Good horse training is boring to watch. It looks like nothing is happening. Many people are impressed by training methods that are nothing more than a blatant series of attacks on the horse because they are dramatic to watch. However, physically dominating a horse does not teach him anything. To train a horse, you must use mental strength, not physical strength.
Training horses starts with understanding how their minds work. You have to understand what is logical to the horse. The horse's mind does not work the same way as yours. They do not associate events or a sequence of actions in the same way we reason that things are related. To train a horse, therefore, you have to understand how horse logic works and base your training on that.
Horses are prey animals. They are in an undesirable position in the food chain and they know this. Their eyes are on the outside of their heads so they can see danger coming from any direction. When we approach a horse, it has no way of knowing what our actual intent is. It can only observe our actions and make a decision that it is safe to stay put or safer to flee.
When a large cat approaches a group of gazelles as a hunter, the whole herd will start running and try to escape until one of them is killed. Once its hunt has been successful, the cat's tail goes down and its muscles relax. Now it can pick up its kill and walk directly through the herd and the gazelles will just go on grazing. The cat's body language has changed from a tense alertness that telegraphs the message "there is a hunter among us" to a more relaxed, non-threatening posture that merely says "there is a cat walking among us" and the herd responds accordingly.
So your first communication task in training is to get the horse to quietly accept you as a "cat walking in the herd" rather than as a "cat hunting within the herd." From a horse logical viewpoint, you do not want to be seen as an attacking predator.
Your next communication task, once the horse has quietly accepted you into its "herd," is to be the horse in control of the herd. Stallions do not run their herds. All they are concerned with is who gets the next mare. The lead mare controls the herd and makes the decisions. She controls the herd through body language that the other horses clearly understand.
At Meredith Manor, we get a horse to accept us as part of its "herd" and then we use body language to get and keep its attention and to establish ourselves as the lead mare. We first use horse body language to play with the horse, then we use body language to get and keep the horse's attention. Now we can add body language that creates a corridor of pressures that start to shape the horse's behavior. We create the desired shapes on the ground, then we transfer the concept of corridors and shapes into our under saddle work. When done correctly, the entire system is very logical to the horse. There is no need for physical restraints or physical punishment and the horse never feels "attacked".
Let me give you an example of how mythunderstandings about training happen when people substitute human logic for horse logic. When a horse is scared or upset, it tenses and its head goes up. Human logic says that to create the desired shape (a lower head carriage), all you have to do is tie the horse's head down until the horse "understands." However, if the horse is tense because the training methods were scaring or confusing it, this will only make the problem worse. From a horse logical standpoint, the tie down is only another threat or attack. If the trainer's techniques were horse logical in the first place so that the horse remained relaxed, its head and neck would eventually have the desired shape without the need for mechanical aids.
People who train by presenting the horse with a task then punishing the animal in some way when it doesn't "get it" are on the wrong track. They think they are teaching the horse a lesson. But the horse understands their "correction" only as an attack, a threat. No real learning takes place. By fighting with a horse, the only thing you are teaching it is that the biggest, baddest one wins. You give the horse no clues about how to do things methodically and logically.
It is also important for trainers to realize that horses do not understand or recognize human feelings. But our human feelings often create conflicts for us and our horses. If we don't plan our actions ahead when training, our actions will be guided by feelings and instincts. Since man is a natural predator with an instinct for combat, the very first thing young males often do when frustrated is to fight. And the more scared they are, the more willing they are to fight. When people make a big fuss in front of others, posturing about how they are handling this big, dangerous horse, very often it is because they are afraid you are going to realize they are not really in control.
Training is just like swallowing a big ball of string. It would be impossible to swallow it all at once. But if you eat it an inch at a time, break the task down into really small bits, it is easy. Getting the horse's attention is the first bite of the string we call training. Most of the mythunderstandings about training come about because people try to swallow too big a chunk of string. You must go bit by bit, using a methodical series of actions to get the horse's attention and direct the horse's attention without threatening or attacking him. Training a horse involves dominating him mentally, not physically. And you must systematically introduce new shapes or tasks to him in a way that is logical to the horse according to his natural instincts rather than your human instincts and logic.
