UNDERSTANDING THE WORRY CUP
THE NERVOUS, ANXIOUS, SPOOKY, REACTIVE HORSE – UNDERSTANDING THE WORRY CUP
I have always loved horses and have spent the majority of my life surrounded by them. But it is only in the last few years that I have actually started to understand the horse and its behaviour. I believe the reason for this is that horses are not intuitive and neither is the way we train them. We tend to get wrapped up in traditional practices and misconception about them that further complicates things. In fact my life up until 5 years ago is evidence that you can love, own horses and even compete horses in competition and even win ribbons and still be ignorant of how they work! I thought as my second blog I would talk about what frustrated me the most about horses and sent me google searching more than any other issue and that is - horse anxiety.
“Frustration begins where knowledge ends” is a great quote by Clinton Anderson that pretty much sums up my problem with dealing with horse anxiety. Horses are emotional creatures; their behaviour is a reflection of how they FEEL. Therefore, if a horse feels discomfort, confusion, irritation, frustration, unsafe or threatened, they will express these feelings in the way they behave. Whilst we are verbal communicators and primarily express the details of how we are feeling in words, horses express themselves in their behaviour and body language. Therefore, when a horse gets anxious it’s telling you loud and clear something is wrong. The great news is that it is not some uncontrollable factor like a horse’s temperament, personality or the previous owners fault. It’s knowledge and I hope you find this blog a source of encouragement that by understanding all the various things that can cause acute or chronic stress to a horse, you can help you horse. You can help them find comfort and a sense of control over what they experience which in turn gives them confidence.
There is an analogy used in discussion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) known as the worry cup which has been used by American horseman Harry Whitney to help people understand anxiety in horses. The analogy goes like this – each horse can only handle a cup full of worry before it over fills and when it spills the horse can no longer cope and the horse will be flipped into escape or fight mode. This description made a lot of sense to me because I have been on that horse that you can feel the tension rising and then the wind will pick up slightly and rustle the branches of a tree or a drip will fall to the ground from the roof of the indoor arena and the horse will spook. Small things that just tip that worry cup to over flowing and the horse gives this massive over reaction. It can even help understand what is happening when you start having training issues, for instance, when a horse gets tense and starts running through the bridle every time you start working on flying changes or when the horse gets worried on a trail ride or in the show environment or when a horse gets agitated when another horse leaves the arena leaving it alone. The worry cup analogy helps you get your head around why a horse behaves the way it behaves. It helps you identify all the things that impact on the way a horse feels and gives you a strategy to overcome this behaviour by “emptying the worry cup”. The emptier the worry cup, the better a horse feels and the more pressures a horse can cope with.
Illustration #1 identifies a number of categories of things that I have identified can cause not just physical stress but also mental and emotional stress to a horse and negatively impact on the way the horse feels. You must remember that each individual horse may have multiple stresses clogging up their worry cup and therefore dealing with just one of these issues will not completely address a horses anxiety issues. Dealing with horse anxiety is something you must look at from many dimensions. I remember when I got better at training horses and was able to remove a lot of mental anguish and obedience issues I still had unresolved anxiety issues in the odd horse. This kept me learning and digging into the many aspects of horse behaviour and it was only when I addressed some of the other types of potential stresses that I was able to unclog the worry cup in these horses. For instance, a while ago I was working with a horse that very anxious and difficult to handle. With careful training I was able to improve the horse’s obedience and made it a lot safer to deal with but it remained sensitive with a very low coping thresholds for pressure applied in training. This was not a big problem for me as I have a good control over my timing and feel. But this horse’s owner was only developing his skills and the small errors he made when he worked with the horse would make the horse quite upset. Then the man moved the horse to a different agistment centre (barn) and his horse went from being yarded alone to a herd environment in a large paddock with access to grazing. The horse’s behaviour changed and it’s ability to cope with pressure increased making it less negatively impacted by its owner odd mistakes. Therefore, this example demonstrates the importance of both living arrangements and training practices have on solving this particular horse’s behavioural issues. I am now going to provide a short description of each category but please make sure you consider each of these dimensions of stress in each individual horse as a worry cup can be clog up with more than one type of stress and to address the problem you may need to target more than one issue.
