When a horse does something we don’t want, who is to blame?

Most people would say it’s our fault. We are to blame. It’s become the standard catch cry.

When we ride with a group and our horse wants to pull on the reins to be in the lead, who is to blame? When a horse is being chased by a swarm of bees and doesn’t stop when we apply the reins, who is to blame? When a horse with a sore back tries to buck, who is to blame? When a horse lays in the sand then rolls over and gets its feet trapped under a fence, who is to blame?

We could ask dozens of more questions like these and clearly the answer will be that sometimes people are to blame, sometimes the horse is to blame and sometimes nobody is to blame.

I bring this topic up because I see no benefit in the view that humans are to blame for everything that goes wrong when working a horse. Trainer after trainer is telling people that horses are perfect and it is never the horse’s fault. What world do these people live in? They must be working with a special breed of horses that I have never met. It’s time people stopped being so gullible for anything an expert tells them and look at horses and how they operate with the hard reality of how things truly are.

Yes, a lot of the time people make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are inadvertent errors of judgment, sometimes they are caused by ignorance, sometimes by arrogance and sometimes by stupidity. People are to blame for a lot that goes wrong with horses.

But horses are not infallible either. Just like people are not perfect, neither are horses. As amazing and brilliant as horses are, they suffer from lapses of judgment and bad decisions. Sometimes a well-educated horse will lose focus through no fault of the rider. Sometimes a very experienced horse will misjudge the height of a fence and crash. Sometimes a highly schooled horse will misinterpret a rider’s cue and make the wrong choice. Sometimes a horse just has a bad day - after all, they are only human ☺

Making mistakes and screwing up is part of the learning process of any complex brain. It’s called learning by trial and error. But for this to work, the animal has to make errors, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to make a better choice.

At clinics, I often talk about the need for people to try something they never thought to try before and if it is a mistake, learn from it and try again. I don’t believe it is possible for a person to become a good horse person without making a hell of a lot of mistakes that then form the basis of an encyclopedic knowledge about horses and training. The more mistakes a person learns from, the bigger their database of knowledge.

This is no less true of other species, including horses. Horses have to screw up, in order to learn and understand how the world works. Like us, it’s how their brains operate in the process of learning. It’s called experience.

I’m not saying these things to give people excuses or a free pass for poor outcomes in their horse training. I’m saying these things because I’m tired of the trite mindlessness that gets passed for wisdom in the horse world. It’s all very well to quote some horsemanship guru as saying “horses are never wrong….” (or something similar) to make us feel wise, loving and sympathetic towards our horses. But the reality is that a statement like that is pure bovine (or should I say equine?) manure. It is detached from reality. Horses do make mistakes and horses do screw up – just like people, dogs, cats, chickens, axolotls, dolphins and just about any animal with a sophisticated central nervous system that has the capacity to make choices.

I know humans are smarter than horses and better at problem-solving than any horse I have met. That’s why I am the senior partner in the relationship with my horses. Yet every day I work with them I still make mistakes. So why would I ever suppose that horses don’t make mistakes? If I can make mistakes, so can they. They are not machines.

The important part to keep in mind is to own and correct the mistakes we make and not to blame the horse for something we did wrong. And even if it is the horse’s mistake, our job is to guide them to a better response and not take it out on the horse. We need to accept that the blunder is part of the learning process and embrace it while at the same time offering a correction. Instead of criticizing a horse for making a mistake, guide them to doing better.

It is important people question everything they are told, even when it comes from their favourite horse person. Does anyone really believe horses always make perfect choices and the reason something goes wrong is never that the horse made an error?

Many riding students already carry feelings of inadequacy and in my opinion, it is not okay for teachers to add further to a student’s burden of guilt by telling them that every mistake is always their fault.

Horses don’t need us to assign them special abilities they don’t possess (like being infallible) to make them any more special. We do them no favours by not seeing horses for what they are – wonderful, beautiful, honest and imperfect.