Arguably one of the biggest dilemmas people face with their horse is what to do when it gets upset and won’t listen to them. They are faced with this fire-breathing monster that has doubled in size and is ready to gallop over the edge of the world at a moment's notice. Decisions have to be made quickly to prevent pain and injury.
While a horse is in a highly emotionally charged state it is almost impossible to work with it and certainly impossible to teach it anything. The primary goal of a rider or handler is to de-escalate the situation and calm the emotions so that a conversation between horse and human can begin once again.
For most people, the choice is between being the calm, confident, and quiet influence in an effort to bring the horse’s emotions down to zero. Alternatively, you can make yourself even scarier than the object that triggered the tidal wave of emotion with the intent of trying to remind your horse that you are still there and are still important. There are not very many options except those two choices, and you’ll see plenty of examples of both approaches used by professionals and amateurs alike.
So how does a person decide which is right for their horse?
Like most things in horse training, the answer is simple but the application is difficult.
The first thing you have to do is to pinpoint what is the cause of the trouble. You can’t decide whether to do a lot less and be the centre of calmness and tranquility or to do a lot more and become a whirlwind the horse can’t ignore until you are sure what is the trigger for the behaviour. After that, it’s an easy choice.
If we are the cause of the emotional turmoil, then by becoming quieter, more reassuring, and asking less of our horse we can help quell the inner trouble. On the other hand, if something else has provoked the response, then we need to do enough and make ourselves bigger to become more important to the horse than the thing that generated the hysteria.
We can’t help a horse while it is ignoring us and focused on some scary object or activity such as a plastic bag floating across the ground. We can only help it when we are able to talk to it and get a reply in return. So until our horse is checking in with us there is not much we can do except stay out of the way and wait for enough time to pass that the horse calms down. But this is not a viable option most of the time. So we need to intervene with enough pressure to make ourselves important again in order to help our horse recover.
When we first up our energy to be important enough, a horse will be worried about us. We will have its thoughts, but they will hard be thoughts, not soft ones. This is the time to revert to being the centre of peace and tranquility – the Dalai Llama of the horse world so to speak. I would suggest politely and quietly giving a horse a job it knows and understands to allow the conversation between horse and human to be practical and beneficial. Give it a job that doesn’t bother it. Then it is time to continue with the session as if nothing went wrong. The trouble is over and we should carry on as if it never happened.
To be clear, when we are the cause of a horse losing its cool we should try to quell the upset emotions by being calm and quiet and reassuring. But when something else triggers trouble inside a horse, we need to do enough to cause the horse to concentrate on us. It will quickly check in with us with a lot of concern and forget about the original problem. Now that we are the source of the horse’s worry, we should immediately revert to being calm, quiet, and reassuring. We want to make friends and not go to war with our horse.
This is by no means a law or golden rule of horsemanship. But it is a good principle to keep in mind when you are dealing with horses that are prone to having meltdowns over incidences that are not dangerous or life-threatening.
Rain was upset by the feel of the rope and chose to pull away. But I kept interrupting her thought to leave and when she checked in with me I became as quiet and reassuring as I could be.