The way a horse is can always be attributed to two things, nature, and nurture. Everything a horse does, how it responds, and what it understands, is a combination of what it learned from its life experience and what it inherited in its genetic makeup. This is true of all species with a complex nervous system.
When we attempt to work with a horse we can only focus on the ‘nurture’ side of what shapes their behaviour. We have no influence on the ‘nature’ side of the equation. But we are even more limited than that. Not only can we not affect their genetic disposition, but we also can’t affect their past life experiences. We can’t undo what has already been done or teach a horse to unlearn what it has already been learned. We can only try to influence their future experiences to achieve the training outcome we desire.
It’s important to appreciate that training does not help a horse to ‘unlearn’. The behaviours and responses we want to change during training are never eradicated. They don’t suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke the moment they learn a different response.
Our training provides layers of new learning to our horse’s understanding. Each new lesson adds another layer to what the horse already knows. But lurking underneath are the layers from lessons learned before. None of the past lessons are removed. This is true whether or not those lessons came from us or from a bee sting.
For this reason, nothing a horse learns is unlearned. When we teach a horse to no longer buck when carrying a rider, we are training a new layer of learning that sits above the old layer. But the old lesson of how to buck when a person sits on its back still exist. All the new training does is to change or suppress the triggers and ill feelings that caused the bucking. Therefore, the moment those triggers and ill feelings re-surface, so does the bucking.
In time, the old lessons that first taught our horse to buck with a rider are so heavily weighed down by the layers of new lessons that it can seem almost unimaginable that anything could trigger a bucking storm in our horse ever again. But it’s not true. The bucking lessons are still in there if you dig deep enough.
It’s important to remember that training does not eradicate old or unwanted behaviours. Training simple overlays the old lessons with new lessons. Old behaviours or unwanted responses are still there waiting for us to screw up and trigger the old emotions that caused them to exist in the first place. That’s why sending your horse to a trainer, without becoming more skilled yourself, has limited benefit. If we don’t step up and learn how to reinforce and build upon the new lesson, it won’t take long before the old behaviours appear again. They are always there, lurking and waiting for us to fail our horses.
I've been in Minneapolis the past 10 days teaching a clinic and working with my friend, Ellen Kealey. Here is Ellen helping Smoke to line up to the fence. Smoke carries a lot of inner worry and Ellen is doing a great job of layering new lessons and new feelings on top of Smokes old ones.