I have a few things to say about this tricky and complex subject. My views are nothing more than just personal opinions derived from many years of working with and thinking about horses. So you can dismiss them or give them some thought, as you like.
I believe trust and obedience are two separate phenomena, but not necessarily independent from each other. You can have obedience without trust or a horse can give them together, but I don’t think you can have trust without obedience.
Let’s talk about trust for a moment.
Some people like to think there is a natural bond between humans and horses that makes horses want to have a trusting and willing relationship with people. I don’t think so. I don’t think horses innately want any sort of relationship with humans.
Horses are by nature, selfish, nihilistic self-absorbed, and without a moral conscience. They do not possess the milk of equine kindness to get along with humans or do their best to please us. They have one goal - self-interest. Every choice and decision they make is weighed in terms of their self-centred notion of comfort and survival.
What does this mean?
It means it is the nature of a horse to trust nobody and nothing that is unfamiliar and has not yet proved to benefit their comfort and survival - or at the very least, does not threaten their comfort and survival.
Horses are born skeptical of everything new. If in doubt, they flee from it. If they can’t flee, they fight it. If they can’t fight it, they may mentally disengage by experiencing torpor (ie, frozen in fear).
How many horses raised in the wild gallop to the first human they see and ask to be loaded into a truck, taken to their farm, and asked to be started under saddle? What happened to that natural bond and willingness to please some people talk about?
If you agree with this assessment of the nature of horses, then it is logical to assume that trust is a learned phenomenon. We have to teach it because a horse won’t automatically offer it. It’s not in their nature. They are not domestically bred puppies.
For the process of training trust into a horse to be successful, it requires that everything we do involves a large element of a horse gaining a sense of comfort and security. Nothing we do can end badly for a horse. Everything we do must end with a horse feeling better about what we did. And even then, we can never betray the trust we gained. For example, if we gain the trust of our horse to ride through a puddle, we can’t then betray that trust on the next ride by mistaking the puddle for a sinkhole that swallows the horse. The trust can vanish into smoke that easily.
I have written previously about contractual trust. Training is in large part about teaching a horse the ‘contract of trust’. We train our horse that if it stops when I apply my seat, I won’t put uncomfortable or troubling pressure on the reins. That is the condition we place on our ‘contract of trust’ when we train our horse to stop from our seat. If one of us breaks the contract, there are negative consequences. It doesn’t matter if we train using negative or positive reinforcement methods. Trust is only gained and sustained when both parties meet their contractual obligations. It is the comfort and security that the contract brings to the relationship that creates the willingness that so many horse riders seek and work hard to establish. Willingness requires trust in a relationship and trust requires an understanding and acceptance of the rules of the ‘contractual trust’ we have built-in training by both horse and human.
Now that I’ve talked about trust, what is the role of obedience?
As I said, horses are not innately trusting of new and unfamiliar things. This is because they don’t yet know the rules of the contract that creates the trust. It has to be learned. A horse has to be taught to trust that jumping over poles will be easy and not jeopardize its life. And a human has to learn to trust that brushing their horse’s tail will be easy and not jeopardize their life.
It’s because our new relationship with a horse does not begin with trust, that it has to begin with obedience.
Before we can train a horse to trust us we have to first engage with it. The first encounter has to begin with preventing him from keeping his distance. Our horse does not trust us, so we have no option but to begin with removing his choices to run to the other end of his 50 acre paddock. We might herd it into a yard or we might try to entice it by placing food and water near us or we might rope it and tie it to a strong post until it stops fighting. There is no limit to what we can do to impose obedience on a horse so that we can start to teach it trust.
Horses avoid discomfort and since anything new or unfamiliar is seen as a potential danger, we need to impose obedience to eliminate avoidance. If we do our job right, the obedience we impose teaches a horse the rules of the ‘contract for trust’. Soon a horse is obedient because of its trust and not despite it. Our horse follows our idea because we have taught it to be a good idea and not because it wants to avoid the negative consequences of disobeying. Then we add another layer by introducing something new and challenging and do the same thing. Then another layer and so on. With time and hard work, we eventually are working as one unit with our horse because we both have the same ideas and they feel like the best ideas.
The thing that separates good horse people from second-rate ones, is this idea that the best horse people are always working on expanding the ‘contract of trust’, whether it is a first-time experience or the horse has done it a thousand times. The second-rate horse people are just satisfied with obedience and are okay with a horse working to simply avoid trouble.
I hope it is clear by now that obedience and trust are not the same thing. At the risk of repeating myself, (i) trust is a horse doing something because it believes it is a good idea, (ii) obedience is a horse doing something because it believes not doing it is a bad idea. So trust involves a horse going towards a good option, while obedience is a horse avoiding a bad option.
Catching wild horses the Mongolian way.