Feel is a concept, which is your responsibility as a horse owner or trainer. You need to learn to distinguish when your horse has responded and how to reward this. What feel means is the ability to tell when a change has happened with the horse, adjust and reward the horse. Change may be good or bad, you have probably heard people say they are looking for a soft feel from the horse.
An example of this would be asking a horse to bend at the poll while standing still. While on the ground, if you use the knot at the bottom of the rope halter to pull down and your hand on top of the horses neck at the poll (just behind the ears). Ask the horse to lower it's head. Immediately when the horse drops its head, release the pressure on the rope. You just followed the feel of the horse!
Don't take, don't pull, ask. What do I mean by that? Are you a rein puller? Can you ride your horse at a walk, trot and canter on a loose rein? You're probably thinking, what kind of stupid question is that? If I let go, the horse will run off somewhere I don't want to go. Well, if you are constantly holding on to the reins with a "death grip" you are teaching your horse that they should be tense with the pressure from the rein. This is the surest way to develop a horse that pulls on the reins or pushes their nose out. Relax, from a standstill ask the horse to bend at the poll with the reins. When the horse responds with a proper bend, immediately release the rein and reward the horse. This is a feel too. Do you want to teach your horse to collect himself and be on the bit? This is the first step. What you have to do is follow the feel of pressure, release and reward.
Feel is more difficult for you to learn to recognize than the horse. When you are starting a horse, and you are asking for a backward yield it may take 100 pounds of pressure on the rope in order to get a horse to back up. You initially want to ask with 1 ounce of pressure, but if it takes 100 pounds to get the response you want - that's what you have to do. Buck Brannaman had the best quote on how to visualize this concept " you want to do as little as possible but as much as it takes".
Always start with what you want to end up with. This may sound strange, but if you want a soft horse that responds to small changes, you have to set this up from the start.
Bill Dorrance and Leslie Desmond have written a book on this subject "True Horsemanship through Feel" that is outstanding. We have found no better book, video, or training material so we aren't going to try and go into too much depth on this topic. This is an expensive book (around $50), but is worth so much when you put it into the context of how much time and money you can waste on misguided lessons and flailing around on your own.
This is a concept that may seem odd since your horse might do what you ask. Instead of just going through the motions or completing an exercise, emphasize the quality of the movement and posture of your horse. You probably know what a relaxed calm horse looks like; their head is even with or below their withers, their eyes are soft looking as opposed to open all of the way with the whites around their eyeball showing, their back is relaxed, and they move their feet freely. This is a tense or braced horse vs. calm and relaxed.
These pictures are a good example of what we're talking about. The first picture shows us working a four year old mare with lateral movement exercises. She's doing the movement correctly but the attitude of the horse is not good, her head is high and she's not moving her feet too well either.
You want a willing compliant horse that doesn’t get upset or worried in a given situation. The horse not only does something that you have asked, but does it without being scared, nervous, or high headed. This should be the case whether you are just asking your horse to stand quietly or you’re trotting around an arena. In a horse show situation; merely completing a pattern is not good enough. Work towards softness in patterns, movements, and exercises.
This picture shows the same horse two hours later doing a similar lateral movement exercise down the outside rail of our arena. You can see the relaxed attitude in the horse. She's picking up her feet, and more importantly -- putting them in the appropriate place.
Think about this in terms of yourself -- if you have ever had a massage or a backrub and you get to a relaxed state where you’re not tense, aggressive, or assertive, and you feel like all of the stress has gone out of your body. This is the feel you want to work towards with your horse. You're thinking about good things and aren't stressed about your immediate environment. Horses do this too.
You get to softness through repetition, desensitization, and making things into a good experience for the horse. You can ask for softness in your horse and condition this behavior into everything that they do. When standing with your horse, ask for softness by yielding the horse at the poll. This is the atlas joint or the last vertebrae in the horse’s neck connecting to the skull. You want the horse to move off of feel and learn to adjust their posture when you ask. This is a good place for the horse to be. When their head is down naturally (no tie downs, martingales or gimmicky hardware) the horse is not resistant or braced. If you ask the horse for this posture and then reward for softness in the posture, you and the horse get what you each want. Horses want to do the least stressful thing they possibly can; you have to learn how to recognize it.