1) Pain & Discomfort
The first stress to consider that can be clogging up a horse’s worry cup is pain and discomfort. Look at any online horse discussion forum when people ask about horse anxiety issues and the majority of responses will be recommending anything from a saddle fit to dental treatment to gastric ulcers. All these things are highly relevant as how COMFORTABLE a horse is to do its job will impact on the horse’s MOTIVATION to perform that job. Imagine being sore or uncomfortable and being forced to do something that made you even more uncomfortable. How stressed this would make you feel and how worried you would get trying to perform what was expected. Therefore, the first thing I do when presented with a horse with problem behaviour is consider its overall physical health and soundness. I watch how it moves, how it holds itself, how it responds to palpation over its body, its teeth, state of its hooves, its condition etc. It is also the first thing I will consider if I have a horse that has been doing well in its training and its performance suddenly changes.
2) Lack of Trust or Obedience or both
I could write pages and pages on this issue and this sits at number #2 worry to discuss regarding the worry cup because this was highly relevant to ME personally. Buck Brannaman says that a “horse is a mirror to your soul. Sometimes you might not like what you see… sometimes you will”. My ego didn’t like realising that I was the primary cause of my horse’s anxiety issue. But it actually turned into a very empowering thing because when I accepted it I improved my understanding and skills and I have become a much better horse trainer today than I ever dreamed I could be.
From the age of 10 to 25 I had really only ridden a handful of horses and these horses were mainly a little older and rather forgiving. Then I finished university and saved up all my money and bought a flash warmblood. Unfortunately this horse proceeded to morph into the mirror of my soul and got more and more nervous the more times he spooked and I fell off. I labelled him sensitive and felt depressed about buying a horse with such a difficult temperament. I tried to find solutions to his behaviour by focusing on pain and discomfort issues (worry cup issues #1) and he was dosed up with everything from ulcer treatment to calming herbs and I even went to the extremes of getting him to sniff calming aromatic oils before I rode him! None of it worked and I never competed him for many years. In fact, I only ever rode him in a 20 metre circle at the top of my arena. I rode that circle so much it turned into a trench! Then I met my partner, a good horseman who after enduring watching me ride this horse around my 20 metre trench a few times, offered to ride him for me. Well that horse calmly walked, trotted and cantered around that arena without even batting an eyelid at scary corner, the tree of death or the truck that rattled up the road. The truth is my partner was a confident rider, who stayed in the present and who focused purely on the job and direction at hand. He looked up and forward and directed the horse to a destination after destination….from here to there. The mirror of his soul was calm and confident. Me on the other hand was nervous, I spent my time focused on the “what ifs”, looking to avoid anything potentially scary myself (so my focus was not where I was going but in the scary bushes) and defensively riding in a death grip to avoid spooking. Horses are the master of body language and my horse detected instantly that I felt unsafe which made him not trust me but enter a state of hyper-vigilance and then when he reacted to potential threats to his life and spooked I would lash out with my own fear with my whip or spurs which completely did nothing but punish the horse for feeling unsafe. Needless to say scary corner was very scary for good reason as I conditioned him to fear it.
So I was making him feel uncomfortable in my death grip, unsafe with my own nervousness and conditioned his fear with my aggression and the worry cup was filled to over flowing but there was something else I was doing that deteriorated my cues/aids and was also not helping address the spooking behaviour. Just say I was riding on the left rein and my horse started looking at something in the bushes next to my arena on the left hand side. As he approached his head would raise up and then he would spook off to the right. I knew he was going to spook so I would normally just turn him off to the right to avoid the spook. Every time I did this and responded to him thinking and pulling off to the right to avoid the thing on the left or he spooked right I was eroding my horse’s obedience to the rein and leg cues/aids. So when he felt unsafe responding to rein or legs were merely suggestions and every time he got worried this was reinforced either my me allowing him to change the line or by him changing the line and going against my line directed by my reins and legs. I make sure now that I am conscious of the horse being responsive to my cues/aids, so if I have a horse that starts for example, looking left and therefore pulling on the right rein to focus on what it wishes to look at left, I will ask it to look right. If I have a horse spook right I will immediately turn a horse left into the fence to reinforce responsiveness and obedience to my cues/aids.
So to eliminate this worry from the worry cup, you have to stop looking for trouble yourself, look up and look forward and ride your horse places and stay in the present and if you get a spook or a shy focus on reinforcing your rein and leg response and not on punishment.
