In my book, The Essence of Good Horsemanship the first major section discusses the importance of a horse’s focus and how to achieve it and maintain it. That’s because focus is perhaps the most important requirement even before the teaching can begin. If a horse is not paying attention, we trainers are doing little more than talking to ourselves.
In my view, there are two ways to obtain a horse’s focus on us and our feel. We can either ask a horse to do something it does not know how to do or to do something it already knows but with a new specificity. (There are a couple of other alternative methods, but I won’t discuss them here because I don’t recommend them and won’t use them.)
The first way works because when we ask for something a horse does not know, it sets up a strong search in a horse. We ask a question and the horse asks us back for clarification. We answer with a bit more or a bit less pressure or we wait longer or we present a different feel to give the horse more clarity about what the pressure or feel was asking them to do. That inspires the horse to ask us another question to obtain further clarity of what we are asking.
Our first feel or pressure poses a question. The question motivates a horse to search for an answer. The search causes our horse to participate in a conversation with us to obtain clarity and discover the answer to the question. Participation in the conversation requires focus from us and our horse. In short, we ask a question that causes the horse to search which causes the horse to focus more.
Years ago I watched Ray Hunt apply this approach at a clinic. A fellow was trying to saddle a young Warmblood for the first time. The horse was mentally outside the yard looking for friends and the owner couldn’t get it to stop moving to get the saddle on. Ray came into the yard on horseback and roped the horse’s back leg - something it had never experienced before. Ray worked for awhile at teaching the horse to follow the feel of the rope on the back leg. After about 15mins the horse’s mind was in the yard and emotionally soft enough that the owner could saddle it while the horse stood quietly relaxed.
The second way to achieve greater focus works along the same lines as the first, but with a slight difference. Instead of asking a horse to do a job is doesn’t know how to do, we could ask it to do a job it does know how to do but to do it in a slightly different way.
Let’s say my horse knows how to walk from point A to point B in a reasonably straight line at a speed of about 6km/hr. He knows how to do this, so when I ask him to walk from point A to point B he can do it without much mental effort or focus. If I want him to walk from A to B with more concentration than normal, I can motivate him to pay greater attention by altering the pattern. So instead of walking from A to B at 6km/hr, I could ask him to walk it at a speed of 1km/hr. That would interrupt his normal pattern and require him to be more attentive. Or I could ask him to walk at 6km/hr for 5 steps then1km/hr for 8 steps, then 10km/hr for 15 steps, then 1km/hr for 8 steps, then halt for 15 seconds, then walk at 4km/hr for 10 seconds, etc.
Alternatively, I could walk 6 steps, stop for 5 secs, forehand yield to the right for 2 steps, back up 1 step leg yield back the direction I was heading, trot to 4 steps, backup with no halt for 3 steps, etc.
It doesn’t matter what questions you ask your horse. It only matters that you give your horse a reason to ask you a question back. It’s the conversation that transpires between you and your horse that creates the focus. If you keep the conversation alive by asking a new question before your horse loses focus, the length of time and the intensity of the focus grows.
The one caveat to asking your horse a lot of questions if that if you throw too much at him in such a way that he feels overwhelmed or that the answer does not feel good, then you can make things worse and a horse will choose to not pay attention. I see a lot of horses that suffer from this syndrome at clinics.
When I am working a horse with a lack of focus problem, it is generally my preference, to begin with asking them to do something they know how to do, but with a different specificity or in a different pattern - as in the example of the horse walking from point A to point B. This is because often I am starting from a place that the horse feels emotionally comfortable with the initial questions since they already know the answers. It can help to begin with something that a horse feels confident in doing and then transition into making variations to the pattern. Sometimes if you start with a job that is very new to a horse they can feel daunted by the task and instantly put up a wall and avoid trying. However, each case is different and your experience and learning to read the horse will guide you to the right choice.
If you want further insight into what I mean when I talk about improving a horse’s focus by adding variation to what a horse already knows, I urge you to watch my video, Building A Connection With A Troubled Horse, on YouTube where I am working with a horse that has learned to deliberately tune out people. I help overcome the lack of focus by doing some simple leading and lunging work. I am constantly interrupting the horse’s thought in a way to break the pattern that allows his focus to drift. In this way, I motivated the horse to become super attentive and soft towards the end.