One way to see this is by asking your horse to back up. This is tougher for a horse to do than moving forward because it’s usually a fleeing response to stimulus or a way out of a situation. The horse is thinking about how to get out of there in a hurry. Does your horse lower its head and pick up its feet when moving backwards? Or does it brace itself, shuffle its feet, hollow it’s back, and keep it’s head held high? Work with your horse and recognize when your horse shows a sign of softness and reward for this. Once you know what to look for and reward it, you'll make huge improvements in your training program.
I was out trail riding and noticed that the person behind me was having problems going uphill. Their horse was rushing up the hill, head held high, and transitioning between walk, trot, and canter. Basically, this person didn’t have much control of their horse. But what I noticed was that many of the other horses were calmly walking up the hill. I got to thinking about this and what was causing the problems with this horse. Many things were occurring; the horse didn’t have his feet under him, his rider was sending mixed messages (kicking the horses sides but holding the reins tightly), and the horse wasn’t comfortable unless it was right on another horse’s rear end. None of these things alone are good, but packaged into one situation can be dangerous. Getting this horse to be soft going uphill is going to take a lot of work. This horse needs to learn to move it’s feet and the rider needs to learn to ride in a loose rein for a start.
So think of softness in terms of willing movement where the horse feels comfortable and is not stressed out. A soft horse will show you this with their posture and body language. You want to work towards softness in everything that you do with your horse, everything! Besides, it's easy to go the other direction if you decide your tired of that calm and relaxed horse that your creating.
Focus is your ability to keep the horse’s attention on you. If you have a horse that is looking around at other horses, checking out a barking dog, or not paying attention to you – you have a respect problem. When working with your horse, make sure that they are focused on you. You can tell a lot about a horse by what it is looking at an where it’s ears are -- unless the horse is mad or you have taught them to be "sour".
Horses have excellent peripheral vision. They can see almost 360 degrees around them. There is a blind spot just in front of their nose and directly behind their tail. Because of this, there is no reason for a horse to turn or move while you are working with them unless you ask.
When working with a young colt, you want to instill the concept of focus immediately. To do this, all you have to do is ask your horse to stand. While you are standing at the horses shoulder, watch the movement of the horse's head. When it moves away from you, bring it back to center with the lead rope or a gentle pull on the halter. If the horse moves it's head into you, move the head away. This may take 5 minutes or it may take an three hours, you have to be patient and reward the horse for the proper response. What you are after is a horse that will stand quietly, focused on you. When you get this on the ground, you'll have it in the saddle too.
Time is your friend. You won’t learn to speak Chinese overnight and your not going to teach your horse perfect ground manners this fast either. Stay relaxed and work on things one step at a time. There are horses that are ready to learn and can communicate with you almost immediately and there are others who you wonder if they are ever going to get it. Horses are just like people in this respect, if you have patience you will be rewarded.
Horses get bored easily and like to find interesting things to do to occupy their time. If you make time work for you, it can be a useful tool that you don’t have to buy. After you spend time training your horse you probably put him into a stall or pasture. It will most likely be at least another day before the next time you go get him, he has had 24 hours to think about what happened during the previous training session. If you end your session at the right time you can give your horse something positive to think about until the next session. Always end a training session positively. Don’t quit with both you and your horse upset. That just teaches them that this was a bad experience.
Another important concept regarding time is how long to train your horse during each session. This all depends on the horse. Young horses do not have the attention span to maintain a long training session. I work with the youngsters anywhere from 10-20 minutes at a time once or twice a week. Our 3-4 year olds work about an hour every day. The thing that makes this work is that we have goals for our horses and know where we want to end up. None of our horses are at the same stage in their training, even though we may have started them at the same time. You have to be flexible, but also remember what you are trying to achieve.
A good example is training a horse to ground tie. Your goal should be to have your horse stand quietly not tied, to groom, saddle, and bridle, or just chat with friend. This is a good exercise that you can do to build the focus and time limitations of your horse. This is easy; all you have to do is ask your horse to stand quietly. Start in an arena or round pen with just a rope halter and lead rope. Drop the lead rope on the ground and pet your horse on the wither. If your horse starts to walk off, don’t worry, they’ll step on the lead rope and stop themselves. You can make the horse do all the work.