Training horses involves using pressures to shape a horse's behavior. But many people MythUnderstand how to use pressures properly .
Horses will learn when:
pressure is not perceived as an attack,
the pressure is only one step away from something the horse already understands, and
if doing the correct thing relieves the pressure which rewards the horse.
When all three of these things are in place, then the pressure will be "horse logical." The horse will accept it calmly and learn from it.
Many trainers attack horses. They think that if the horse's activity level or excitement level increases, the horse is learning more. That's one of the biggest MythUnderstandings there is in the training world. In fact, the truth is just the opposite.
When a horse feels attacked, you have created an avoidance situation. Avoidance situations create five times as strong a reaction as approach situations. That means that if you create a pressure that the horse wants to avoid, you create five times as much negative feeling as you do if you use an approach situation instead. What does that teach a horse?
When most people come to the end of their knowledge of how to enforce training positively, they often resort to avoidance pressures. Yank that lead shank. Pop him with the end of the rope. Jab him with those spurs. Those actions all create a high level of activity in the horse because the horse feels he's being attacked by a predator. Do you want that horse to react to you like a prey animal or a partner?
Have you ever noticed how people talk to someone who doesn't speak English well? The first thing you know, they're talking louder. The problem isn't that the other person can't hear. It's that they don't understand the language. So you cannot be louder with your aids or pressures to achieve the desired result with your horse.
Many people don't know how to link the things a horse needs to learn up in a logical sequence or how to break training down into many small building blocks the horse can learn one by one. They put pressure on the horse to do something, to create a particular shape, before the horse understands all the baby steps he needs to get him to the point of understanding. Then when the horse doesn't "get it," they "swear" at him.
Swear pressures elevate a horse's excitement levels. What are swear pressures? Whenever anyone runs out of language, they swear. It's a cheap shot out of nowhere. But a person with a command of the language can make a number of meaningful points without ever swearing. Swear pressures do not make your point. The only thing they do is disrupt communications.
To communicate with the horse, you must make the shape you want understandable. You need to use the right language. You will see a lot of people slap a horse when they want it to move or go faster. As a training pressure, a slap has a definite "start" but the "stop" is right there with it, too. So what does the slap tell the horse to do? There is no way for a slap to do anything but elevate the horse's excitement level. The horse will not be going the specific amount faster you wanted or moving in exactly the way that you wanted.
How quickly you apply a pressure, where you apply it and how hard you hold it tells the horse how he needs to respond. And as soon as he responds, you reward by taking the pressure away. The greatest reward to a horse is the release of pressure. Always. So you apply pressure in a horse logical way that causes the horse to act the way you want, and then you release the pressure as a reward. Then you do it again until the horse's response to that pressure becomes a habit.
Some horses will tend to lean into your pressures when you apply them and in order to create an understandable shape at that time, you must keep the pressure there until the horse moves in relation to it. For example, if you are on the ground trying to get a horse that is leaning into your pressure to move away from you, you have to push only the amount that you can comfortably hold until the horse gets tired of it. If the pressure of the flat of your hand or the front of your knuckles doesn't have any effect, use the butt end of a whip or poke with a finger or two to concentrate the pressure on a smaller area and make it more noticeable. If you take the pressure away before the horse gets tired of it, the horse learns that all it has to do is wait and you'll quit. You hold the pressure until the horse decides to move away from it. And you have to be certain that you don't get impatient and smack the horse in the belly and ruin everything it was understanding up to that point. Give the horse time to learn. Then reward it.
The timing of a pressure can be important to learning. Take this statement: "Woman without her man is lost." Now change the punctuation. "Woman. Without her, man is lost." The words are the same but the way they are timed creates an entirely different meaning. Aids are the same way to the horse. It's the timing, the punctuation, of our aid pressures that often counts, not the strength or force of them.
