I receive many emails asking for advice on a problem people are having with a horse or for my thoughts and interpretation on something they have observed about a horse. It seems part of the job because I know many trainers have the same experience.
In practical terms, it is almost impossible to offer any advice with confidence to somebody without first-hand experience of them and their horse. Very few issues are black and white and have a single definitive solution. Plus, without knowing the skill level of the owner I would not know where to begin.
At clinics, I get to watch and play with people’s horses and usually gain a pretty good insight into the problems and how I would work towards a solution. But for people and horses that I don’t know, it is potentially dangerous to recommend how to fix a problem.
What I do recommend to everyone is to attempt to figure out the causes of their horse-related issue. Nobody knows a horse better than their owner. So with some analytical thinking, I urge people to play detective. Everyone should channel their inner Sherlock Holmes. Once the causes are known, the solutions often become obvious.
The first step is to become brilliant at observing everything about your horse. Not just the bad behaviour, but observe what happened before the bad behaviour. What happened before what happened happened.
Remember, everything begins with a change of thought. The change of thought always precedes the change in behaviour. So learn to be brilliant at noticing the change of thought. It might be a horse's glance or the slightest change in posture or a change in blinking or asymmetry of the nostrils or a different type of yawn. Take in the whole horse and notice all the changes that accompany the change of thought. Nothing a horse does ever means nothing.
Add them up. How many of those lead to soft, quiet thoughts, and how many to troubled, anxious thoughts? How many are questions your horse has and how many are related to your horse tuning you out?
When you take in what your horse is doing, now take in what your horse thinks and feels when you interrupt what it is doing.
It is one thing to observe an easy-going trot around the arena and think things are going well. But, just as an example, maybe that quiet trot is the result of mental/emotional disconnection. It’s done it a 1000 times and is trotting around the arena on auto-pilot. How do you know it is a trot with focus, clarity and softness or a trot with a horse mentally hiding from the world? You have to ask questions of your horse.
To test how your horse truly feels, interrupt that quiet trot with something that requires it to engage its brain. For example, ask your horse to trot for 5 steps, stop, walk 3 steps, back 4 steps (no halt), then walk forward at 1 km/hr for 6 steps, then trot half a circle counter bent and the other half over flexed to the inside. Mix it up. Do things differently so the work is not easily predictable to your horse.
What felt different? Where was the resistance and where was the softness? How much trouble did the horse experience?
We learn a lot by observing our horse doing what it does. But we learn so much more when we interrupt what it is doing and observe its response to being interrupted.
Another part of channeling your inner Sherlock Holmes is to experiment. Be brave and experiment.
In the most recent post, somebody asked me for advice regarding a horse that leaned heavily when their farrier picked up a foot. I suggested different experiments for them to try in an effort to find out the cause that would lead to a solution. Here are some examples of questions I posed to them and I would ask myself (it is not an exhaustive list) before deciding on a method to fix the problem.
“…. it will depend on why your horse is leaning on him - pain, avoidance, balance issues, etc. Does it do it only for the farrier or when you (or others) pick up a foot? Does it lean instantly the foot is picked up or does it gradually lean heavier and heavier the longer the foot is held in the air? Does it do it for all the feet or only some or only one foot? Does it do it every time? Does it lean on the farrier mainly when taken away from its friends, but is better when another horse is nearby? Does it lean if the farrier makes the horse lift the foot but not lean when the horse volunteers the foot?”
Learning to be good at reading horses is hard. It takes a lot of time, experience, questioning, and humility. We need to accept that what we think our horse is telling us is always a guess because they can’t (or maybe won’t) post it on Twitter. But to ensure it is a well-educated guess requires brilliant observational skills. It requires vigilance to interrupt a horse’s thoughts. And it requires the confidence and gumption to experiment and ask hard questions of our horse and ourselves.
At a clinic in California, Tiny (nickname) stood at one end of the yard for 20 minutes while the sprinkler fired water all over his body and head. There were plenty of other places to stand to avoid the sprinkler, but his thoughts to be at that end of the yard were so strong that not even the discomfort of water spraying at his face could change them. He is such an interesting horse.