It’s Never the Horse’s Fault
If you spend enough time in barns you probably have heard a lot of blame toward horses. It sounds innocent enough, even I have been known to throw these around.
“He just decided not to cooperate today.”
“She is so full of herself.”
“He is such a stinker.”
While we often feel these things, it is important to remember that horses only act out of an aim to please or an aim for self preservation. There are no problem horses, and if we can learn to understand and retrain “problem” behaviors, we can be better and safer horsemen.
For example, a horse that bucks is often labeled as “naughty.” But we know that the number one cause of bucking is pain or fear (self preservation). The next most common reason is joy or playfulness. If it hasn’t been made clear to a horse that bucking is an inappropriate way to show joy, they may act on that impulse and cause problems.
Another example is a horse that slams on the breaks in the middle of work. I see this often in lessons. Most of the time the horse stops because either they feel the rider relax, or come off balance. The horse is doing what they think the rider is asking them to do. Sometimes a horse does this because they have become dull to the leg. Again, they have learned a behavior as an unintentional consequence of the way they were ridden. The horse isn’t scheming to get out of work or stopping because they want to play a trick on you. They are stopping because they believe that is what you want from them.
So next time your horse does some unwanted behavior, try to think about how they might have gotten the message that you wanted this from them. Then, retrain the correct behavior. You can do this in many ways, including:
Reward a desirable behavior
If the horse stops every time you take your leg off, reward him for moving forward from the tiniest leg pressure.
Redirect the undesirable behavior
I’ve heard this phrased “make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy.” If you don’t want the horse to buck, do leg yield or make tiny circles when you ask for the canter transition (after ruling out pain and fear of course).
Train a competing behavior
If you don’t want your horse to snatch cookies out of your hand, teach them that they only get cookies if they take their nose away from you. Can’t snatch a cookie if their nose isn’t close to your hand.