The horse world is awash with training methods for every aspect of dealing with horses from handling foals to competing at the highest levels in any given sport. Ask ten people for advice on how to train something or how to deal with a problem and you’ll get ten different responses from eager helpers with good intentions.
Most training methods work to some extent. They may not work on every horse or in the hands of every person, but they exist because they achieve results for somebody at some time.
The overwhelming majority of approaches to training are aimed at achieving submission and obedience from a horse. We all want our horses to do what we ask, when we ask, and how we ask. When we ride we don’t want them freelancing and making decisions on their own without prior consent from us. It may make for a more interesting ride, but perhaps a more dangerous ride too. Therefore, having control of the riding experience means being able to induce a fair degree of submission and obedience from the horse to our commands. In the minds of most horse people, this is the goal of most effective training methods.
But I see a problem with this from the perspective of the horse. When training submission and obedience into a horse becomes the priority, something gets left out of the nature of the horse. Horses are thinking and feeling animals. They have opinions about what we do with them. Anybody who has spent even a short time around horses knows they have opinions. To make the goal of training an issue of obedience ignores the opinions and emotional needs of the horse. The horse now becomes a programmable machine to a large extent. It can kill the essence of what makes a horse a horse. They become no more than a vehicle.
This is easy to do because by their nature horses are very submissive. It’s easy to exploit that side of their personality for our own purposes. Could you imagine what would have happened to the first person who tried to ride a horse if horses had a personality like a cat?
It’s my view that in good horsemanship the training is shaped in a way that benefits both the horse and the rider and not just turns the horse into a submissive automaton. Training should not dispose of any part of a horse’s personality. It should keep the horse inside the horse.
To do this the training should incorporate three very basic principles that I have referred to as the three pillars. I call them this because they should underpin every method and practice to do with handling and riding horses. They are the pillars that support every method of training, irrespective of where it came from or why it is used. It doesn’t matter if you are teaching a horse to pick up its feet for the first time or training him to canter to the rear – the three pillars should be incorporated.
Coming from an early exposure to dressage in my life I had drummed into me the importance of the German Training Scale (sometimes called the Training Pyramid) as the basis for moving forward in dressage. The concepts of rhythm, relaxation, contact, impulsion, straightness, and collection as a progressive scale towards the ultimate goal of near perfection in dressage became cemented in my mind. But I later realized that the elements of the training scale were not the secret to brilliance as I had been trained to believe. What was missing was an appreciation that underpinning each of those elements should be the three pillars. The German Training Scale should be standing on the shoulders of the pillars if brilliance is to be achieved. It was a rude shock to me to discover this. And from talking to dressage people today, I realize that we have a long way to go to dismantle the myth of the training scale.
The three pillars are simple. They are focus, clarity, and softness. Each is important but the order is equally important. Clarity is only achievable if there is a good degree of focus. And softness won’t be realized without a high level of focus and clarity. These three elements determine the quality of any form of training or method you employ when working with a horse. If focus, clarity, and softness are incorporated in every method or approach you choose in your training, then you are taking care of a horse’s emotional needs as well as producing willingness and keeping the horse inside the horse. But to ignore these elements is to produce little more than a unwilling, but obedient slave. The method you choose in your training is not nearly as important as the decision to incorporate focus, clarity, and softness into every step.
