To quote a great man (me), “Don’t be afraid to make a mistake because doing something is better than doing nothing and there are very few unwanted outcomes that can not be salvaged.”
They are pretty words that sound deep and meaningful, but there is a darkness lurking under them. You can take heart that if you make a mistake with a horse that the consequences will not be serious if you recognize your mistake and do better the next time. But how many mistakes can we make before we irretrievably screw up our horse?
Errors of judgment and bad decision are part of the learning process. Mistakes are impossible to avoid and there is no learning without them. They are the food that nourishes our knowledge. Even today, it is a rare day that I don’t make some sort of error at some level when working with horses. But it is even rarer that those mistakes lead to any serious negative outcomes because I almost always recognize them and make corrections.
However, how many mistakes does a horse grant us before they say, “You’ve filled your quote of screw-ups and I’m not playing anymore”? How much betrayal can a horse tolerate before its trust is irrecoverable? We all know most horses are very tolerant of our ineptitude and ham-fisted horsemanship skills, but every horse has its limits. Every horse can tolerate only so much confusion, abuse, stress in its training before it no longer tries to get along with people. When it comes to people, it only thinks of escape whether through flight or through fight.
There have been a few people in my career where I felt the need to tell them that they are on the cusp of whether they will have a good relationship with their horse or if things don’t change they will have a monster on their hands in a few weeks or months. It’s a hard and terrible thing to tell somebody and it is always upsetting for both the owner and me. But my fear for the future of the horse and the person has forced me to try to give them a reality check and I think it has always achieved that goal.
I don’t want people to be afraid of making mistakes because that paralyzes them into doing nothing at all – and that’s as fatalistic an outcome as making new mistakes. Doing nothing is its own form of screw up. But there are things to consider about how much a horse can tolerate before they become so bad the horse will never be okay.
The first thing I think is to try to always be aware of your horse’s opinion. Opinions are formed by a horse’s emotions. When a horse shows you he doesn’t like something it is because it doesn’t feel good. Their opinions are not rational, they are emotional. Negative opinions don’t have to be a horse screaming at you with striking or ear pinning or biting. They can be quiet negative opinions such as changes in resistances or crookedness or changes in breathing rate or blinking rate or the direction his eyes are pointing. But opinions are always important and always there to be read if you know to look for them.
When you observe the negative opinions outnumbering the positive ones you can be pretty confident the overall trend is that the emotions are more negative than positive. The question then becomes how long can this persist before you almost never see positive emotions when a horse is under work?
That’s not an easy question to answer because the emotional sensitivity of the horse, the previous experiences of the horse, and the maturity of the horse will determine it. Sometimes we can screw up for 20 years and the horse still keeps trying and other times it’s a one time deal and the damage is so great that the horse never recovers.
When I say that I think of situations where I have seen people saddle horses and not snug the girth tight enough. The saddle eventually slips and ends up under the belly of the horse. I have known this to happen to a young horse being started and the horse was never okay with being saddled ever again. It was always a huge stress to the horse. Other horses that it happened to on the first saddling recovered very well and saddling was never a problem. With some older experienced horses that had been saddled and ridden for many years the same sort of experience was no big deal and with others it caused them to be a blithering mess for the rest of their lives every time they saw a saddle.
I don’t have any guidelines or rules for you to figure out where the limit of “screw ups’ is with your horse. I don’t even have any sage advice on how to keep the mistakes down to the minimum to ensure you don’t cross the line into fatally bad behaviour that can’t ever be made right again. The one thing I can offer that I think will always help is to learn to read a horse’s emotions and never ignore negative feelings – even the tiny ones. They all have meaning and if left unattended they all have longer-term consequences to how you get along together.
Haltering a foal for the first time is a huge responsibility.