A horse’s brain works best when the emotions are calm. A horse is better able to engage its problem-solving skills when it does not feel the need to save its life. The emotions that accompany “survival mode” definitely hinder a horse’s ability to think through a challenge AND learn from it. If you know this simple fact, it is easy to see why we all want our horses to feel calm and relaxed.
For this essay, I want to focus on the premise of a horse facing a challenge and learning from it.
By its very nature, anything a horse perceives as a challenge creates the opposite effect of calmness and relaxation. It’s because something evokes anxiety and stress that the horse perceives it as a challenge. That’s the very definition of a challenge.
But challenges are not all bad. I would argue that challenges are both desirable and necessary for a horse to be okay in life. I think it is true whether it is living in the wild or living a domesticated life among humans. Challenges or pressures or trouble or whatever you choose to call them are important because they motivate a horse to learn. They force a horse to change habitual and reactive behaviours that are counterproductive to safety and comfort. Instead, they learn to replace those behaviours with new coping skills. This is how a horse evolves from the day it is born to the day it dies. A horse that does not face challenges and learn from them has a miserable life repeating the same mistakes over and over. We can’t protect our horses from pressures and challenges, but we can help them learn coping strategies that make life easier.
Now I come to the reason I am writing this article.
I have noticed in recent times more and more trainers on YouTube, Facebook, and magazines (print and online) talking about how to calm and relax horses by removing pressures and challenges. I’m not talking about just lowering the pressure when it gets too much for a horse. I am referring to removing any pressure that would cause a nanogram of anxiety for a horse.
One example that comes to mind was a video of a rider with a seasoned older horse demonstrating that when they applied an inside rein to ask a horse to turn, the horse braced against the rein and hollowed its back. The rider then showed that by letting the horse travel anywhere it chose without the rider applying the inside rein the horse travelled much more relaxed. The difference was clear. But the problem is that allowing a horse to go anywhere it chose is not training. It is simply being a spectator. There was no benefit to the horse because it was learning nothing about how to feel okay when a rider did start using the reins to direct its thought. There was no help or clarity for the horse with how to feel okay about the inside rein.
The rider intended to not upset or challenge their horse when they should have been teaching the horse how to find comfort and security in the face of their worry about the inside rein. In the bigger picture, what happens to that horse when it refuses to go into a trailer if the human if the training is designed to avoid crossing comfort zones? What happens to that horse when it refuses to let a person inject a life-saving drug? What happens to that horse when it thinks running over a person is a better option than running around a person? Considering horses have to live in a world, where they have to learn to get along with humans what favour does a trainer offer a horse when they avoid teaching that life is best when the horse learns to problem solve their way out of discomfort?
If I had been the rider on that horse, I would begin by using my inside rein to direct the horse at a walk. I would carry the feel in the rein until my horse offered something closer to a softening than it was giving. I would not care if it took several laps of the turn or circle before the horse stopped resisting and softened its back before I released the inside rein. I would wait for the softer thoughts that would result in a softer back. What the feet were doing would be far less important to me than the softer thoughts and emotions. I would be adjusting the feel of the reins constantly to help guide the horse to quieter emotions AND the thought to follow the feel of the inside rein AND finally a softer way of moving. I would not remove the feel in the rein until something changed for the better. In this way, the horse can learn to feel okay about pressure from the inside rein and change its thought to go with it rather than fight it.
I am seeing more and more examples of people teaching students that the way to get along with their horse is to avoid exposing them to trouble or challenges or pressures or anything that might result in raising a horse’s blood pressure. I don’t believe this is the purpose of training. It is not possible to direct a horse to an idea it doesn’t have or doesn’t want or doesn’t like without creating some degree of anxiety.
To avoid anxiety is to avoid training. We should never push a horse beyond what it can handle or can recover from because that turns pressure into punishment and damages a horse’s trust and confidence. But at the same time, without pushing a horse from comfort to discomfort and back to comfort there can be no learning. The purpose of training is to help a horse get along with us in whatever we do together with the minimum amount of trouble. We can’t help a horse by riding it in a padded cocoon. We must keep pushing the boundaries of its comfort zone so that one day a horse’s limits for what causes its anxiety is beyond the horizon and out of sight.
Presenting a new challenge to a horse’s comfort for the sake of teaching problem-solving skills to the horse