Work towards being able to have your horse stand quietly for as long as you ask. Initially, this may be 2 seconds, then 5 seconds, then 20, until you have worked up to a minute. You should be able to do this on the ground and in the saddle. Eventually, you should be able to have your horse stand quietly as long as you ask this may be up to an hour or more. It may take you 2-3 weeks to get to 20 seconds. It is your responsibility to ask the horse to stand quietly through your posture and movement.
You are after quality time, not the quantity. You can get much more training accomplished if you have a goal and work at it a bit at a time rather than trying to force something to happen.
I remember someone asking Buck Brannaman a question at one of his clinics about how long they should work with their horse, because it just wasn't responding to a one rein stop. Buck's answer was simple "however long it takes". What he meant by this was don't stop until you get to a point where you have made some progress. Although, you need to determine what progress is, it may be standing still for two seconds. If you work on this for an hour and only get to this point, I'd call that a good place to quit -- there's always tomorrow.
One thing about horses, their senses of smell, sight and hearing are much better than humans. I doubt their taste and touch sensations exceed that of humans. I've tried alfalfa and never developed a taste for it and the opposable thumb thing put's us in a better position with these two senses.
Horses have those giant radar dome ears that can pick out noises way before we do. They are actually nocturnal (night) animals with huge eyes relative to their body size. They have exceptional peripheral vision. And, they can smell things that we never will. All of these senses are highly developed for their use -- fleeing trouble as soon as it's detected. If we recognize how these senses are working, we can use them to our advantage.
Smell
Horses great each other with a blow through the nostrils. It has been reported that they can remember another horse's smell ten years from the time they first met. While I do not recommend blowing in a horses nose every time you meet, there is another way of greeting a horse. The "handshake" is something that a horse can quickly understand. The next time you work with your horse, offer the back of your hand to the horse. Let him smell it for 2-3 seconds. This is a great way of initiating contact with your horse when you go to get them out of a stall or pasture. If you have a "biter", you're going to need to work through that issue first.
Sight
I'm sure glad they don't lock people up anymore for saying what may sound like crazy things -- because this is one of them. If you look at a horses eyes you can see a lot about what is going on in their minds. I'm not talking science fiction or "retina scans", but rather the physical appearance of the eye.
A worried horse or nervous horse will have it's eyes wide open and you will see the white membrane around the eye. You'll also see wrinkles around the eye. We call these "worried wrinkles", they are a sign that the horse is not comfortable with a situation.
Another signal that you can get from the eyes relates to thought. After you work on training your horse and you can see from their posture that they are relaxed, licking and chewing. You'll also notice that they are blinking their eyelids more frequently than normal. This is where we get strange on you -- this blinking is an outward sign that they are thinking about what just happened. We work with a trainer who says "If they're blinking they're thinking". It's just another indication about what's going on in that little "horsey" mind.
Hearing
If you watch a horse that is in it's pasture you will notice that it's ears can move independently through a pretty good range of motion. One ear may be directed at something happening in the barn, while the other is directed at some other horses in the pasture. You can use this to see what the horse is paying attention to. Is your horse focused on you? This doesn't work to well if you have a cranky horse who always has her ears pinned flat to her head.
Talking to your horse is an interesting concept. The only talking horse I ever saw was Mr. Ed on TV. I am sure that they can understand the que for walk, trot, whoa, etc. if you use these everytime you ask. I overheard Dennis Reis chastising a student at one of his clinics when she said HO, HO! to her horse. Dennis responded, like only he can… "A ho is a garden tool or a bad girl!", his point being that they don't understand speech.
I am also sure that they can understand the clucking and kissing noises that some people are taught to use for asking different cadence. But why would you want to teach your horse this stuff? They don't speak. If you are out on a trail ride and someone behind you is clucking and kissing to their horse to get him to go, how do you know your horse isn't listening to them? I'm not saying don't talk to your horse. But, I would never consider voice as an alternative to seat or leg commands. (c) 1999 Natural Horse Supply, Cloudburst Farm, and Rhett & Marilou Russell. Reposted with permission.
