that matters, but the clarity at the end.

It is very human to want to make sure our horses are calm and relaxed all the time. We want them to like us, so we don’t want to be the source of their trouble. I applaud this notion and try hard to work in that way. However, I don’t believe we do our horses any favours by allowing our desire to be their friend and not upset them with their need for clarity and confidence in following our idea. It never is and never should be about us.

Photo: I was in Germany earlier in the year, I worked with Simone Carlson. She using pressure with feel to help this horse overcome its fear of crossing a tarpaulin.

22/10/2024

The more I read this, the more I think about how hands change over time. Early on, sometimes we need to exaggerate. That means I can take quite a strong hold for a short period of time, when I'm teaching the horse to carry himself and not pull/lean on me. As he learns what I'm asking, the hands get light and used only for reminders. Doing too little can be as bad as doing too much. As trainers, we teach the horse how to carry himself. We teach him how to navigate difficult terrain with us on his back. Without that guidance, we will never get the athletic potential he holds, undeveloped. It is a dance that depends on softness, giving to pressure and sometimes making larger corrections briefly, as needed. Once the foundation is laid, in english riding, we begin to teach that they can come into our hands and trust that that connection is something fluid, following and supportive. We must NEVER use them as punishment in their mouth. That is probably the main reason we start horses in rope hackamores. You can make the big corrections there. When you've got them going well in that, the bit has less of a job to do for major corrections. That's why I love the cradle bit. If the horse gives softly to the rope halter nose, the bit never really kicks in. It makes horses lighter and lighter.

21/10/2024

Well said. A truly wonderful partnership with a horse takes a lot of dedication to gaining knowledge, then learning how to put it into practice. Get access to wonderful teachers who have spent decades perfecting their skills and learn from them before they are gone. If you feel it's too much work, then perhaps a different hobby is a better path. But if you eat, sleep and breath horses like I do....make the effort to be great with them.

Training and lessons are interesting in the sense that you are buying a service, but it isn’t really a passive thing you can “allow” to happen. Not if you want to be successful anyway.

You can spend thousands, kajillions even, and make no progress, or have a horse go home and revert right back to how they were before you sent them off to training.

You can spend hour after hour with the best teachers, and get the same lesson time after time if you don’t put in the work. That means really taking stock of yourself- what do I need to do to make this information mine? Is it a fitness plan? More self awareness? Is my mind frame getting in the way? Am I getting bored, tuned out, offended, mad, depressed, and how are those affecting my ability to learn? Am I really and truly and honestly trying, or am I just coasting?

Some people have every resource, all the money, all the time, and are just getting by, making an appearance in the arena when the weather is good and making very little true progress. Some folks will drive hours with a beat up truck and trailer and a $500 horse to learn, and sit on the rail til the sun goes down to keep learning.

Some folks are tourists. Some are true students of the horse. The real students are not passively receiving a service, they are making the best of every opportunity to learn and grow through personal reflection and hard work.

Photo by Jasmine Cope

08/10/2024

THIS is the difference between teaching a horse confidence and emotional control versus "flooding" and "punishment" techniques.