Category: the horse’s mind

Categories
attention philosophy the horse's mind training

How to find the best horse in the world

Every horse wants to be the best horse in the world.

I have argued this case in the past with my people who believe that some horses are just mean and lots of horses just want to survive, but I think better of them than that- I think that every horse wants to be the best horse in the world.

If they could overcome their physical constraints and their emotional concerns your horse would definitely be the best horse in the world. Then you’d be happy because your horse was the best horse in the world and they would be happy because they were the best horse in the world and it would be a very good situation for everyone involved.

So why has this situation not arisen for all of us with our horses? Often I think it’s because we don’t know how to show them what being the best horse in the world involves, sometimes it is because they physically can’t do the things we are asking them for.

Cash having a roll in the snow, sticking his tongue out
Trying hard to be the best horse in the world.

I think there is benefit to taking this attitude- it gives me a very positive outlook on the horses I am working with and helps me stay focussed on clarity in my work and on looking for what is important to the horse I am working with. I also always give a horse the benefit of the doubt as regards their physical capacity- if I think there may be a physical problem I will try to find a solution for it before I push the horse harder to do something they aren’t capable of. That doesn’t mean not working them at all and it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop handling them in the way I always do, but if I suspect they may be being prevented by pain then finding a way of discovering what the problem is and how to resolve it will be my first priority. I would rather have a horse who I had confirmed to be sound and have wasted a bit of money and a few weeks when we could have been working harder than to try and force the issue with a horse who was uncomfortable and risk causing both physical and emotional problems.

There is a difference between a horse trying and not being able to do something that is asked of them and not wanting to- in the latter case the horse has spent too long not understanding what is being asked of them or not understanding why it is being asked of them. After a while the cue is likely to either become something they ignore or it will them anxious or grumpy. If they don’t know what they are being asked for but they are still trying to find it, then you can usually find a new way of making it clearer – break the problem down into smaller pieces and make sure that there isn’t something else which is setting the horse up to fail before they start. For example, if I was asking a horse to load into a horsebox but they didn’t lead up really well, I would need to fix the leading before I started working on the loading. This is usually a case of patience, experimentation and lateral thinking.

It is more difficult to explain to a horse who has given up on searching for an answer why they should start to try again. There are a lot of different ways of explaining the “why” part and  you will have to think through what you are happy with- some people favour a “because you will have a tasty treat” other people feel that “because I said so” is reason enough. I fall further into the second camp- partly for reasons I have explained elsewhere – for a horse I am working with the “why” they should look for an answer is that if they make a try towards what I’m asking  them for ( or in the case of a shut down horse a try of any kind ) their life is going to be very comfortable, whereas if they decide to ignore what I’m asking for, they will probably find things getting quite energetic and hectic and they might had to work hard for a while. Then I will give them some time to think and set the question up again, to see whether they are inclined to try. If they aren’t, then I probably need to do more to make it hard for them to ignore the request or ignore me. I never want to make a horse anxious or bothered, but if it comes to a choice between doing something that gets their attention and makes them a little concerned about me for a moment and not getting their attention, I will always choose the former.

The question of finding the will to try is so important to realising your horse’s potential- they can’t become light, or soft or willing until they start looking for what you are asking them for and they won’t learn to try harder if you don’t reward the tries they give you. It is very easy to get a really great step and instead of stopping, taking a break and maybe quitting for the day, you ask for just one more step. Then the horse thinks they must have done the wrong thing and starts trying everything else instead. This is, so far as I can tell, something everybody does from time to time and we are fortunate that our horses let us off from these kinds of mistake and keep on working at getting along with us. But it does make sense when you think about it- after all, they are trying to be the best horse in the world.

Categories
emotion energy philosophy the horse's mind training

Understanding life and energy in horsemanship

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.

