BUILDING TRUST AND CONNECTION IN A HORSE
AN EXAMPLE OF BUILDING TRUST AND CONNECTION IN A HORSE
Nothing I have learnt about horses has challenged me so much than how to build connection and trust in a horse. Learning principles, methods, techniques or the various science topics connected to horses and how to train them has been a walk in the park in comparison to becoming effective at building connection and trust. But in reality it is easy to motivate a horse to do something but an absolute art to get them to do something and feel COMFORTABLE while they do it. Just because a horse understands, is motivated and is obedient does NOT mean they necessarily feel comfortable.
The problem with writing about connection and trust is that they are more subjective ideas until concepts like pressure and techniques when they can be explained and demonstrated more easily. It is even easy to talk about emotions, such as fear or anxiety but how do you describe connection and what does trust look like and how do you tell whether a horse trusts you compared to just being obedient to you?
I thought I would start with some definitions and then give a good example to demonstrate the idea of connection and trust. Firstly, connection and the word to look up in the dictionary that best describes the connection you wish to build with your horse is the word – rapport. Rapport means the forming of a connection that establishes a close and harmonious relationship. The foundations of rapport is good communication and it is beyond just being clear with your cues, it is WAY more than that. It is where you LISTEN to the horse and the horse listens to you. It is where you understand HOW the horse is feeling and you be CONSIDERATE with how you respond to this.
This brings us to the concept of trust. Trust has many meanings but I think the meaning relevant to working with horses is the horse developing a belief in the RELIABILITY and ABILITY of you to work with them in a way that doesn’t make them feel chronically mentally or physically uncomfortable. This is a quality that develops over time and many encounters. Sure it relates to your skills in communicating with them but again it is more than this. It requires you to the reliable human in the horse’s life. Not the sometimes inconsistent, emotional, frustrated or scowling goal driven drill sergeant that sees only the horse’s inconsistencies or imperfections while being blind to your own self. In a nutshell you have to be a self-aware, self-disciplined person that listens to the horse and make decisions and takes actions that are considerate to how that horse feels.
Self-awareness and self-discipline are vital qualities as horses are what is known as gesture communicators, their awareness of us and what goes on in our heads and how that is reflected in everything from the way we breath to the way we move to the tension in our face to the look in our eye and probably even the way we smell holds tremendous meaning to the horse and impacts the way they feel about us and the level of connection we can build with them. I spend a lot of time being aware of how I breathe, emptying thoughts from my head, believing I have magic powers (yes, I am serious!) that can make horses do things just by thinking about what I want them to do and learning to transition these magic powers of thought into physical movement that is performed with ease and confidence. Always work with a horse like it can read your mind – because basically they can!
Still trust extends further than reliability with your thoughts and emotions, it is also the reliability in your responses and how you react to maintain the balance in your relationship. Making them feel mentally and physically uncomfortable is destructive to trust. This doesn’t mean I don’t put into action the principle “make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard”, it just means I am considerate if the horse is finding the “right thing uncomfortable” and that brings me to my example to demonstrate an exercise that highlights building connection and trust. This example is when a horse may draw to a certain area when you are trying to work with it. It might draw to the gate, its stable, paddock, barn, another horse etc. Some trainers label this an “addiction” and a desire to be somewhere else. Some techniques for dealing with this include letting the horse go where it wants to be and then making it work hard in that area with idea that the horse can work out where it wants to be is “hard work” and therefore the horse will drop the desire and therefore stop drawing towards the area. This is a good example of focusing on WHAT the horse is doing and not considering WHY the horse is performing this particular behaviour. A horse draws to a certain area because it does not feel COMFORTABLE where it currently is and with what it is currently being asked to do…it means it is not comfortable with YOU…that is right YOU…..and making it work hard where it wants to be might make it stop drawing to an area but it doesn’t do anything for improving how the horse feels about YOU in fact if anything it can result in them feeling even worse about YOU and the best you can hope for is obedience from the horse and obedience alone can be devoid of connection and trust and your relationship therefore limited. A relationship limited to obedience easily spills over into tension in new environments or competitions or when presenting new training elements or even if the wind blows a bit stronger or someone walks up the street! But even worse ramifications from using this technique is that you make the horse feel even more uncomfortable and its “addiction” to drawing to directions, places or other horses will become chronic and people then spend forever dealing with it. These days when I feel a horse draw somewhere I listen to the horse as it is VERY important information. Now I will happily go to that area or the gate or wherever as this is where the horse feels MOST comfortable in a particular space and therefore this is where I start the training conversation to make the horse feel more comfortable! I call this area the horse’s “comfort zone” and I respect this place. I simply start asking the horse to walk a figure of eight, I make sure I am very smooth and guiding with my hands and I just keep asking until I start feeling the horse begin to follow the feel as I pick up the reins, therefore there is a reduction in brace, tension etc. in the horses response to my reins and the bending response becomes softer and the figure of eight becomes a better quality. At this point I know I have a degree of the horse’s mental engagement which is connection and from here I commence stretching that connection. Therefore, I will guide the horse away from the gate for a few steps before guiding it back BEFORE it wants to head back and once again establish a connection in my figure of eight. I will repeat this stretching the horse away further and further away always returning back to the comfort zone BEFORE the horse wants to. After a while I might rest in an area near the edge of the comfort zone before returning to the exercise. What I am looking for is a change in speed of the horse’s walk as it leaves and returns to the comfort zone. If the horse walks quicker back to the comfort zone I know the horse still feels more comfortable at the gate, however by focusing on improving your connection in the figures of eight and resting away from the gate you will begin to notice the horse will start walking away from the gate a little faster than it will return. Once this happens move your figure of eight away from the gate and start stretching the area of the comfort zone using the same principle of stretching your connection before returning to the comfort zone and resting on the edges.
The objective of this example is not to make the figure of eight “hard work”, it is to establish a connection and mentally engage the horse in YOU and stretch that connection and in doing so stretch the area that the horse feels comfortable working with YOU. These days I rarely have any issue with horses drawing places but I never see this behaviour as a negative or bad thing instead I see it as really important and meaningful information conveyed to me by the horse about how comfortable the horse is when working with me. This situation and how I have found it best to handle it is good example of building connection and trust because it demonstrates listening to the horse, being considerate to the horse and not just focusing on obedience but focusing on building a connection and how that connection has to be stretched and expanded in a thoughtful and considerate way.