3) Mental Anguish
There is an Australian horseman called Ross Jacobs and he is a prolific blog writer and I get a lot out of what he writes. Ross encourages people to consider horses’ thoughts and feelings and how everything a horse does starts with a thought. In training we apply cues and motivate with pressure to capture and direct a horse’s thought, making our idea become the horse’s idea. But if we are not consistent and predictable with a cues and application of pressure the horse cannot identify how to avoid pressure then the result is that the horse lacks clarity and with a lack of clarity the horse experiences stress and mental anguish. Poor training techniques and application of pressure that results in discomfort and a lack of clarity can clog up a worry cup.
This is by far the most common form of worry I see clogging up worry cups of horses and the easiest to rectify. Learning how to teach horses is something I have written about previously in my blog and I can thank Australian horseman Warwick Schiller for teaching me how to break horse training down into very small achievable steps for a horse (known as shaping behaviours) from the ground up into the saddle to create confident, calm and responsive horses. Five years ago I never really considered the mind of a horse when I was riding it; I was focused on biomechanically manipulating it. While people with tremendous skill and stable seat can apply this kind of physical manipulating pressure the majority of dressage riders like me cannot do this. So the horse can perceive a wall of pressure that it cannot avoid or control and depending on the individual horse will respond to this situation by expressing a variety of manifestations of anxiety. Some will become dull, heavy in the hands or dead to the leg. Others will try to escape, rush and become hyper-vigilant and reactive. While others will perform what is known as conflict behaviours e.g. buck, rear, pigroot, rushing backwards etc. which can then result in learned evasions as the behaviour led to the release of pressure by displacing the rider or removing the rein pressure. Therefore, once learned and a similar situation presented to a horse again, the horse is likely to repeat the conflict behaviour.
Therefore, learning how to apply pressure (teach horses) and minimise that pressure (learning to sit and ride a horse well) so the horse can gain clarity and a sense of control over pressure they are subjected to during training is a way to remove this source of worry from the worry cup.
4) Frustrations & Desires
This aspect elaborates on from a horse’s thoughts and feelings existing at the root cause of every issue. Therefore, horse behaviour will be dictated by what the horse is most motivated to do and what they are most motivated to respond to. It is a hope of training that our idea becomes the horses idea and the horse is most motivated to respond to us but that is not always the case and horses may be more motivated to respond to their own frustrations or desires and this clash in motivation can result in a hell of a lot anxiety clogging up the worry cup. An example of this includes separation anxiety as the horse feels unsafe by being removed from its herd members and is driven and obsessed to return.
In order for a horse to let go of their idea you have to make their idea less of a good idea and yours a better option. You do this with good training techniques but also taking into consideration the other three points I have discussed above. Pain, discomfort, mental anguish and feeling unsafe do not inspire a horse to go along with your ideas so considering these aspects is important when addressing a horse frustrations and desires.
I have found that people struggle to identify if a horse is frustrated with them and is being more motivated to respond to their own desires. A while ago a lady contacted me to discuss her horse’s reactive behaviour. She described the horse as really sensitive and worried and it sounded like a sensitive horse with a low threshold for coping with pressure during training. When I finally saw the horse in real life there was nothing sensitive about this horse at all! It was completely unmotivated to respond to the lady and frustrated about being connected to a lead rope. Its frustration and irritation was evident every time she asked it to do something. It wasn’t acting out of fear but frustration. My initial advice to her description of a very sensitive horse was to be careful with her application of pressure but after seeing the horse in real life, I actually fixed the problem by upping the pressure in order to get the horse to drop the idea of returning to its paddock and instead motivated it to respond to me as being the most comfortable options. With change in motivation to respond to me, so did the change in the worry and the horse calmed as the conflict was resolved.
Warwick Schiller encourages people to consider “where the horse wants to be” during training. He has called this “destination addiction” and horses with destination addiction will normally draw to the gate as they wish to be someone else – their paddock, back with their friends etc. The second illustration #2 “Test for Destination Addiction” , gives you a bit of guide to help you observe to see if you horse has destination addiction. As I said previously horses with worry cup issues #1-3 have a good chance of having destination addiction purely because physical and mental stresses can impact on the horses overall motivation and they can hold desires to be somewhere else and not being ridden in an arena. To change their motivation and resolve destination addiction, the trick is to work the horse where it wants to be (the gate) and rest away from the gate. This helps motivate the horse to drop its desire and frustration to be somewhere else out the gate. I have never met a horse with a spooking or shying issue that did not have a degree of destination addiction.
