I keep coming across articles and videos that promote the idea that touching (patting, rubbing, stroking, or whatever you want to call it) a horse is an important element in the training process. I’ve seen it several times lately. The premise seems that horses like to be touched by people and find it comforting. Therefore, touching a horse is believed to be a powerful way of rewarding a horse for doing well or comforting a worried horse.
I have some trouble with this theory. It is not that touching a horse is not a good thing. My concern is that those who talk about this idea don’t offer any more information other than patting, petting, or stroking is a rewarding experience for a horse and we should do it often. I have yet to come across anybody who teaches about when, how, and why we should touch a horse. And even fewer who discuss when not to, how not to, and why not to. The theory is that all touching is a good thing all the time.
Firstly, I think the notion that horses feel rewarded by a person’s touch is an assumption that is not always justified. We take for granted that because we intend our touch to be comforting the horse feels comforted. But if you watch enough horses, that’s a hard assumption to substantiate. Have you ever felt comforted by a touch or embrace from a person you were not fond of? How many times have you gone to touch a horse and they have looked away or their focus has escaped you? Some people assume that if a horse is within reach, it is ready and wants to be touched. But in my experience, this is not true. Horses often do well at tolerating being touched, but tolerating is all it is. An example is a horse that drops its head and closes its eyes when stroked on the forehead. Most of those horses mentally escape into a distant land deep in their mind where humans leave them alone while their owner is rubbing up and down their horse’s face thinking how much their horse loves being rubbed. It becomes a practiced and mindless habit for both horse and owner.
When a horse knows a person well and they want to be touched, they present themselves to be touched. This is particularly true if they have an itch that they like to have scratched. When my horses greet me in the paddock, they present their preferred scratching spots to me first. For most of them, it is under the neck or chest, but my mare Six loves to have her face rubbed. I’ll hold up the palm of my hand and she moves her head up and down against it at exactly the right pressure that she enjoys. I do this because it’s a way of touching her that suits her. I don’t just touch Six in a way that I think she should appreciate. I want to touch my horses to benefit them and our relationship, not to satisfy some inner urge to make physical contact with a horse.
When we work with a horse and want to touch them as a reward, most of us don’t give enough thought to how we touch them. I recently watched a rider trotting her horse in a circle. When the horse gave nicely to the inside rein, she reached to scratch the horse’s wither as a ‘thank you’ for a nice try. But I saw nothing change in the horse that told me it liked it or even cared (like further softening or relaxation). If that was the case, then we need to ask what was the point of scratching the horse on the wither.
Meanwhile, the rider kept the horse trotting in the circle and asking for even more effort to yield to the inside rein. I suspect the horse would have appreciated it much more and learned much more if the rider had removed the pressure to keep working rather than a scratch on the wither.
I read an article recently where the trainer was recommending people to calm a scared horse by touching it. They advised that the best way to comfort a worried horse is to get a hand on them and rub them soothingly. In my experience, this is rarely helpful to a scared horse, although it might soothe the handler or rider. The reason I believe this is because worried horses are overwhelmed with emotions and centre their focus on the thing that most worry them. Their focus is often so strong that the rest of the world is shut out. They generally do not even register that somebody is touching them because they are so fixated on surviving the experience. They only have room in their mind to decide whether to run, faint, shut down, or fight. Even with a horse that likes to be touched by people, stroking them will have no effect until the fear dissipates enough that the horse can register the person’s presence again.
I hope I’m not coming across as being against touching your horse, because I’m not. I do it all the time with my horses and every horse I handle. I think it can be a positive experience in both our lives. But I think it is a mistake to assume that just by patting or stroking our horses we are automatically doing something worthwhile. I believe we need to give much more thought to why, when, and how we touch our horses for it to be useful and productive.
We rub, pat, and stroke our horses every time they are within an arm's length. It’s the first thing we do when we meet them and the last thing we do when we leave them. But we tend to put so little thought into when, how, and why we touch our horses that many of us miss the opportunity to use it to full advantage.
This is Six. Is she rubbing my hand or am I rubbing her head?