Many people who attend one of my clinics for the first time are in the hope that I can help them fix whatever frustration they are dealing with in their horsemanship. But clinics are not for fixing horses. In my view, clinics are for changing the thinking and understanding of horse people. Nothing at a clinic is about fixing a horse. All the ‘horse fixing’ happens at home with the new knowledge and understanding learned at a clinic.

Perhaps the most common flaw in people’s thinking that I focus on correcting is that a rider’s seat, legs, and reins are for steering, brakes, direction, forward, and posture. People think that pressure on the reins should slow the horse’s feet or turn its body in a specific direction or re-balance the way a horse moves. This is also true for a rider’s seat and legs.

This could not be further from the truth.

Let me ask you, if the job of the reins are to steer a horse why do we attach them to the mouth and not the feet of a horse since it is the feet that take a horse in a new direction?

This is because the mouth acts as a transducer. It sends a signal from the rider to the horse’s brain. This is true for any pressure/feel that we apply to induce a horse to do something. Pressure and feel only create a change in a horse by evoking a change in the thoughts of a horse. Pressure and feel do not bypass the brain to cause a change in the musculoskeletal system or outside of a horse. Everything is processed through the thoughts.

So when we think of our pressure and feel as steering cues or movement cues or postural cues we misunderstand the essential pathway by which we communicate our ideas to our horses.

I guess it seems obvious that pressure and feel work via the brain to change a horse’s thoughts. However, even though most people acknowledge this they don’t train as if it is true.

Just recently at a clinic, I asked a rider why she kept applying her inside leg when teaching her horse to leg yield.

“I need my inside leg to get him to move off it and travel sideways,” she answered.

“Okay,” I said. “Have him walk forward or standstill, let go of both reins, fold your arms, and apply only your left leg. If you are correct he should try to move to the right”

She reluctantly complied. The horse increased its speed to go forward, but there was no lateral movement of any kind. I asked her to repeat the exercise this time applying her right leg. Again, no lateral movement but an increase in forward.

She seemed quite confused. “He should move off my leg. Why doesn’t he move his hindquarters away from my leg?”

I replied, “Why would he? You haven’t trained his brain to think laterally when you apply the inside leg.  You see your inside leg like it was a steering wheel. It’s not. It’s a line of communication to his brain that’s sending a message he thinks is to go more forward, but you think the message is to move sideways. Your line of communication is out of order.”

A horse is a brain on four legs. A horse is not a body with four legs. If you want a horse to do anything you should have a conversation with the brain.