5) Fears & Negative Associations
Horses can develop fear associations & negative feelings about things, people or places. I have already touch on this issue above but it deserves its own category as horses, like us, can learn to fear things and develop phobias if that horses fear was not handled well at the time. I have deliberately left this issue a bit down the list because people (like me 5 years ago) tend to jump on it as the problem causing their horse’s anxiety problem. I have heard everything from horses having phobias about men, hats, mounting blocks, floats, other horses, walking through gates, rugs, fly masks etc.…you name it and while some have been fear phobias the vast majority of these cases have resolved with just using good training techniques and application of pressure. So it wasn’t really the horse having a specific phobia, it was a trainer issue and the way the issue was being handled. But in saying that horses can form fear associations and some can be tricky to deal with. The most common one is one that I did a great job at creating and that is creating a fear association by punishing a horse after it got scared of something. Don’t ever punish a horse for being scared, focus on your cue presentation and be consistent with the application of your cues but don’t react with punishment for fear. If you do have a true fear phobia then you have some work to do and the name given to how you address these issues is technically called “counter conditioning”. Counter conditioning means instead of the horse associating the place/thing etc. negatively with a fearful experience, you replace the association with something positive. In regards to the issue I created with the scary corner in my arena by punishing my scared horse, I counter conditioned this location by making it my resting and quitting spot. So the horse got to rest there and I always ended my ride and over time they developed a positive association with the location..
Negative associations are another thing to discuss as they can trigger some pretty complex behaviour and I think it is fitting to mention this here as well. If the application of pressure in horse training is not done well and the horse experiences great distress from the discomfort or inability to identify how to control the pressure and escape it, dissociation behaviours can be triggered and these can be triggered on re-representation of things that the horse associates with the situation that triggered the behaviour initially. Dissociation behaviours are coping mechanism used by animals in response to stress and trauma. They are very sad things to see in a horse and probably the most misunderstood things as most people will assume the horse goes to sleep or is choosing to ignore them, when really the horse has detached itself and it has shut down in an altered state of consciousness. It highlights the level of stress and trauma the horse has endured during its training history. Importantly for horse training, when a horse is in that state they cannot learn and if a horse cannot learn you cannot deal with horse anxiety.
I have seen horses dissociate when being desensitised, in lateral flexion and when they have reached the threshold of pressure they can no longer cope with. They are extreme reactions of the overflowing worry cup and frequently ignored or misunderstood by people. Removing fear and negative associations from the worry cup requires much empathy and understanding of horse behaviour. With dissociation behaviours they can be addressed by ensuring worry cup issue #1-4 strategies are employed as they will help improve the coping ability to the horse and also counter conditioning techniques might be necessary to change the horse’s association and perceptions of the trigger e.g. the bit etc..
6) Chronic Stress from Domestication
The final source of worry that can clog up the worry cup is something I have only just learnt to really acknowledge and that is the chronic stress endured by the horse due to its domestication. I touched on it at the start of this blog and Lauren Fraser, an equine behaviour consultant is the author of a 3 part series on the International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants Association website, called “The Horses Manifesto – What Do We Want? Friends, Forage and Freedom!” and I recommend everyone to read all three parts, here is the link to part 1-3 https://iaabc.org/.../the-horses-manifesto-what-do-we...
Domestication restricts things the horse values such as friends, forage & freedom of choice and this can lead to varying levels of chronic stress in the horse. Chronic stress means elevated cortisol levels and cortisol changes and alters everything from brain function (neurologically cause horse to be more reactive) to gut ulceration.
As already described above I have seen changes in living arrangements( from an individual yard to larger paddock with friends), feeding arrangements (from 2 feeds a day to 24/7 access to forage), from over-rugged to minimal rug….all empty worry out of a horses worry cup and result in horses that have improved trainability, decreased sensitivity and improved coping ability. Therefore, please always consider the chronic stress the horse is exposed to just in its living arrangements as it can be significant.
This has been an epic blog and I am kind of embarrassed at how long it got! But I hope it has left you with an understanding of the horse as an emotional creature that responds to the way it feels. I hope that next time a horse tells you via its behaviour, that it is not coping, uncomfortable, confused or feels unsafe, that the worry cup analogy helps you feel less frustrated and empowers that you can address these worries by making changes FOR the horse and WITHIN yourself.
