WHEN IS A HORSE A LOST CAUSE?

WHEN IS A HORSE A LOST CAUSE?

A saw a question posted on social media a while back – when is a horse a lost cause?

The answers to this question is not straight forward because it really depends on who is hanging onto its lead rope or attempting to sit on its back! Our human nature tends to see only the horse as the problem but really it is how skilled you are at undoing negative horse behaviour and how you make the horse feel in the process..

I believe that every horse has a star rating of difficulty to work with and this difficulty rating is impacted by the inherent sensitivity of a horse and the negative associations and behaviours the horse has learnt in its dealing with people.

All horses sit on a spectrum of how quickly they feel uncomfortable or stressed by pressure or simuli such as novel objects, movement, sounds or smells. The more quickly a horse feels uncomfortable the more rapid they can feel negative about things and the faster the flight response can be triggered.

The result of when the flight response is triggers depends whether the horse learns a negative behaviour or not e.g. If it pulls away, it can learn to pull away in similar circumstances; if when it bucked the rider fell off, it can learn to buck when presented with a similar situation. If the horse feels confused, frustrated, worried or uncomfortable when it is worked or trained it will not associate training or handling positively!

Our domestication of the horse also impacts on the difficulty of the horse as the way many horses are traditionally kept in unnatural living arrangements, confinement and restricted access to grazing, lack herd environment etc. results in the horse living with a degree of chronic stress. This chronic stress results in varying degrees of anxiety and neurotic behaviours such as separation anxieties or stereotype behaviours such as cribbing or weaving. We know that when we take humans and restrict their freedom and restrict normal socialisation and healthy diet that an individual’s mental and physical health is negatively impacted. The same goes for horses when they are subjected to our traditional management practices of separation, stabling and twice daily feeding routines.

Therefore, the first thing you do when you are presented with a horse that is being difficult to work with is that you assess for pain e.g. saddle fit, gastric ulcers, and other causes of discomfort. The next thing you do is focus on minimising chronic stress. I have seen a horse’s tension in training plummet with the only change made was moving the horse to a different agistment centre! The horse went from individual paddock and stabled at night, to a herd environment and access to grazing 24/7!

Finally, there is the training approach and the methods used to allow the horse to gain clarity and to ultimately feel confident and cool with what you are expecting it to do.

There is a quote by Thomas A Edison and this is really the answer to the question when someone asks – when is a horse a lost cause?

"When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you havent"

As long as the horse is sound and absent of pathology you can argue the answer is – maybe never! It means that when you think you have exhausted all possibilities to help a horse there is a chance you haven’t and it just depends whether you are willing to explore them.

Now I am just going to say that again because it is VERY important....IF the horse is SOUND and absent of pathologies. I have not met a difficult inconsistent tricky horse yet that has not turned out to be unsound or unwell! But I can say that this has only been about 15% of problem horses I deal with. Most of the time a horse can be helped by helping them understand, be motivated and get confident in what is expected of them.

When I first discovered a horsemanship method I remember thinking I had found all my answers to working with horses and then I met one that the methods failed to fully relax. That horse showed me that working with a horse was not a method but a process dictated by how the horse felt where I learnt to evaluate not just what the horse did but how it performed each thing I asked it to do. This gave me the insight into how the horse FELT during the process. This horse was a gift, she gave me another dimension to view training, she was the fifth horse that I had worked through this method and if I had not met her there is a chance I would still be thinking that those initial methods I used were all that was needed.