Categories
leadership philosophy the horse's mind training trust

The leader on the leadrope

Having established what our horses don’t want from us, what can we bring to the table that our horses might need? I’m ignoring, for the time being the basics of feed and care, and thinking in the slightly narrower terms of the relationship with have with our horses and how we behave around them.

For me the single biggest thing we have to offer is leadership and that is a slightly tricky term. The problem is that our notion of “leadership” has been poisoned by people who name themselves as our leaders. The politicians and captains of industry to whom the term “leader” is most liberally applied are not the people who we might choose to be lead by. If more of the people who manage us in our working lives were genuine leaders then Dilbert would not be one of the most popular cartoon strips in the world. Consequently whenpeople start talking about leadership, most of us think of cold, distant, self-serving individuals who are quick to drop a colleague into trouble to protect themselves. That is what our current political and media culture has taught us they are.

Riding down a hill.
When I'm riding Zorro on terrain like this steep hill ( it is steep, honest, the camera angle flattens it ) I am trusting him to balance himself and take care of getting us down the hill, he is trusting me that this is the hill we are supposed to be going down.

But that isn’t what a leader is. A real leader is a person that you follow because you want to, because you feel that when they are in charge then things are going to work out fine. I suspect many of us will know a person like this, whether it is the friend who leads you off on wild adventures or the manager who makes work a pleasure and always brings out the best in you, that is how it feels to have a good leader.

So what does it take to be a good leader? I’m still working on this, but I have some ideas that I definitely believe are important parts of the picture.

A leader is consistent- they respond in the same way to the same things. If you are well lead, you don’t have to worry that something that was alright yesterday is going to get you shouted at today. It is very hard to to trust a person who is unpredictable.

A leader is reliable, this comes from consistency but takes it a little further- you know that if a problem comes up you can count on a genuine leader to help and support you in solving it. A really good leader is unlikely to solve problems for you, instead they will enable you to solve them for yourself.

A leader is conscious of who they lead – a good leader will not push you beyond the limit of your ability. They may however push you beyond what you believe to be the limit of your ability, so that you can learn more of what you are capable of. To be able to do that requires genuine understanding of the people who are being lead.

A leader takes responsibility. This is particularly important in horsemanship- ultimately a successful leader makes the decisions. This is the part that people who want power see, the right to make decisions and take control of others, but without any of the other elements I have mentioned here. They do not distinguish between leadership and control. But responsibility is more than simply making a decision at your whim, it is having the vision and awareness to make the right decision for everyone you are leading.

The thread that runs through all of this is trust. A good leader is trustworthy and – this is the part that often gets left out – they also trust the people under their leadership. A leader may have overall responsibility for direction, but they also rely on those they are leading to fulfil their own responsibilities. I expect that I will have a lot more to say about trust in future because I think it is very important in horsemanship and in life, but for now I will say that a leader who is not trusted by those they claim to lead is no leader at all.

If you have ever been well lead or part of a really solid team, then you will probably have been aware that by knowing your own role and by trusting that everyone else was fulfilling their roles you were able to excel in your own area. It is also empowering not to have to worry about every single thing, to know that the person in charge can be relied on to make good decisions and you don’t have to spend all your time doubting or second-guessing them. Many things become someone else’s problem and you only have to concern yourself with the problems that you have to deal with directly.

This is where I think that leadership is so important to horses. For a horse, feeling that you have to make decisions about things the whole time is a stressful situation to be in. If we can show them that we are a good enough leader that they don’t need to worry about every little thing that happens then they are able to relax and think about what we are asking them to do. This is natural to them – in a herd they will choose to follow the lead of a horse they trust rather than constantly exploring for themselves. The horse’s mind is full of survival strategies that have served them brilliantly over millions of years as a prey animal living out in open grassland. It does not necessarily help them as much in a world of noisy humans, wind-blown litter and fast moving traffic. By building up our relationship so that we are able to say to the horse “that really isn’t your problem, let me worry about that and I’ll let you know what to do” we are offering them a degree of safety and comfort that they would not otherwise have in that situation. That means a lot to horses and to humans.

