Category: emotion

A Question Of Trust

Riding Iris in the field — Riding Iris on a summer evening.

At the start of the summer I bought a new horse- Iris is a beautiful grey mare with a bit of dressage in her parentage and a genuinely wonderful nature. She didn’t have much experience, which was good news from my perspective because it is often easier to build training from the ground up, so for most of the summer we have been working on our schooling and learning to understand one another. By the end of the summer I felt she was ready to start going out on the trail and we also made our way to our first horsemanship clinic.

One thing that both of these activities have in common is that they took Iris a long way out of her comfort zone – on the trail she is away from her usual home and her known space, at the clinic we had to pass terrifying donkeys of doom ( no, I’m not really sure what they had said to upset her ) then work in a large indoor arena with ten other horses cantering around.

What I noticed as we worked in these environments was that when I felt Iris’ anxiety pick up, I was taking control more, shortening my reins a little and directing her feet to make it clear where I wanted her to be going. As my horse got more anxious, I would be working harder to direct her and sooner or later we’d get into a dispute about where we should be going and whether or not we were in imminent danger.

During the clinic, Martin talked about how he uses the rein; always keeping in mind his goal of having a light, soft, riding horse he will ride on a long rein, ask with a subtle cue and then back that up with a firm bump and release if the horse chooses to ignore the initial ask. That is essentially the whole process he uses, he never tries to hold the horse in position and he doesn’t pull on the rein, he just teaches them to carry themselves the way he wants them to be going on a soft rein, so he can keep a hand free for roping or working other horses.

As I worked on developing this type of feel I found that all our work got much easier and that Iris was less emotional in situations that had bothered her before. I realised that when I was picking up the rein as she got more concerned I was actually trying to pre-empt something which wasn’t actually happening, but my expectations were making her think that there was something up, resulting in me creating exactly the kind of problems I wanted to prevent. The whole thing was like the plot of a complicated time travel story.

The outcome has been that since the clinic I have concentrated really hard on not picking up the rein until something has actually happened. If I see something that I think my horse might worry about, I get ready to respond if I need to, but I don’t actually do anything – except maybe to rub on her – and I keep the reins long.

This is difficult for me- I like to feel I am in control – but it turns out that when I stop trying to take over every time I imagine something that might bother my horse, I very rarely need to take over at all. Iris is very green as a trail horse, but she has a great heart and a steady nature so although we do have the odd spook and sometimes she does decide that it might be time to go for an unrequested trot, she comes back to me beautifully when I do pick up the rein.

It is almost as though the more I trust her to do the right thing, the easier it is for her to trust me.

emotion energy training

What are you practicing?

“What you practice,” I remember Tom Widdicombe telling me, “is what you get good at.”

This is undeniable, in fact it is fundamentally obvious. What else would one get good at? After all, practice is how we get better at things. If you want to improve any skill, just keep practicing it.

But Tom wasn’t talking about me at that point, he was talking about my horse. Being creatures of pattern and habit, horses learn by practice as well. If something has worked for them one day, they will probably try it again the next. Before you know it, they have developed a pattern that will take some effort – and probably cause them some concern for them – to change it. So if you give your horse time to practice something, expect them to do that more in the future.

One day you might be working your horse on the ground and they are in a slightly flighty mood, pinging around on the line and overreacting to everything around them. You ask them to move off and they go flying round at top speed, maybe throwing some bucks or other silliness in while they go. When that happens, what has your horse been practicing?

A palomino pony, in the snow, holding a glove. — If your horse isn’t practicing bringing you gloves in the cold, maybe you need to re-evaluate your training strategy.

“Wait,” I hear you say, “that wasn’t me asking my horse to do that, they put all the nonsense in, I just wanted them to do a nice calm circle.” That is all true but all the time they are doing their own thing, how much do you figure in their thinking? Are they practicing working with you?

If I ask a horse to work and they decide to put way more forward in than I wanted, there are a few different things I might do depending on the horse and the situation, but they all have one goal: Get the horse’s attention, so that they stop practicing doing their own thing and practice being with me instead.

