Feel Goes Two Ways

I think everybody agrees that having a good feel is a pre-requisite to being a good horse person. There is probably no argument that being aware of the subtleties of communication between a rider and a horse and knowing how to adjust with appropriate feel is something we should all aspire towards. And if there are people who don’t agree, they are probably not reading this page.

I think the hardest part of having good feel is not in presenting it to a horse, but in listening to the feel the horse presents to us.

Humans are talkers. Our primary form of communication is through speech and writing. Words are our tools of choice when it comes to presenting ideas, directing movement, and expressing emotion. If a horse were to think about how humans communicate with words, they would probably think it is a mystical and spiritual form of language.

But with horses it’s different. They emote through body language. To a horse, feel is so easy and obvious – it’s like breathing to them. Sounds make up only the tiniest fraction of a horse’s communication options. And they are hopeless at interpreting sounds and turning them into action. When you teach a horse to trot at hearing the word “trot”, he may give you a trot, but the only trot you get is the trot he offers. You can’t tell a horse to try “extended trot” or “working trot” or “collected trot”. It’s not within a horse’s ability to decipher complex sounds and turn them into complex actions. When we talk to horses, it’s mostly just babbling to them.

Furthermore, horses are incapable of interpreting the meaning of a sound in context. For example, when we say the words “meet” and “meat” they will have the same meaning to a horse irrespective of the context we use. But humans know precisely how to place different meanings to the words by how we use them in the context of a sentence. 

Yet when it comes to body language, a horse can differentiate between subtle changes such as the energy when we approach a horse in anger versus when we approach it in a welcoming fashion. A horse can’t differentiate between sounds by their context, but it can differentiate between body language or feel by its context.

However, when horses talk through body language and feel, it is mostly just babbling to us because our brains are more highly tuned to words. We notice the big changes in body language, just as a horse may hear the word “trot”. But we don’t understand the subtle forms of body language, just as a horse doesn’t understand the words “collected trot”.

We are really poor at interpreting the different meaning of body language and putting it in context. For example, many people can’t distinguish the difference when a horse licks and chews because it is relaxed or processing a thought or is highly stressed. We tend to just assume licking and chewing have one single meaning. But it doesn’t. It has different meanings depending on the context. Likewise, a horse with half-closed eyes could be stressed or relaxed, or shut down. A horse that yawns could be displaying stress or relaxation. The meanings of these behaviours all depend on the context.

So a horse can’t separate the meaning of the words “meet” and “meat” and a human can’t separate the meaning of a relaxed yawn and stressed yawn.

My point is that the hardest part of feel is feeling the language of the horse, and not simply presenting our intent to a horse through feel. We generally have more trouble reading feel than we do offering feel. We are pretty good at having our say, but not listening to horses having their say.

This is why science has such a long way to go before it becomes useful to the training process. It has not yet developed the tools to analyze and decipher the feel of the horse in context. On the other hand, good horse people are much better at this. People may not hear everything a horse has to say, but we keep trying and our degree of deafness is diminishing as we learn.

Working with horses inevitably involves two-way communication between a horse and a human. There is a constant discussion. Even when you think a horse is doing nothing, he is talking. It takes considerable feel to be good at hearing the stream of discussion coming from our horses and requires thousands of hours of working with horses to develop. Most of what horses express is beyond the sophistication of present scientific methodology to observe. But one day that may change.