Aid pressures must be balanced in order to create a training corridor for the horse to move in. A horse has a one track mind. Anything will distract him and when it does, he's gone. He's out to lunch. You see people distracting their horse with badly applied aid pressures all the time. They only use one aid or pressure too loudly out of all the aids it takes to communicate an understandable shape to the horse. That distracts the horse from all the other aids that could give him a clue about what to do and he misses the meaning of the communication. Bits are the biggest problem here.
When you communicate horse logically using methodically applied directional pressures that shape rather than attack the horse, you are training, not breaking. Punishment has no place in a training program. When a horse does something "wrong," that happened because you taught the horse to do it or you allowed the horse to do it. Punish yourself, not the horse.
Many people who are training horses will ask them questions that the horse has no way of understanding or answering. Then they will fight with the horse or hold him hostage until the horse either gives in or gives up. The so-called trainer walks away feeling like he or she has won the game because the horse finally did what they wanted him to do. But no actual communication took place. What happened was "breaking" not training.
When you break a horse rather than train it, you get a trained flea. What do I mean by that? Well, you start training fleas by putting them in a jar. You know they are going to jump and if they do that, they'll jump out of the jar. So you put a lid on the jar.
Now when the fleas jump, they hit their heads on the lid. Being smart fleas, they learn not to jump so high. Now you can take the lid off and they won't jump out. Voila! You have trained your fleas not to jump so high. That is exactly what you do when you "break" a horse.
A lot of people train horses this way. They condition the horse to random tasks one by one. They do not do it in a systematic way that is logical to the horse.
Remember that horses have very simple minds. They can only connect a cause-and-effect sequence of about two steps. To be horse logical, the next thing you teach a horse can never be more than one step away from the thing you just taught him and not more than two steps away from the thing before that.
It should be easy for the horse to understand how to do the next thing you want to teach him because it should flow naturally from the last thing he learned. It should be horse logical for him to behave in a certain pattern. He shouldn't have to guess about what you want until he accidentally gets it right. He shouldn't have to stress himself mentally or physically until he learns to do the "correct" thing by avoiding the "incorrect" thing.
At Meredith Manor we teach our horses a "language" based on their body position relative to ours. The horse first learns on the ground that certain body language on our part calls for him to be in a certain position relative to our own. With this as a basis for understanding, we gradually shift the concepts of mirroring the trainer and working in a corridor of aids from ground work to under saddle work and eventually to whatever game we ultimately want the horse to play.
Horse showing is a game a lot of people like to play with their horses. Someone defines some rules, prescribes a set of mannerisms, and the guys whose horses come the closest to those prescribed mannerisms are the winners. When it gets too easy to win, the somebodies change the rules so it takes something different to win the game. And everybody's off again. Horse show rules are no more logical than the rules we make up for football or basketball. They're all just artificial rules that can get changed at any time.
We teach our horses to perform according to these prescribed mannerisms to make them competitive at the horse show game. When you are training, it is important to remember that producing a prescribed mannerism should not be your highest goal. The way you mentally and physically gymnasticize the horse is the real game. The horse show mannerisms are only a way for you to demonstrate that you and your horse are physically and mentally prepared.
If you've only learned to duplicate the mannerisms, you and your horse are going to be left behind when the somebodies change the rules. If your horse was properly trained, horselogically gymnasticized both mentally and physically, you'll be able to adjust to the new game rules.
As your horse's trainer, you mentally take command of the horse's muscle and strength and use it to play whatever the game you want to play with your horse. Whether it's polo, cutting, reining, jumping, pole bending, barrel racing or whatever other game you're playing, the real game is the interaction between you and the horse. It is about mental, not physical control. And that control has to be methodical and horse logical for you and the horse to play the game as well as you can.
Training horses is about developing the horse's mental attitudes to the point where they enjoy playing the same games that you do. That means taking mental control of your horse. The controlling factor is not strength, not size, not speed. The horse is ten times stronger, bigger and faster than we are.
Let other people be the ones who jerk on horses and slap them around or hassle them until they've "learned" something. You want to be the one who can communicate with the horse using horse logical emotions, horse logical shapes and change them from what they aren't into what they can be by using what they are to start with. Training is about what to do rather than about what not to do.