If you have a bit of space around you and your horse wants to go gallivanting off ahead then you can just walk out behind them. Unless they have the art of dropping their shoulder on the rope and running off, which thankfully very few horses do, they will have to come around and catch you up, allowing you to reset your relative positions and helping them to understand that charging off is harder work than listening to you.

You can also just turn them to a stop – where you ask with a gentle pressure on the lead rope for them to turn to face you and stop running forwards – and then walk towards them and slightly to the other side ( so if you were on the left rein you will walk to their left) asking them to move their shoulders out of the way and turn to move along with you, staying on your right the whole time. This is a good way of changing the rein and a really good way of bringing a horse’s attention back to you if they are inclined to keep thinking about everything else.

The other thing I might do is to use a clear up-and-down bump on the rope, which sends a wave down to the horse. This tends to cause them to throw their nose in the air and stop, sometimes bending to a stop, other times just stopping. Please note that it is an up-and-down movement, I’m not pulling on the rope, and that I don’t use heavy bull-clips on my ropes and wouldn’t use this technique if I did. This is a really effective technique for a horse that is determined to get ahead of what you are asking for.

With any of these techniques you can interrupt the horse’s thought and start them thinking about what you want instead of just running about doing their own thing. You’ll probably need to do the same thing a few times, but as long as you are getting an effect, stick with it and they will start to change and pay more attention to you. You’ll probably need to keep things low energy for a little while so they don’t get emotional again, but often it doesn’t take long at all to start getting a lot more interaction going on. The more they practice being with you and staying with you and the more they find that there is calm and quiet and comfort in doing that, the more they will seek you out and the easier all your work will become. Relaxation and calm are things that can be practiced too and the more of those that your horse gets to enjoy, the more likely they are to be in that mindset from the start of your sessions together.

emotion energy philosophy the horse's mind training

Understanding life and energy in horsemanship

Post author By the-pragmatic-horseman
Post date 26th January 2012
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Like any activity in which one can gain expertise, horse training has its own terminology and among the people I’ve learned with a critically important concept is “life” or “energy. A lot of people hear these words and think that they sound almost mystical, a key to the magical touch of the horse whisperer accessible only through years of dedicated training at the Jedi Academy on Coruscant.

Now I would hate to disappoint anybody, so you might not want to read on at this point lest I ruin your illusions, but ( from my limited but growing experience ) life and energy aren’t really like that.

The two terms can generally be used quite interchangeably and the way I understand them is really a matter of how you move and carry yourself and how you feel about doing that. Imagine you are sitting in a chair in your living room and you want to read the newspaper but it is just out of reach, so you get out of the chair step over to it in a leisurely way and return to your comfortable seat. That is a very low energy movement. Now imagine that you are walking to the station and you are running a little late- you’re still walking but now you’re walking briskly and with a lot of intent, you know exactly where you’re going and you’re determined to get there before the train leaves. The difference between the two is the amount of life or energy in your movement. You might think of energy in this sense as being simply the amount of energy you are putting into moving.

Horses, being living creatures, also have life and energy but as they are herd animals that largely communicate through body language they are very sensitive to it and naturally tend to reflect the energy that other creatures around them carry, particularly horses but they can learn to do it with humans too. There’s a good reason for this in terms of survival – if a predator appears and one horse starts running, the last horse in the herd to pick up that change is the one most likely to be caught by the predator. Of course, being able to read the energy of fellow herd-members is also valuable for getting along in a herd in general, in fact it’s the major way that horses communicate among themselves, so when we are able to tap into it that can really help them to understand us.

When we’re working with our horses on the ground, it is quite easy to use this reflective quality of horses to change their way of going by changing our own energy. If I want my horse to change from walk to trot on the line ( or at liberty ) I can just change my way of moving – increase the amount of life in my body – and they will make that transition. At first a horse might not know that doing that has any significance, especially if they are accustomed to humans and our tendency to fluctuate our energy arbitrarily, but once we start to consistently use this, they pick it up easily.

Zorro flinging himself into the air — Too much energy!

