I was watching a video of a trainer discussing herd behaviour. It was pretty boring and nothing new was being revealed that I hadn’t heard many times from many trainers before.

Until they said ….

“I understand horse behaviour because I have a lot of years and a lot of experience….”

That made my eyes widen. They understand horse behaviour because they have a lot of experience?? Mmmmm. That seems a pretty bold statement.

I’ve had a lot of experience breathing, but I don’t claim to be an expert respiratory physiologist.

Yeah sure, somebody who has had years of experience around horses probably knows more than another person with next to zilch experience with horses. But that is very different from making the bold claim that they understand horses.

Horses are an enigma for everybody (even if people don't know it). We can’t possibly know or understand everything that goes on inside their head. We can take a guess and hope we guess right sometimes. But we have no right or basis to claim certainty because we don’t know how much we don’t know. 

A couple of examples from my own experience confirms how little I understand horses.

In the early training of my mare Six, whenever I removed her halter after a session she would causally walk past the rest of the herd with almost no acknowledgement and head to the corner of her 40 acres paddock. There was no hurry inter steps, just a lazy stroll. She would stare for about 10-15 minutes and then casually turn around and calmly join the herd to graze. I never worked out what she was staring at or why she did it or where she wanted to go. Then after several weeks she stopped doing it and never did it again. I still don’t know why.

Our gelding, LJ very occasionally exhibited a strange behaviour. Every so often (no more than once a year, sometimes even rarer) he would gather the mares into the corner of his paddock. Only the mares. The geldings were excluded. If a gelding tried to join the group they were chased away. If a mare tried to leave the group LJ would chase them around the paddock until she rejoined the group. This would last 1 to 2 days and then it was over and the herd was once more a cohesive group until it happened again a year or more later. For me, the reason for this behaviour remains a mystery.

Everything we think we understand about a horse’s behaviour is an interpretation. It never comes from an indisputable fact. Even the results of scientific studies are skewed by human observation and biases. Behaviour is not a science like astrophysics or mathematics where observation rarely interferes with the results (although some claim observation itself influences the outcome. But that’s another debate for another day). 

There have been times when a series of horses that came to me for education went home in very good shape and I felt pleased with the work I had done. It occasionally lured me to think maybe I knew what I was doing when it came to this training gig. But just when I thought I had it figured out, a horse would come into training that made me realize what a dill I really was. I still don’t have it figured out. I am still learning like a pre-schooler.

The complexity of a horse’s mind and its way of operating never fails to astonish me and remind me how little I understand.

Our understanding of the behaviour of a horse is often biased by our personal experience with not much connection to the reality of what a horse is experiencing. The training of the human has as much to do with how we interpret horse behaviour as how many years we have been around horses. I guess that a cavalry rider, a circus trainer, a barrel racer, an endurance rider, a racehorse trainer, a trail rider, a horsemanship trainer, etc all look at horse behaviour from very different perspectives and understanding. How can they all be right?

I don’t think anybody knows enough to justifiably claim they understand horse behaviour. We are all just giving it our best guess. We hardly know anything about human behaviour! How can we expect to understand the complexity of another species? Which is probably why there are so many different approaches to training horses. If experience alone gave us insight and certainty into our understanding of horse behaviour, why are there so many divergent theories and approaches to training? Why do we all screw up so much? Why have I never seen a horse with zero trouble inside?