Ground control precedes horse control. Before you snap the lead rope onto a horse's halter, you and the horse need to start communicating in a meaningful, horse-logical way.
The reason for that is because lead ropes don't lead horses or control horses. You're in trouble right from the start if you expect a little bitty rope, or even a rope with some kind of chain at the business end, to control a horse. You have to lead a horse using a communication system that clearly tells the horse you are the lead mare he can trust and that clearly tells him the speed, the direction, and the shape you want the horse to move.
At Meredith Manor we don't teach students to move horses by pushing and pulling them at the end of a lead rope. Instead, we teach them a ground communication and control system we call "heeding." I came up with that name because I needed a word that wasn't so common that people assumed they knew what I meant as soon as I said it. Heed is an old-fashioned word that means "pay attention." Whenever you're working with a horse, you should be paying attention to the horse and the horse should be paying attention to you. When heeding involves leading and it's done right, it looks like the horse is heeling like a well-trained dog. So you can think of heeding as a combination of leading and heeling if that helps you picture it.
We start by bringing the horse into a small indoor arena. This confines the horse in way that is understandable him. Starting inside four solid walls minimizes distractions and makes it easier to get the horse's attention, especially in the beginning lessons.
You start by turning the horse loose and letting it trot, run, and play. He is completely free to go anywhere he wants to in the confined area. Horses tend to play by practicing their various means of defense. They run and escape. They kick out at imaginary predators. And its first time in the arena, the horse is going to want to check everything out.
In the beginning, you do not direct where the horse goes, you just follow it around. Imagine a line from the horse's shoulder out to where you are. If you walk a little behind that line, you are pushing the horse, putting very gentle pressure on it to ask it to keep moving.
In following the horse, never put a loud pressure on the animal. You don't hurry the horse or chase him or "attack" him in any way. You only push the horse whatever little bit is needed to keep him moving. If you stay relaxed and calm, that relays the message,"I'm here but I'm not hunting." When people get to chasing, they tend to get too aggressive.
Your objective is to keep the horse's attention on you without making any loud moves. So before something else gets his attention, you want to make just a little bit bigger move to get his attention back to you--jiggle a whip, raise a hand, or walk in a little closer or a little farther back from that shoulder line. If the horse gets his head down and starts eating grass or whatever, you're going to have to be loud with your actions to get his attention back. You'll startle him, he'll run from your "attack," and it will take longer for him to trust you.
When the horse is through playing and checking everything out, he will stop and look at you which is his way of asking if you're ready to quit playing. If he wants to come over to check you out, allow him. You just stand still and wait. When he gets to you, do NOT immediately reach out to catch him. To a horse, anything sudden or unusual is dangerous so moving your hands is an attack, especially moving your hands toward his head. This sequence of events might happen the first time you turn the horse loose or it might take several "play" sessions before he gets to this stage of trust.
Staying relaxed and calm, turn sideways and stand alongside the horse's front legs with your belt buckle toward his shoulder. Now you can reach the horse's chest to scratch without moving your hand very far. Grooming is a common language of respect and comfort among horses. They don't do any grooming when they are afraid and if you groom in a calm way they will feel there is nothing to be afraid of.
Keep your shoulders parallel to the horse's body as you scratch and groom. If you can find a place where the horse really likes being scratched, you have his attention on you. You want to captivate the horse, keep him heeding everything you do. After you're through grooming and scratching in these first lessons, just bring him back to his stall.
Repeating this play lesson using consistent moves establishes two concepts that become logical to the horse. When you face the same way as the horse with an imaginary line through both sets of shoulders, it indicates a direction for forward motion. When you turn parallel to the horse, it indicates stop and stand.
Once the horse understands these two concepts, you can turn from facing his shoulder to facing with him in the same direction and encourage him to walk forward with you. Because the horse heeds, now you can lead. You do this by making an obvious move with your feet, maybe rustling a whip behind you and leaving things wide open in front. You will gradually build on and refine these concepts to lead the horse forward, turn him, back him, and ask him to stop and stand whenever and wherever you want. That includes his stall, an aisle, a trailer, the breeding shed, or the show ring.