In the saddle, the same applies – by changing our energy level before we apply a direct cue, we can teach the horse to follow our energy without needing us to use our legs and hands or only needing them to add finesse or information about how exactly we want to go. This is an area where the principles are simple and yet they can be applied with limitless depth and subtlety if you are willing to keep working with them. I know I have only scratched the surface of this in my own horsemanship but then Ray Hunt, who took this further than anyone else I’m aware of, claimed that he was still only scratching the surface; this is one of the places that horsemanship can truly be considered an art.

Communication through energy goes in two directions – if something makes our horse emotional then that puts life in their body which can be a little nervewracking for us. My cob, for example, will typically pass pigs in passage. Sideways. They really bother him and that emotion puts life into him to a much greater degree than me putting my leg on ever does. When your horse has more energy than you can comfortably deal with the important thing is to avoid putting even more into the system. I have heard it described as being like a cup containing two liquids, one for the horse’s energy the other for the rider’s. Ideally we would like that to be half and half but if the horse is running at 9/10ths energy and the rider tries to put in their half, the cup is going to overflow, so if your horse is putting more energy in, you probably want to put a lot less in. At the same time, if a horse has a lot of energy then there is no point in trying to repress that- horses have a fundamental need to move their feet when they are emotional and if we try and stop them we create problems for the horse and for us. In that situation I prefer to just direct the life the horse is making available to me so they are moving, but they are moving in the way that I’m asking them to. The combination of movement and listening to my decisions rather than making their own can really help the horse to relax. Rather than trying to stop them I might pick a place where I will offer them a stop and then take them round in different figures and keep offering the stop at that place. When the horse is ready, they will choose to stop there and that will be more meaningful to them than if I try to close them down and make them stop.

At the other end of the scale, sometimes you need to put more life in – traditionally this is what we do with our legs and maybe with a crop or other secondary reinforcement. This is a bit like putting one’s foot on the accelerator – it gives us the movement that we can use to direct. If you are sat on a horse who isn’t moving, trying to steer them, then all you are really doing is pulling on your horse- you can’t direct life you don’t have.

My goal, ultimately, is to be in a place where the life in my body is connected to the life in my horse’s. That sounds a bit like I might be getting back to that mystical place that I was claiming to debunk and there are things that I see other people do with horses that look a lot like magic to me. But then the things I do now would have looked like magic to me a few years ago and I’m only scratching the surface- there is always room to go deeper.

I will certainly return to this topic as my understanding grows – it has many facets and lies at the heart of the communication that we can share with our horses.

emotion philosophy the horse's mind

How to be your horse’s best friend

Post author By the-pragmatic-horseman
Post date 2nd October 2011
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In a way a lot of people interested in horses, particularly people who have got interested in natural horsemanship, got here because, at heart, we want to be friends with our horses. We want to them to feel they can trust us, rely on us and to like us – we are social animals, just as they are, and wanting to be liked is a big part of that.

Befriending a pony — Like many people, there is a corner of me that just wants to be friends with ponies everywhere. And when I say "corner", it's pretty much all of me.

This keys into one of the trickiest intellectual problems we run into when we are thinking about our time with horses. The idea that a horse might think enough like us that they see social relationships and friendships in the way that we do is, at heart, anthropomorphism. So many difficulties that we create for our horses derive from anthropomorphic thinking – maybe most of us these days don’t think that our horse is trying to get one over us or behaving in a particular way because they know it will annoy us ( horses are never doing those things, they are only ever being horses ) but is it really any less anthropomorphic to think that our horse wants to be our friend or wants to play with us? If we are going to get rid of the negative anthropomorphism, we really need to get rid of the positive as well for our position to make sense.

The simple truth is that we cannot know how our horses feel about us, what they find interesting or boring or even whether they have any concepts equivalent to interest or boredom – what would it mean for an animal that would choose to be grazing most of the time to be bored? The way they physically perceive the world is unimaginable to our minds adapted for our own sensory system.

In fact when you consider that, it’s a miracle that we manage to have as much fellow feeling with our horses as we do. It is quite possible to have very subtle and reliable lines of communication between a horse and a person that both absolutely understand. This is interspecies communication at what I consider to be a uniquely sophisticated level – I can’t think of any equivalent to the constant contact and feedback that is available between a horse and rider.

