If my body was taken over by an alien who knew nothing of human ways, life would be very different.
My wife might ask me to go to the store and pick up some milk. I’d walk to the store, locate the milk in the refrigerator, grab the nearest container, and pick it up. I would hold it up until I got tired or distracted or was told to put it down again.
I would do this because I would not have the understanding to separate the nuance of my wife’s intention from my literal interpretation of the language. Michèle would mean for me to bring home a bottle of milk from the store and I would interpret it as I was being asked to hold a bottle of milk at the store.
Like my alien-possessed self, horses are literalists. When they are learning something, they have a rigid interpretation of it. They don’t easily follow nuance. It takes a long time for horses to understand that similar questions from a rider can have significantly different answers.
For example, when a horse is started under saddle we teach them that pressure from a rider’s leg means to go forward. More pressure means more forward. When they learn this, it becomes the literal interpretation of all leg pressure and they are not prepared for any subtle differences in meaning. When a rider wants to let the horse know that pressure from just the left leg means sidestep to the right, it confuses a horse. At first, a horse thinks it is being asked to go forward. The horse is trying something and not doing anything wrong, but it is not the answer we are wanting.
This becomes even more chaotic when we want to teach that subtle differences in the position of our left leg can mean move only the forehand or only the hindquarters or move both ends.
What if then we want to teach a horse that pressure from the left leg means sidestep to the left, instead of the right? We could teach them that one type of pressure from the rider’s leg means step away from the pressure and another type of pressure means step into the pressure.
In another example, I was demonstrating to a student how using just one rein could have multiple different responses. I rode a horse and using only my right rein I could direct the horse to turn right, then neck rein to the left, then yield its forehand to the right, then yield its hindquarters to the left, then leg yield to the left, then stop and then back up. All this with nothing more than a single rein being applied in slightly different ways.
For a literalist like a horse, it can make them want to sit in a corner and suck their thumb if we don't do it with enormous clarity.
How does a literalist like a horse learn not to be literal? Well, the truth is they don’t stop being literalists. You can’t alter the nature of what a horse is. But we can exploit their literalism to our advantage with our clarity. We don’t try to make them creative interpreters of the meaning of our questions. Instead we use their propensity for literalism to our advantage by making our questions very specific and very clear.
Most of the time when a horse keeps coming up with the wrong answer it is because there is a problem with our question. If a horse understands the question, 9 out of 10 times they will do their best to come back with the response the question is asking. But it is almost always in the posing of the question that the problem stems. Our clarity (or lack of) is usually the limiting factor in our horse's learning and understanding.
Don’t send your horse to the store to pick up milk. You may never see them again. Instead, first teach them how to walk to the store. Then teach them how to buy milk. And finally teach them how to bring the milk home.
A horse bringing the milk home