I was once asked about my thoughts on winning and losing when it comes to training horses. The question came from another trainer who believed that you should never let a horse win. I had heard this before and I had heard others say that you should let a horse win, but only sometimes.
I gave a short response to the question, but there is a much bigger issue to consider associated with the idea of winning and losing.
Let me explain.
Firstly, the idea that there is a winner and a loser conjures up the idea that training horses is an adversarial pastime. It presupposes that horses and trainers are at war with each other and there can only be one winner. I find this notion disturbing because I like horses and look at them as friends. I don’t want to wage war against my friends – horse or human.
Even if you allow a horse to feel like a winner sometimes, that means you’re okay with leaving it to feel like a loser sometimes too. Horses live in the moment and when a horse feels it has lost, it feels it has always lost. It is not capable of adding up the tally of 5 wins and 2 losses and then feeling like a winner.
We should always be striving to make the work feel good to the horse. I want the horse to feel better at the end of the work than it did at the beginning. Working with a horse should feel like two mates getting a job done together and not like a battle of wills.
So that’s pretty much how I answered the question. But I stopped short of talking about the bigger picture. I’ve been tossing up whether or not to even bring it up in a post, because I think it is both a difficult and confronting subject to discuss. But here goes.
Every time we try to change a horse’s mind we invariably also change their thinking, their behaviour, and our relationship with them. Even when we just look over the fence at a horse we can induce a change in their thoughts and their emotions.
I want to stress this point and look at what it means.
To me, it means that any time we interact with a horse we are changing what it is to be that horse in that moment. That horse is no longer the same horse it was a few minutes ago. It’s different. Perhaps the change is small and unimportant or perhaps it is dramatic and cathartic, but either way, a change has occurred.
It’s generally our hope that the changes we instill are positive and beneficial to both the horse and us. But I think when we get a change that doesn’t feel positive to the horse; we damage the innate nature of that horse.
For many centuries, good horse people have done their best to work with the nature of a horse. They recognize that horses are born amazing and try hard to avoid changing that through their training. But I believe it is a futile hope. Any interaction we have with them changes a horse – just like throwing a pebble into a lake will change the nature of the lake forever.
I believe that training inevitably requires a horse to give up something of itself in order to get along with people. Even the most gentle or benign methods require a horse to sacrifice some part of its innate nature. We hope and try that our impact is to the benefit of the horse. Nevertheless, what a horse is before we enter its life and what it is after we have entered its life are two different things.
An extreme example of this idea would be a police horse. I remember as a kid watching on television police horses charging into a group of Vietnam War protesters. The horses were being hit with placards and firecrackers exploded around their feet. Yet the horses continued to do their job. Any sane, sensible horse would have bolted in the opposite direction. So how much of the nature of those horses was sacrificed to turn them into useful police horses? How much of their essence had to be destroyed to make sure they ignored their natural instinct to flee?
Perhaps a less extreme example that comes to my mind is when I was trekking in the bush with two of my horses. We were trapped by a bush fire and the circumstances became desperate. However, both Luke and China kept cool heads and followed my direction despite the terrifying situation. I do not doubt that we only survived because the horses were able to suppress their natural instinct to panic. It could be argued that it was a good thing considering the state we found ourselves in, but it is worth considering how much had the training I had done destroyed their natural instinct to look out for themselves first and to panic.
I knew a fellow who trained showjumpers. He had a very nice quiet horse that was easy to handle and ride when it first arrived. But over the months the horse became more difficult to handle and even unsettled in the paddock. It would spontaneously run crazy for several minutes in its paddock before snoozing for an hour or so and then run crazy again. Every day it would chew at its rug (blanket) to rip holes in it. There was a total personality change, which I believe was caused by the training. I am sure the horse’s true nature was to be easygoing, but an easygoing horse was not what the fellow wanted. The true nature of the horse was altered to make it a jumping horse.
When I first began training horses for a living I used the motto “keeping the horse in the horse.” It has always been my aim to keep alive the essence of what a horse is, while at the same time shaping its behaviour. I no longer believe it is entirely possible to do that. Nevertheless, I am convinced that our best chance of keeping the horse in the horse only comes when we ensure a horse never feels like a loser. If we allow the training to become a win/lose situation, we turn our horses into shadows of the animals we loved in the beginning.
If we care about horses, we all have a moral boundary about what is acceptable training or treatment and what is not. It’s a personal boundary and not for me or anybody else to lecture another where to draw the line. But if we wish to make sure we never lose sight of where the line is drawn, I think it is vital that we are always mindful of what a horse has to give up of itself in order to make us feel better.
L-R me, Luke and China.. We had already been travelling for 5-6 months when this photo was taken by a fellow we met in the bush. He invited us to rest for a couple of days at his property and the offer of a hot home cooked meal and a shower were too hard to resist.