To me, a big part of how we make that work is about finding a line between anthropomorphism and empathy. I don’t want to be attributing human needs or motives on my horse, but I definitely want to make the best guess I can about what they are feeling and where their attention is, to recognise their tries and to give them the benefit of the doubt if I am unsure. I also know that horses need to feel safe and want to feel comfortable and if I can judge how relaxed and how comfortable they are at any given time then I can ensure that when they are with me and we are working together, they are as relaxed and comfortable as possible.

What helps with that is that as social animals, horses are highly communicative- you only have to watch interactions within a herd to see how much they can say with a flick of an ear or a lift of the head. They are always offering us honest feedback in their terms about what is going on and although I don’t believe that a horse would ever believe us to be another horse – that would be weird, wouldn’t it? – we can learn to read horse-to-horse communication and maybe tap into parts of it enough that we can make ourselves understood.

This is a tricky area and one where I think we all have to make our own judgement on where we stand- this post is simply my own take on it. I don’t believe my horses perceive me as a friend or as a herdmate or anything of that type but when we are in the field together they do choose to come over and spend time with me, ask for scratchies and generally distract me from whatever tasks I’m trying to achieve. If I go out of sight when they are in a stable they will often whicker to me on my return and seem keen to interact with me. That is the way I want things to be- I definitely want my horse to feel comfortable in my company and it opens the door to a lot of the training I seek to do.

For my part, I love my horses – I think of them as my friends and enjoy their company more than that of many humans. I also constantly anthropomorphise them, having one-sided conversations with what I imagine them to be saying, attributing human characteristics to them and generally being totally irrational about the whole affair. Horses will do that to you. But underneath the jokes and nonsense, I am very conscious that for all the ideas I have of what they might be thinking if they were people, the fairest thing I can do if I want to offer them human friendship is to treat them as horses.

emotion the horse's mind training

Emotion and calm

Horses are emotional creatures. Their first response to most new things is an emotional one – usually fear, often turning that into inquisitiveness once they have established that the thing won’t harm them. For many years I used to wonder whether my horse was afraid or defensive or angry in some way until I realised that firstly I will never actually know what emotion the horse is experiencing at this moment and secondly it doesn’t really matter. I may not know whether my horse is angry or afraid – for all we can know there might be no similarity at all between emotions as horses experience them and emotions as we experience them – but it doesn’t change what I do. I need to let them work through the emotion they are experiencing and help them to be calm again.

The place where I begin to work on that is by letting them move – it is absolutely counterproductive to try to stop a horse from moving their feet if they are emotional – but to direct that movement and to ask them to bring their attention back to me. It seems to me that the emotion takes the horse’s mind off what I am asking them to do and gets them thinking more about whatever it is that is causing them to feel that way. By getting them thinking about what I am asking them for ( and importantly by getting them thinking rather than just reacting ) I can break that pattern a little. So I’ll ask for regular changes of direction and typically I won’t put any more energy into the system- I won’t ask them to go faster – but I will let the energy that they have put in drain out by simply waiting for them to come through.

Zorro flings himself in the air — Zorro gets very emotional about the rain- is he angry? Excited? Happy? I have no idea, but I don't want to be sat on him when he does this.

The other part of anything we do with horses is how we react to things as well. I am lucky in that I am very calm and patient by nature so it isn’t too hard for me to avoid getting too involved when a horse gets emotional. This is critically important – if the horse is emotional and I respond in kind then that is very likely to make matters worse as I will effectively be telling them that there is something to be getting emotional about. If I can remain as a calm place that can make my presence much more reassuring for the horse when they are concerned and make my company somewhere they would like to be.

One thing I found helpful when I wanted to get better at being this way for my horses was to think of myself as being part of the environment rather than part of the emotional dynamic the horse has chosen, so I try to imagine that mentally I am more like an oak tree or rocks that the sea washes around. Whatever the horse does happens in the environment around me- if the horse wants to push or pull on me there will be no more benefit to them than if they chose to push or pull on a tree – I may have to do something to change what they are doing, but my plan is simply to keep putting things out the way I would like the horse to respond to them and let the emotions wash away. The quicker that the horse can go back to thinking about what I am asking them for, the sooner they will be able to think clearly again and we can go back to some useful work.