Heeding is step-by-step communication using horse-logical pressures to control the speed, direction, and shape of the horse's activity.
Heeding is a horse communication system that proceeds in small, horse-logical steps that never create fear or antagonism in the horse. It requires being consistent in the moves you make around the horse, introducing just one small bite of information at a time, and making sure that new information is just one step away from what the horse already understands. Heeding builds a solid foundation that the horse and trainer can use to play reining or show jumping or dressage or any other game they decide to play.
In a relationship with a horse, the best place to start is at a distance. So last time we talked about how you start the heeding relationship at a distance. You turn the horse loose in an arena and just "play" by following him in a way that builds his confidence that you are not an attacker. You establish an imaginary line running through your shoulders and the horse's shoulders and consistently keep your body facing in the same direction as the horse.
The horse begins to associate that posture with the freedom to move forward. When you step behind this line, you put pressure on the horse to move forward. If you step ahead of this line, you restrict him a little. As you and your horse get to playing together and paying more attention to one another, you can eventually use these actions to encourage the horse to turn another direction or change speed. For example, you can step ahead of the shoulder line, turn, and ask the horse for a turn.
But in the beginning, you just play and wait until the horse stops to signal he accepts you and wants to approach. When he does, you turn your shoulders parallel to the horse's body and start making friends by scratching and "grooming" him from his chest up to his favorite places. The horse begins to associate that shoulder position with standing still and relaxing.
After grooming, you snap a lead rope on his halter, and you change the game a little. You start asking the horse to follow you, literally step by step. In the beginning, you want to match your steps to the horse's steps. When he picks up his right fore foot, you pick up your right foot. When he moves his left, you move yours. Take a look at how your horse is standing. The front foot that's a little behind is most likely the one he'll pick up first when you ask him to move off with you.
The reason for matching the horse's footfalls is because everybody starts out trying to develop a language with the horse by telling it a hundred things to do. That doesn't work. In the beginning, you match exactly what the horse is doing. Eventually, the horse understands that matching strides is the game. Then you can change the game a little again and start asking him to match exactly what you are doing.
The first time, you kind of move him over along the wall quietly then stop and scratch him. Then you obviously turn from facing toward him to facing with him in the same direction. You start to walk, anticipating which foot the horse is going to move first. Just as you start to walk, you reach back with the whip and encourage him with a little rustle or shake to go forward. He can see your feet move in his peripheral vision, he can hear the rustle behind him, and he can see it's open in front of him. It's an easy decision to step forward. Now you are "leading" the horse, not just physically but mentally.
When you start teaching your horse to heed, you walk along the wall of an arena. The wall creates one side of a corridor while you, with the lead rope in your hand and a whip sticking behind you, are the other wall. The "walls" create a shape the horse can feel. A methodical corridor of pressures creates shapes the horse will understand.
You walk down the wall and as you approach the end of the arena, the horse will think the corridor is blocked. To turn, you turn the line running through your shoulders and the horse's shoulders. You don't pull the head over because if you pull on the lead, you teach the horse to lean on the lead. And if you teach him to lean on the lead, he will always think that he can lean on any aid you put on. So as you reach the end of the arena, you have to fall back a tiny bit, turning your shoulders away from the horse so that you open up one side of the corridor. Now you can bring him around the end and show him that the corridor bends. You do the same thing on the next wall.
If you have a situation where he wants to run off in front of you or you are having trouble getting him to stop, don't yank on the lead. Walk straight into the arena corner to stop him. Give him lots of scratching and loving to let him know that halting was the right answer. Then make a turn, go across to the next wall and do the same thing. Before you know it, you will be able to stop before you get into the corner and he will stop with you. The control is being transferred to you.
Heeding gets the relationship between you and your horse to the point where you can communicate exactly where you want each step and how long the stride should be. That is where real control comes from. Once you have the horse working in a horse-logical corridor of physical pressures on the ground, you'll change the game again and ask him to work in a corridors of pressures (aids) created by a rider sitting on his back. The more methodical you are about the kinds of moves you use the easier it is to get the horse in the habit of paying attention to you. And the more accurately you can speak this language, the more relaxed and calm the horse will be.
