A few years ago I was teaching clinics in the US. At one clinic I was working with a young Mustang horse that carried a lot of worry and tension. It was only 4 years old but had been put through the washing machine of a reining program and done a lot for her young age. Nevertheless, the filly really didn’t understand much and the way she approached her work was all about the desperation to avoid any hint of pressure and trouble.
Anyway, at one point I walked over to the fence to pick up a ring rope. For those not familiar with a ring rope it is simply a long rope (often about 6 -7 metres) with a 5cm metal ring spliced to the rope at one end. The opposite end of the rope is passed to through the ring to form a loop of any size you might want. See photo.
As I reached for the ring rope a friend said to me, I know what you are going to do with that.” I replied, “No you don’t.”
I was right. My friend wrongly assumed that I was about to use the ring rope around the belly of the horse. It was a natural assumption for two reasons. The first is that ring ropes are very often used around a horse’s belly to help introduce a horse to the feel of a girth before the first saddling OR to help overcome inbuilt stress a horse may feel when the girth is buckled (such as on a cold-backed horse). The second reason she would assume the ring rope was going to be used as a belly rope was that the filly had a habit of “crow-hopping” when it was saddled.
But I didn’t pick up the ring rope to put the loop around the belly of the filly. Instead, I put the loop over the top of the hindquarters and let it drape over the tail and down the hind legs. I don’t really want to spend the rest of this essay going over why I did this and the changes I was looking for because I want to make another point.
My friend understandably made an assumption, but it was a wrong assumption. She saw a pattern. Four out of 5 times a trainer will use a ring rope to rope the belly on a horse that feels troubled to be saddled. That pattern led her to make an assumption.
Horses do this all the time. They see a pattern and they make assumptions. That’s how cues work. A cue is a set pattern of signals that are intended to inspire a specific behaviour. But sometimes we teach them the wrong pattern.
Let’s look at an example that I saw at a recent clinic.
A student had bought a horse that had the habit of walking forward the moment they tried to mount. With a bit of work and repetition, she eventually taught the horse to stand quietly while she mounted. She would sit in the saddle for 5 seconds before allowing the horse to walk. When she came to the clinic I noticed that the horse had not learned to wait until it was asked to walk off, but to wait until it figured the 5 seconds had passed. I pointed out that if the rider asked it to stand any longer than 5 seconds it started to fidget at about 15 seconds and became really agitated by about 30 seconds.
Instead of teaching her horse to listen and wait for her, she taught her horse a pattern that was based on how much time had passed. The horse anticipated the rider’s idea to walk by focusing on the pattern it had learned. Its assumption to stand for 5 seconds and then walk was the wrong lesson.
But we do this all the time. Our horses make assumptions based on the patterns we teach them and when it turns out the assumptions are wrong or the pattern is changed all hell breaks out. I feel we teach these patterns because it is pretty easy to do with repetition AND it makes us and our horses feel safe – life is predictable. But I also feel that as a long-term strategy to training, it is not fair to them. We are setting them up to make the wrong call all the time.
When a horse learns a pattern it doesn’t take long before it pre-empts what it thinks you are about to ask. They often try to give you the answer early when they think they recognize the cue. It’s like somebody finishing your sentences for you and getting it wrong.
Jenny: “How...”
Bob: “Oh I’m fine, thank you.”
Jenny: “No, I was going to ask how the project is coming along.”
An alternative approach is to encourage a horse to take an interest in us (focus) and open up the lines of communication where we are constantly exchanging questions and answers. Working with horses should not be a matter of issuing commands and the horse obeying. It should be a conversation where the rider presents an idea and the horse comes back with either “no problem, when do you want to do this, how fast do you want to do this, when do you want to stop doing this and what are we going to do next?”, or “sorry, I don’t get it, please explain again”, or “is this what you mean?”, or “listen you nitwit, you're pulling on the reins too much” or “my back hurts” or “that’s too hard and scary I can’t possibly do that”...
Working with a horse should never be like pressing the button on a vending machine and out pops a Coke. If you only rely on a horse learning patterns there are going to be lots of mistakes that will lead to some rough waters in the relationship.
Lorena demonstrating the proper use of the belly rope for preparing a young horse for its first saddling.