Categories
emotion philosophy the horse's mind

How to be your horse’s best friend

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.

 

Categories
attention catching groundwork the horse's mind

Catching a reluctant horse

I had done a few sessions with Cash before I bought him – that was how I knew I wanted to buy him – and I knew he could be a little unwilling to be caught. He was very ear shy and he was also worried about going through gates and being ridden, so there were a lot of reasons that he wasn’t keen to be caught. Consequently he wore a halter while he was out and he was usually caught using a scoop of mix and clipping on a rope when he went to eat it.

When he came to stay the first thing I did when I put him out was to take his halter off and let him loose to explore his new field for a while. Later in the day I came back with a halter and he allowed himself to be caught almost straight away. I was impressed, so I gave him a pony treat and let him go again. After a minute I went to catch him again. This time it took an hour and a half and I had to go through the whole process of teaching him to be caught. As you can imagine, I was very pleased I had decided to test that.

Setting Cash up to be caught.
At least he was facing me at this point- a good start.

What I do with a horse who doesn’t want to be caught is to spend a while following them around. I don’t chase them, but as long as they want to walk away I follow them. If they want to stop I stop, if they give me an ear or look at me I step away. The moment their attention leaves me ( if they start grazing or looking at other horses or whatever ) I start approaching again. As I mentioned previously holding the horse’s attention is the starting point for any work you do with their mind.

After a while they figure out that they can approach me and I move off, which gives them some control over the situation- as far as the horse is concerned there is something going on that they have a part in, rather than me just trying to do something to them. Fairly soon the horse will start coming up to you to sniff you and investigate you at this point and be ready to accept you in their space.

How I progress depends a lot on why I think the horse is choosing not to be caught- as with many situation where a horse chooses not to do something, their decision making is on a continuum between “I have better things to do” and “I am afraid.” My aim is for them to be in the middle, where they are unafraid and want to spend time with me.

With a horse who doesn’t want to be caught because they don’t feel like it, I will tend to push them a little when they decide to move away from me- if they want to face me or approach me, I will back off and take off the pressure, but if they want to walk off then I will perhaps change things so they have to trot or canter instead. At the very least I want there to be no benefit in moving away, so I certainly need to make sure that they don’t get to eat or rest when they aren’t paying me attention. A consequence of this is that if you have a large field and you don’t want to spend a long time and get worn out, you might want to do this in a restricted area at first. You could also do it from the back of another horse, but if you’re placed to do that you probably don’t need my advice in the first place. Likewise it is easier to work on it if they aren’t out with a herd of other horses – you don’t need to do anything different if horses are around, but they are likely to get in the way, try to push the horse you are aiming to catch around and generally make the process take longer.

Cash was afraid, so I worked at the other extreme, trying to set things up so he didn’t feel that he needed to run away from me. I spent a lot of time on my approaches watching his balance and looking for him preparing to leave,  then just waiting on that point so he didn’t have to. By this point I had his attention and he quite wanted to approach me so if he started to lean away or prepare to turn and I backed off a little he would often relax a little and maybe turn back towards me.

When he would stay still when I approached, I didn’t go straight for haltering him. I spent a while walking most of the way past him and just petting him on the rump then moving slowly forwards, rubbing on him. That gave him plenty of space to move if he needed me to and made my approach less threatening to him while also making my company pleasant. The first couple of times I did this, I walked away after I reached his shoulder to give him time to think over what had just happened.

Once I could stand at his shoulder I would rub on his neck and mane, still facing backwards and reaching under with my left hand to pass the halter up to my right hand without stopping rubbing on him. I was very careful and gentle with this and careful to avoid his ears as any contact with those bothered him. Whenever we made what seemed to me like a significant positive change I would give him a pony treat and walk away. I don’t hold a strong opinion on the use of treats with horses- sometimes with some horses it’s a good idea, other times with other horses it’s a bad one. If the horse is afraid and they’ll take the food then it is probably helpful as long as they are still able to give you their attention rather than obsessing on treats.

