Many trainers talk about the connection between how a horse feels and how a horse moves. Movement and emotions are interconnected. A tense horse will struggle to move with grace and correctness. Likewise, a stiff and crooked horse will tend to carry tension. It’s sometimes hard to separate movement and emotions.
But what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
It appears overwhelmingly most training focuses on fixing mistakes in the way a horse moves. It is widely thought that you should address problems such as anxiety in a nervous horse by fixing problems in the movement. Just consider the German training scale as an example. The German training scale teaches us that rhythmic movement comes before relaxation is possible. Motion before emotion. It does not acknowledge that relaxation makes rhythmical movement possible.
There are a plethora of books and videos available on how to teach a horse to perform specific exercises to improve movement and relaxation. There are entire schools of training that emphasize a specific regime of exercises to teach a horse to achieve correct movement, obedience, and (hopefully) relaxation and emotional calm.
The message is, “If you want to change how a horse feels, move their feet.” In other words, the chicken (movement) comes before the egg (emotions).
I have a different take on this topic. I believe that emotions have a much stronger influence on movement and that it is the changes in emotions that allow for changes in movement.
There is no doubt that we use movement to affect a change in how a horse feels. But it is not the movement itself that causes the emotions to change. The movement is almost irrelevant. the movement is just an excuse to ask a horse a question and to engage in a conversation. It’s the conversation that causes emotions to change, which in turn causes the movement to change.
I’ll try to be a little clearer. Forgive me if this is hard to follow.
Let’s say I am riding my horse and he is feeling pretty tight and anxious. He is carrying worry and tension. So I ask him a question. It almost doesn’t matter what the question is, but it has to be something he is not offering at this moment because I am asking him to change his thought. So I ask him to bend and give to the inside rein as we trot on a circle. He is troubled and argues with the feel of the inside rein. The heaviness and resistance I feel are a result of his worry. I keep asking him to follow the feel of the inside rein. The feel I present motivates him to search for another way of trotting the circle so that he can get some relief from the feel of the inside rein. Finally, he comes up with the brilliant idea to stop his resistance to the rein and go with the feel. That decision changes his emotions from one of anxiety to one of okay-ness and allows him to offer softness to the inside rein and a more correct circle. It was not the lateral flexion or the circle or the trot that changed the way he felt. It was the change in his thought that happened fractions of a second before the circle got better. The change of thought caused a change in emotions and that change in emotions preceded and allowed the change in movement. The change in movement did not precede the change in emotions. The chicken came a moment after the egg.
I know it can seem like the exercise create changes in emotions, but I don’t think that is how it works. I am talking about two ideas with a subtle difference, but the difference is so important yet can be so elusive. Let me give you another example that may help and that many of you may have already heard or discovered.
People talk about helping a horse to relax by getting them to lower their head. It is often thought that it is action of lowering the horse's head that creates relaxation by stimulating the release of beta-endorphin from the brain of the horse. But I don’t believe it is true. The relaxation is caused by the horse altering its idea to fight the feel to lower its head and going with the feel to lower its head. That change of thought results in quieter emotions which then allows the horse to lower its head without a fight. Unless the horse changes its idea from one of resistance to one of softness, there will be no calmer emotions. I could get the same change no matter what I asked the horse to do IF I got a change in thought from resistance to softness. I could ask the horse to back up or pirouette, to look to its right or pick up a foot. It doesn’t matter. The exercise is irrelevant. The change of thought from resistance to okay-ness is the important step. The exercise is just an excuse to ask a horse to change its thoughts.
This now brings me to a really important principle that underpins everything I try to do and everything I try to teach. Everything we ask a horse to do involves a horse changing the idea it already has to a new idea we are asking it to consider with our aids or cues. Unless the new idea is associated with focus and quiet emotions, the movement will be below its best. You can’t have quiet emotions coming from tight movement.
Almost every trainer from the Greek general, Xenophon to any modern master has expressed the importance of relaxation, calmness, and a quiet mind in training horses. Yet, there are still people who think this is achieved by moving the feet of a horse and that moving the feet comes before the relaxation they seek. They won’t say it, but watch what they do. Turn off the sound to videos and watch.
Every question we ask a horse should entail asking it to change its thought. When I ask a horse a question, any question, I use the movement to tell me how my horse feels about my question. How it moves tells me how it feels inside and the feel lets me know if it changed its thought. If I ask a question and there is only movement and not a change of thought I have only attained obedience and not okay-ness or connection or togetherness.
Working in this way is hard to do. Bloody hard to do! Which is some people focus on movement rather than changing a horse’s thought. Creating changes in movement is relatively easy and most people can do it through obedience training. But changing thoughts and emotions requires a whole higher level of expertise, awareness, and experience.
Some people find it difficult to recognize there is a difference between movement and emotions. A common example of this can be seen with some liberty training. Quite a lot of people believe that liberty training epitomizes the ultimate in a happy horse and partnership with a person because they believe the horse has the option to escape if it is unhappy. They are unaware that a horse can be just as much a captive at liberty as with any form of training using equipment. You have to look beyond the obedience to see the emotions and thoughts.
I absolutely believe when a horse gives you an answer to a question, it is the thought and the feelings associated with their answer that create beauty and majesty. It is not the movement.
This is from a clinic at a Harry Whitney clinic in Arizona several years ago. Michèle is working with a student’s horse. I hope you can see that Michèle and the horse are in a conversation.