When the most sought-after veterinarian in your state comes to treat your horse, you call the horse in from the field, reinforcing her response with a bridge signal, and all three horses walk quietly up to the open gate, wait patiently for their next instructions, and target mare (Siouxsie) puts her head in her halter and walks quietly with you to the barn, you don’t think much of it….
Until said veterinarian leans back on your fence, crosses his arms, smiles real big and says, “My goodness, your horses are beautifully trained. I’m impressed. No, really. I. am. impressed.”
That’s when you begin to feel like the digs from some pros about backyard barn owners are more about them and less about you.
Horse friends, you don’t need to hit, shank, pull, push, or force your horses to do anything. An open and curious mind that considers a task from the horse’s point of view (not a human one), and good timing will usually get you what you want. You need to be willing to let go of what you believe is necessary to get horses to cooperate, and at the same time, take inventory of your own strengths and weaknesses. We can’t ask horses for the emotional fortitude required to work with us if we’re not willing to do our own inner work. Self-observation, even when what we observe is painful, is, I promise you, the key to progress. Try it when you’re doing stalls or picking paddocks. It’s incredibly freeing when you have a “Poop Epiphany”!
Finding a balance between training that involves shaping specific behaviors and training that is more social – what I call, “Herdmanship”, is something I’m studying and experimenting with now. I’m looking for a combination of methods that will teach my horses how to behave with me socially, to trust me, to follow me, and then to be interested and engaged as students when it comes time for me to teach them specific things like go, stop, turn left, slow the #*&)@ down please, and so on.
For millions of people around the world, horses are not a hobby or a luxury. They are as essential to our existence as air and water. If you know me, you’ve heard me say this many times before.
Horse people shape society in ways non-horse people would never imagine. We bring what we learn in the barn out to the world at large: humility (that often comes from having dirt for lunch), resilience, empathy, a sense of community, ingenuity, and a strong work ethic. Of course, not all people who ride horses are “Horsepeople”. There’s a difference. Horsepeople are the ones working behind the scenes to make it possible for People Who Ride Horses to actually ride horses. But if we play our cards right, we might just turn the latter into the former, and that would be a good thing for horses *and* people.
-Helena