A few times during the process, especially as I got closer to having the halter on, Cash got concerned and had to leave but each time it was quicker to get back to where we had been and once he was caught and got treats and came in for his evening feed it was meaningful to him and it only took a few more sessions until I could walk up to him in the field and catch him. He’s still wary if you change anything, though – if I have his leather travelling halter rather than our regular rope halter he’s decidedly sceptical- but in general he’s now very happy to be caught.

Categories
tack and equipment the horse's mind

How tight should you fit that noseband?

Anybody who has bought a bridle in this country in the last few years will be aware of the baffling selection of nosebands available to you. In fact one would probably need to go to a western tack store to find one without and there aren’t a whole lot of those in the home counties.

The main purpose of most noseband designs is to hold the horse’s mouth closed. In some cases there is a safety reason for this- if your horse somersaults at speed and their mouth is open then there is a risk of a broken jaw, so for hunting or riding cross-country there is a clear and sensible reason for having a tightly fitted noseband. Most of the time, however, that isn’t how I see them used – mostly they are utilised to stop the horse opening their mouth in response to the bit.

To my mind, this is using a physical mechanism to prevent the horse expressing their feelings about the bit, using physical resistance to counteract the horse’s physical resistance. I have no disagreement with the use of bits – they are a great tool that allows us amazingly subtle communication with our horses  – but I place a lot of emphasis on teaching a horse to carry the bit and to be comfortable and willing following the rein. If a horse is gaping their mouth open when the bit is applied or getting their  tongue over it they are showing a lack of understanding.

Zorro's head, from horseback.
You can see that the bit is not hanging from the bridle, Zorro is carrying it on his tongue.

If you are riding with a bit then it is so much easier to develop relaxation in the mouth and on through the rest of the body if the horse understands the bit and follows it willingly.  This is part of the foundation that every riding horse should have and unfortunately it is one of the parts that is missing most frequently. When a horse is really carrying the bit correctly they will lift it and hold it in place with their tongue, putting it in the most comfortable place in their mouth and it is then easy for them to respond to the most subtle signals. It seems to me that a horse who is doing that is really taking responsibility for their end of the rein so as long as I take equal responsibility for my end we have a lot of communication available to us.

I don’t use a noseband at all – this is something that I take from the western side of my riding background – but I know a lot of people like the look of them on their horse. That is as good a reason as any to use a piece of equipment; by all means have it there but leave it loose and treat it as decoration.

 

 

Categories
groundwork the horse's mind training

Keep your distance

Without wanting to get all Mark Rashid on you ( and without claiming to be a hundredth of the horseman that he is ) I used to be a martial artist at one time. Not a particularly good one, but I did train diligently for a long time, which is an excellent substitute for talent. One thing that is ever so important to a martial artist is the distance between you and your opponent- if you get too close they can easily attack you before you see it coming. The starting point in the art I learned that you wanted to be far enough away that you could see the whole of your opponent without having to move your eyes.

I have no interest in taking such an adversarial pose with my horse- of course not- but that doesn’t mean that I want them any closer than that. This is something I have really had to work on over the years because horses tend to want to be quite close in to you. This isn’t just a consequence of excessive friendliness, although if a horse has had a few pony treats or a lot of scratchies they might want to be near you for those reasons ( and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as they will move away when you ask them to.)  The more relevant  reason is that once they are confident that you aren’t going to harm them then they will start to explore whether or not they can push on you. Most of the time horses figure out the world and their relation to it through two questions:

  • Do I need to run away from it?
  • Can I push on it?

Very often one will start a groundwork exercise perfectly positioned and end up a lot closer to the horse than one planned to, they are masters of controlling their position relative to yours- that is what millions of years of evolution as herd animals have taught them.

