Just about every time I look out across the paddock at home, I see seven horses grazing lazily, snoozing under a tree, laying in the sun or just standing around staring at nothing. My horses certainly don’t appear to be workaholics. Even when they are told crossly to clear the way by another horse, there is usually just enough effort being expended to create the minimum amount of space to avoid an even sterner warning. Occasionally there will see a burst of enthusiasm as they blast across the 30-acre paddock at high speed when they are feeling particularly good on a cool-ish day. But even then it seems to take such a serious toll on my horses daily allocation of effort that they spend the rest of the day doing nothing but eating to recover from that crazed 30 seconds of strain.
In a nutshell, my horses are incredibly lazy in their natural habitat. But I don’t think this is unusual. I see the same behaviour in other people’s horses. In my experience, most horses spend most of their time doing very little. The exception seems to be when a horse carries a lot of emotional baggage with them 24 hours a day. Those types of horses often flip from doing nothing to explosive bursts of energy and back to doing nothing many times a day. It’s like they suddenly wake up and realize the ghost of their ancestors is chasing them, and then it's over. But that’s a discussion for another time. For the most part, the average horse is pretty much a minimalist when it comes to putting out an effort. It’s usually only anxiety that provokes them to have a surge of energy when they are left to their own thoughts.
With that being said, the question that comes to my mind is can we ask a horse to put out a lot of effort without feeling anxious or worried? Can a horse approach its physical limit of output and still feel okay?
This question has important consequences for how we view the ethics of competition or extreme horse activities.
Competition and the nature of humans to push the limits have led to the breeding and training of horses to perform outside their normal limitations. The desire for horses to jump higher, run faster, endure 1000 km races, perform exaggerated gaits and extreme postures, etc has caused us to want horses to work at levels they were never physically or mentally evolved to do. But humans are an inventive species and we find ways to outsmart evolution.
If you examine the things we ask horses to do, it is easy to conclude that these are things a horse would never choose to do of its own volition. A horse would not jump over a 2m fence if it didn’t feel it had to. No horse would choose to piaffe if anxiety did not create it. No horse would enter a skirmish with other horses bumping and stumbling around it just to chase a polo ball if it didn’t feel it had to. No horse would volunteer to stay in the arena with a raging bull charging at it. No horse would choose to spin around and around at a fast speed unless it had a brain aneurysm. Yet, these are things we breed and train horses to do.
I recall an interview with a racehorse trainer in Hong Kong. He was asked what made the horses run so fast. He replied they ran fast because of their fear. He said horses are basically lazy and it is only by exploiting their need to run when they are afraid that we can make them run so fast.
But it is not just about competition that I am referring to (although the desire to compete is one of the biggest culprits). We see the same issue when we apply any form of pressure to produce a lot of effort from a horse. For example, asking a horse to suddenly take off at high speed to run down a cow or pull a very heavy load or perform ‘airs above the ground’ like a capriole.
When we ask a horse to perform beyond its own normal limits, I think there is probably always an element of anxiety associated with that. Sometimes this is not just about provoking a horse to put out a large amount of energy. Sometimes it is to suppress that energy. For example, no horse evolved to not react when a crowd throws firecrackers under its feet, as in the case of Police horses. Yet we suppress their natural flight instinct in order to train them not to react by shutting them down. In the process of training this, we teach horses the futility of expressing their fear. We hardly ever eradicate the anxiety we just hide it away.
I’m not making judgments about the right and wrong of this. I’m just trying to point out that when we ask a horse to operate outside normal limits, there is inevitably a fair degree of anxiety associated with it. You never see a horse performing at the top level that feels completely relaxed. It is the nature of performing at an elite level. In fact, many people try to bring out the anxiety to make the performance even more exaggerated and expressive.
If you love horses and want to perform at that level you have to make peace with the fact that your horse is probably not going to ever feel good about it. It is what it is and we all make choices that we feel come closest to suit our needs.
Freddy Wettach on his horse King's Own, 8 feet 3-1/2 inches - an unofficial American high jump record at the time.