last part, thank God!
Petting a horse
Most horses don’t really like to be petted all that much. So, don’t think that going in and petting them all over is for THEM. It’s for YOU!. However, they need to tolerate you touching their face, so work on that. When they let you pet, not flinching away, nor lowering or raising their head, then pet once and move away from them.
(this is part of you and the horse building the sweet spot together).
Q: what about some of the other methods of training, where you move the horse around a lot until he asks to “join up” with you?
H: you want to give him choices. Giving him choices will make him feel better. You can MAKE him do those things, but he won’t feel good about it.
Q: Does it matter what your posture is, or what direction you are facing when you are aksing the horse to come in to you?
H: your intent is more important than your posture.
(My own musings . . .
Asked, again, about his drawing a horse back in after the horse has left and taken a few “trips” round the pen if he uses any certain body posture to try and draw the horse in, he says, “intent is more important than posture”. However, I noted many times that while “waiting” on his horse to decide to come in or not, he would be standing pointed just off to one side, and would have a ‘cock’ in his hips and knees. So, his posture was at least neutral. That being said, I never really saw him get any sort of “predatorily “ intense driving posture, either, and this made me think about how small his “small “ is.
I mean, a person gets big, right? When necessary. But , they also get small, when they want to be the most allowing of the horse to fill the neutral with his own decision. This is your “Ohhmmm “ sort of stand where you are pausing to invite him in, or reward him with a cessation of pressure .
Harry’s small was REALLY small, really calm, really enjoyable to a horse. having a small THAT small means that it doesn’t take much for him to be able to rise up to what feels big to the horse. he has more range than a person whose “small” is not really small. The person whose energy is always “on” will struggle to be able to raise their energy believably to the horse because they are always projecting energy, so they have less available range. Get it? So, while many of us need to work on creating a “big” that is something unexpected, and thus believable to the horse, . . some of us also need to work on creating a small that is REALLY small, and allows that “turn off” reward the horse craves._)
Why are so many Gaited horses unusually tense?
Harry worked with two Missouri Fox Trotter horses. One was quite worried, while the other less so, but H says that he feels that Gaited horses tend to be a very nervous , tense horse. he thinks it’s part genetics in that in order to breed for a horse with a rapid turnover of footfall, you are likely to favor a hotter horse, thus that temperament become bred in to achieve the rapid gait. AND, they get a lot of worry put into them by people who are always in such a hurry to see if they can “get him to gait!”, so they push the horse for speed. Then, to control him, they have a harsh bit on, so he’s locked between a rock and hard place. This is especially true of horses that pace. It is inherently a very tense way of moving. He sees a lot of gaited horses that are fine standing around, but get them moving and all kinds of worry shows up.
This really reinforces his tenets that he seeks relaxation in the horse, whether standing or moving. He wants the horse to “BE HERE”. And, he has seen that when the relaxation is there, it changes everything, but then sometimes the horse feels the weighted saddle and it all falls apart..
On backing :
H talked about thinking of the rope halter as a loop and you are asking the horse to keep his nose in the middle of that loop. If you move it back, he must move his head and body back in order to stay in the middle. Your hand on the halter, if you are grabbing the halter to back him, presents a “spot” for him to be. Its’ his responsibility to move so that he stays in that spot.. different from “pulling” a horse backward.
If you move him off the leadline, then you feel him sticking, you move toward him with that intent in your body to move backward, and then you touch the halter knot under his chin, and if he doesn’t move with THAT, your hand will firm up and his resistance will become his pressure against the halter. He meets his own pressure. As soon as he wants to, he can move backward and give off that pressure, and earn his own ‘reward’. We don’t “give “ it to him, he creates it himself by removing his pressure back against the halter . (this is something I find very hard to really understand as it ends up feeling/looking a lot like pulling a horse back. But, whatever . . . )
Don’t let him freeze
Doing some close work with the horse , asking him to go forward in a very small circle, when the horse got tight and froze up, H was right in there slapping his haunch, loudly and rhythmically, UNTIL the horse moved FORWARD! He wants to make sure the horse will not think backward when things get worrisome; that he will always realize that he can move his feet forward when he thinks it’s too much. And H reminded us that we may think it’s nothing, but a horse can be so afraid he thinks he’s going to die over something we can hardly comprehend, but it’s real to the horse.
Fearful horses, reactive horses
He talked about some horses who have had a bad experience and now have a belief experience that a human coming in close to them and moving something around near their flanks is just surely not going to end up well puts them in the position of taking care of themselves, and they “have to” flee. For such a horse, we have to “prove to them when things get like this, nothing bad will happen to them”, and for some horses, one has to “take them to the brink” to be able to prove this to them, their belief system is THAT entrenched. If, when the horse starts to respond to some movement around his haunches or such with fear and starts to back up or get upset, and we start moving MORE softly, we *****foot around them and stop being sloppy/loose in our movements, or moving our jackets, or waving our arms, then we only reinforce that belief. See, they acted that upset, moved around, panicked and we stopped. things got better. Horse thinks, “ahah! I guess that’s the best thing to do next time, too!
. Have a plan but be prepared to adapt
Yes, try to have a plan when you work with your horse so you can have better intention and clarity, but remember that having the horse feel good about working with you is the most important, so be ready to abandon the plan in favor of things” getting good between him and me.”
Q: When you deal with a horse who will NOT do something, do you ever use force?
H: there are times when you have to “make it happen”. It’s necessary because the horse does not know that it’s possible. Such as going into a trailer or crossing a creek. He will not even have that possible choice on his list of things to do, so by forcing it to happen, you make him realize it’s a possible choice. Once he knows that, you are working on getting him to see that other choices do not work out, he searches, and eventually re-finds the answer that he has learned is possible.
The absolute most important thing you want, again, is a horse that feels good about working with you. For a grumpy horse, “figure out how to make him enjoy the program
(H quotes Dennis the Menace’s opinion on learning: “I don’t like learning because it’s always about something I don’t know”)
Later, working with a more laconic horse H was focused on getting him to go forward. H was very insistent upon this horse’s upward transitions not be a jerky leap upward, not a fleeing one, nor a dragging one. He looked for this horse to be looking where he was going when he was going forward, not looking too much back at H, because he is looking for that horse to “have a forward thought”. And when he saw those good moments, he let him go and come to a stop. It ‘s not about maintaining that position or pace, but about getting many good transitions.
Its not the maintenance, it’s the willingness to change
Musings regarding Tazo:
This is a bit like my friend’s horse, who is very “conservative” of energy. He is always being “made” to go forward, by driving his energy forward. And he’s quite resentful about it. It brings his focus backward instead of forward and puts “drag” in his step. But once the horse commits to “going somewhere”, his whole attitude changes. He commits to “going somewhere” instead of “just staying ahead of the pressure” (my words)
Harry emphasizes how most humans just don’t see the worry in horses, and go right past the worry spots that he sees and works on. That’s one of the reason he “HATES” the horsemanship programs that emphasize “chasing or drimving the hindquarters over hard and fast, because they make the horse”flee” you, . . they put worry INTO the horse. we want the horse to be with you because “there’s an interest in being wth you” . . . and when we ride and ask a horse to go down the trail, we want him to have an interest in going there, too.
However, Harry says . .
EVERYBODY HAS A RIGHT TO BE WRONG!