Zorro disengaging
Here I'm far enough away from Zorro that I can see what is going on with his whole body.

It is important to maintain that distance, however, because that is what gives us the bigger picture. Details are all-important in horsemanship and we need to be able to see how the horse is carrying their head, what shape their body is in, where their feet are landing and how they are carrying their tail. It is very often once we get caught up too closely in what one part of the horse is doing that we lose track of the whole picture and whatever exercise we are working on goes straight out the window. The need to work at a useful distance from the horse is one of the reasons I favour a 12′ line rather than the shorter lead rope that many people in the UK appear to favour.

There is a secondary benefit as well, one that is particularly valuable with a more unruly horse- nobody ever got bitten, kicked, struck or trodden on by a horse that was a long way away from them. If you are in any doubt about how a horse is likely to behave, then you would be wise to keep them at a safe distance until you are sure that they don’t regard you as an opponent.

Categories
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.

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attention the horse's mind training

The Starting Point

As this is my first post on this site, I thought I would begin at the beginning by talking about the first thing I establish any time I work with a horse. This is so important and the source of so many problems that I will doubtless come back to it in future, but I’ll start by talking about it here.

You have to have the horse’s attention.

When I am working with a horse I want to be able to work with their thought, to get them focussed on what I am asking them for so they are able to do it. If they are busy looking out into the distance, trying to see what their buddies are up to in the field or otherwise zoning me out then I’m simply not going to be able to get any sense of them. I need to have their attention from the start and I need to keep it the whole time.

When I am working on the ground I will start this by just doing something whenever the horse begins to tune me out. The minute they start paying attention to anything other than me, I will do it again, the moment they give me their full attention ( putting their eyes and ears on me ) then I stop. What I do depends on the horse- often it is sufficient to just stamp my foot, slap my thigh or kick some sand around, sometimes I might need to pick up my energy a little and perhaps move them around until they are listening to me rather than looking off into the distance.

Cash gives me his attention.
Here Cash is paying close attention to what I am asking him for. Or possibly to the camera. It's the right general direction at least.

Horses can be very determined that they need to pay more attention to what is going around them than they do to what the human handling them is asking them for and it can sometimes take a lot to get them paying attention to you – sometimes you have to be ready to effectively say “you think what is going on out there is scary, check out how scary I can be.” It can actually be helpful if the horse isn’t completely one hundred percent certain that you won’t eat them.

I probably lost a few readers there for being deliberately mean to ponies, but the simple fact is that if you want to see something really scary go to a show and watch the horses who are fascinated by everything around them and paying no attention whatsoever to the human on the end of the rope. Any time I see a human in a situation where they are relying on pure luck to keep them safe with their horse I find that nervewracking. There are also a lot of fairly anthropomorphic ideas about how horses see the world.  As a human in the modern world we are infrequently scared and we find it quite unpleasant. Horses are fear-oriented animals and they spend a lot of their time spooking at things and running away from them. It seems to me that because of this and because they live very much in the present, horses are only briefly affected by most things that spook them and if a horse is determined not to offer me any attention then I am quite happy to use that response to change their mind about that.

There are many ways that you can lose your horse’s attention when you start working with them and it will happen from time to time. One of the most common is where you work on a pattern for a while – either on the ground or in the saddle – and the horse learns the pattern and then doesn’t need to be paying attention in order to perform it. This is tricky because it is often the point at which the pattern starts to look really good and because much like our equine partners, we are creatures of pattern and it’s easy to do the same set of things any time we do groundwork or schooling with our horses.

The best way to avoid falling into these patterns is to be aware of them. Once you have the basic steps of a form or shape then start changing them – can you do it step by step? Can you change direction and reverse it? Can you get half way through and reverse it? Can you change one element of it but leave the rest the same? By challenging yourself like this you make life more interesting for yourself and your horse and you have a much better chance of holding their attention.