Ground control precedes horse control. If a horse doesn't heed its handler on the ground, it is never going to listen when that person swings into the saddle. A lot of horse people mythunderstand ground work. They think it just means snapping on a lead rope and pushing or pulling a horse from the barn to the arena or from the stall to the crossties or hopefully into a trailer. One of the ways to make people think you're magic with horses is if you can control the horse from the ground constantly and consistently for the purpose you want.
Teaching your horse how to heed makes it possible to tell him not only what direction you want him to move but also how long to make his strides and how quick you want the strides to be. Heeding teaches the horse that when we apply a pressure, it has a meaning. The pressure is never an attack and the horse learns it will go away as soon as he moves way from it. Heeding takes all of the big, exciting individual episodes out of training. It makes training a step-by-step development of an understanding between you and the horse.
In the last two articles, we talked about how we start teaching our horses to heed by playing with them and why it's important to work the horse in a corridor of pressures or aids. When have the horse on a lead line and you get to the point where he stops consistently as soon as you turn in, start using your corridor of pressures to back him. In starting to back the horse, you have to be careful not to do anything off balance because that will signal the horse to turn. If you do anything too loud, he will become afraid.
Create a corridor with the wall on one side and you on the other. Stand facing toward the rear of the horse and hold your whip just in front of the horse's chest so you can touch either of the horse's shoulders easily. Whichever of his feet is the farthest forward, push gently on the corresponding shoulder with the whip handle until he picks the foot up. When the foot picks up, take the whip handle away immediately. When he sets it down, put the whip on the other shoulder and repeat the sequence.
Remember to take the pressure away as soon as the picks his foot up. That is because you want every pressure to have a meaning and we want the horse to understand that if he simply moves away from a pressure slowly, it will go away. Removing the pressure is his best reward. So you are teaching him to reward himself while doing what you ask. Remember to move your corresponding foot at the same time he moves his. Eventually you will be able to just face backward, walk toward him and he will back up in the sequence of steps your feet direct him to.
As your lessons progress, you want to teach the horse to heed from both his right and left sides. Practice transitions from halt to walk, walk to trot, halt to trot and all the reverses of all those. As the horse becomes better, you'll be able to remove one side of the corridor and work him in the middle of the arena without things falling apart. If they do, go back to the wall and repeat some of the basics. Don't get bossy. Accuracy comes from doing the same thing over and over, not louder and louder. The horse learns from repetition, not retribution.
In the heeding process, you can get a lot of refinement and accuracy in the horse's movements if you keep refining what you do to ask and then trusting it will work. Eventually, you don't need to do huge movements to get the message across. For example, once the horse understands the game is to stay by your shoulder, you don't need to turn your shoulders parallel to his body anymore to get the halt.
Similarly, when people start to train their horses to heed, they get to using their knees a lot. To be really accurate, however, you want to step forward rather than up. So you point with your toe rather than popping your knees as a signal to the horse to move. In time, all you will need to do to let the horse know that you are about to step forward is to lean one shoulder forward.
After time, heeding becomes an auto pilot system. The fact that you are calm will cause your horse to heed the fact that you are calm. As you change positions, it indicates a change in things and the horse will change with you. If your shoulders are lined up with the horse's shoulders, the horse will move with you anywhere. If you back, the horse will back with you. If you move forward the horse will walk forward with you. And if you stay on that line and go out and turn, the horse will turn around you. If you break the line between the shoulders and face the horse, the horse will stand because now you are not asking it to move. The habit will become so complete that there will never be any panic involved.
If you pay constant attention to your horse, the horse will pay constant attention to you. And if the horse is paying attention to you, it is not paying attention to anything else, since all horses have a one track mind. This gives you a kind of control that is not obvious but is complete.
Heeding takes all of the big, exciting individual episodes out of training. It makes training a step-by-step development of an understanding between you and the horse. It creates a horse-logical system you can use to lead the horse, longe him, put him on a trainer, stand him for the vet or farrier or even for a mare in the breeding shed.
